[Mission Control] Station, this is Houston.
Are you ready for the event?
We are ready for the event.
Station, this is Richard, Jack and Glen.
Do you hear us?
Hello Richard, Jack and Glen.
This is Tom and Raja, we hear you loud and clear.
That's so cool. This is wild.
Oh my god, zero grav.
I bet that's feels good on the lower lumbar.
If you have any backaches,
the zero grav is probably great for that.
(Richard laughs)
We have some questions for you.
We're just wondering,
when did you know you wanted to be an astronaut?
Did you have an early fascination with space?
[Mission Control] Liftoff.
Or movies about a kid
who has a fascination and kind of dreams about it?
It was about 1969, the year of the moon landing
when I first became super fascinated with space.
I didn't really see my place in it yet.
It was only later after I was in graduate school
that I began to think maybe I could be an astronaut as well.
So yeah, I'm very much a child
of the 60s and the Space Age back then.
Did either of you have any connections to NASA growing up
that influenced your decisions to pursue this career?
So for me, not any family connections or I guess
really close connections or friends or anything like that
but I did have two I guess jobs or internships with NASA.
But in both those cases, I think that definitely
got me interested in NASA or more interested in NASA.
I was already in aerospace and interested in that field
but that definitely made me realize that NASA
was a pretty great organization from a people standpoint
and something I definitely wanted to be a part of.
Can I just say the microphone no-touch
is something Jack is so jealous of?
He wants to steal this for Tenacious D.
Yeah, this is.
It's a very cool look.
This microphone work is top notch.
Can you tell us a little bit
about the astronaut selection process?
I think it's probably a little different than
kickball field, like what we do in the movie.
Yeah, actually if you want to work for the Post Office
or any civil servant job or be an astronaut,
it starts with the same application.
If they like you so far,
then they bring you down in groups of 20
and you know that you're in a group of about 120,
150 at that point and they do the medical exams on you
and you can imagine what that's like.
They look at everything.
You know, my mom worked on
the Apollo 13 Abort Guidance System.
She helped program it and my family connection
to that didn't help me become an astronaut at all.
So I can attest that you guys are legit
and earned your place because otherwise,
I would've been where you are right now.
No nepotism. No nepotism at NASA.
Your mom was smart.
GNC is one of the hardest disciplines,
Guidance, Navigation and Control, wow, that's something.
Yeah, I don't know what happened
to me but yeah, she sure had it.
So how long is the training process?
How long does it take to prepare for a mission?
The first part we call AsCan or astronaut
candidate training and that's about 18 to 24 months
and that is vehicle-agnostic,
meaning it's very focused on the space station
and space walks, T-38 training, robotics,
learning Russian and then you're assigned to a mission
and then once you're assigned to that mission,
it's about another 18 months and then during that flow,
it's more specific to what you'll be doing on board.
So when you find out that you're gonna go on a mission
and that you're gonna officially be an astronaut,
do you throw a party and say "I'm gonna be an astronaut?"
Or do you have to keep it secret,
confidential like we do in the film?
Yeah, you're supposed to not say,
they say don't tell anybody.
I think most astronauts tell their spouse
and their family pretty quickly.
In my case, I just walked into the room.
My wife had heard that some phone calls were going out.
She just took one look at my face, I didn't have
to say anything and she just said to me "No way."
It looks like you guys have
a lot of a circuitry up in there.
It's like a tangle of fusilli, all of those wires and stuff.
(laughing)
Did you guys have to like-
Whoa. Whoa.
Another Tenacious D move
you gotta steal, Jack. Love that move.
Yeah, it takes awhile to get used to all this stuff.
There's wires, cables everywhere.
But these blue, I don't know if you can see,
these blue handrails where my feet are,
you get used to just hooking in your feet to those
and so you can work on the walls or the ceilings
and you get pretty adept at changing
your orientation for whatever the workspace is.
So we utilize the walls and the ceilings for everything
just like we would on the walls back on earth.
So you get used to just changing your body to match.
Normally when we do interviews, I did that
just because you seemed to be interested in the mic.
Normally we do interviews standing up
on what looks like the floor to you
because it gets people sick if we're spinning around.
But normally it's very usual for me to come in
and Tom's in whatever orientation
he needs to be in for whatever working on.
(laughing)
Yeah, I like that pose.
I think you stay in that pose, that's cool.
That makes me feel comfortable.
The floating Buddha.
So Thomas, were you saying you remembered
when they first walked on the moon back in '69
and did you have a favorite astronaut
or what did you think about those guys as a kid back then?
Oh, I didn't have a favorite.
I was completely fascinated with it.
I was in my jammies with the family sitting
on the living room floor watching on the TV.
[Newscaster] Armstrong is on the moon.
Watching Neil Armstrong putting his foot down,
I couldn't wait to hear what he said
and the way he described it.
In my eight year old mind, I was thinking boy,
are there gonna be creatures out there?
Is it gonna be a new civilization?
I had no idea what they were gonna find and it changed me
but I think it changed humankind and the way
we look at the universe in a lot of ways as well.
So no, I didn't have any specific hero.
It was just everyone that worked on that
just seemed to have the most incredible job.
I think they all sounded like super people to me,
everybody that worked on it.
That's fascinating to me.
You and I, I was eight years old also
and I made this film kind of trying to capture
the kid's perspective of what it felt like
to be watching it there in your jammies, you know?
That was kind of the point of view of the film, so crazy.
Yeah, it really is.
What is sort of the, I don't know,
like a common misconception about
what you guys are doing up there
and being an astronaut in general?
So I think a lot of people think it's just constant
excitement and craziness but really it is amazing work,
so don't get me wrong, I love the fact
that every day is a different day and we do
different things every day but it's much more.
We're essentially living and working here.
So a lot of what we do is just living, you know?
Like eating food, like fixing things,
just like you would if you were living in a house
having to fix the things in your house
and then we do the science, which is the highlight of it.
But a lot of it is just the logistics and the upkeep
and the day to day activities of living in space.
A lot of times we call it like 99% boredom
with like 1% sheer terror mixed in is sort of the normal.
And how long will you be up there in total
on this mission?
Usually about four to six months is the typical length.
Wow.
So on a day when nothing is going wrong,
on an ideal day, what are you doing to pass the time?
Actually, it's a beehive of activity.
We spend the morning getting ready for the work day.
Then we execute it, every five minutes is planned out.
Mission Control's got us working all in the laboratory.
We have to work out two and a half hours a day,
so our bones and our muscles don't waste away
and so he's showing you the schedule there.
That's a typical- There's the red line.
There's the red line.
We're following that red line all day
trying to stay ahead of it.
So we do have just a few minutes
each day to look out the window.
Looking out the window is like the main attraction.
It's the most beautiful view in the world I imagine, right?
You got a good view?
Yeah, we have an amazing view and the sun goes up
and goes down 16 times a day for us in a 24 hour period.
So you're always getting to see a sunset or a sunrise
and then even if it's dark, then you're seeing city lights.
If it's light, then obviously you're seeing the earth
and even if you're seeing ocean,
which is the vast majority of the earth,
it's still just amazing and the clouds and just yeah,
it's incredible, the view and every time you go to
and from the bathroom, you go by where the window's at.
So you get an opportunity to take a quick break
and just remember you're in space because like Tom said,
we're pretty busy from basically 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
It is all planned out down to when you're eating.
So bathroom breaks are actually a highlight for me.
That's when you can go and stop
and take a look at the window for awhile.
Are you guys fans of science fiction at all?
I imagine that you would be.
Something else that happened in 1969
was "2001: A Space Odyssey" came out and the moon landing
and that movie were the big formative things for my career.
Do you guys get visits from
like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk at all?
Do they pop in just to say "Hey,
just want to come by the station?"
Not yet but they are, at the end of March, early April,
they're launching the first private mission.
So that's kind of a new era as NASA looks to
put our focus on exploration and back to the moon
to stay and Mars and letting commercial industry take
over low earth orbit, that's kind of the long term plan.
As Artemis gets going and the moon and Mars,
are you hoping to visit the moon or Mars
in the coming years personally?
That's not in the books for me but I am looking forward
to seeing potentially Raja or some of my colleagues
that I know now or at every school that we talk to,
we say "You might be the ones that are walking
on the moon or being flight directors
and flight controllers for the first mission to Mars."
[Mission Control] Station, this is Houston ACR.
That concludes the event. Thank you, guys.
Thank you. So great talking to you.
Thank you guys. Thank you to all
participants from "Apollo 10 1/2."
That was unbelievable.
Unbelievable. that was so cool.
I wasn't really ready for that.
What?
No, I was like-
You never forget for a second what badasses astronauts,
like how smart they are,
what engineer brains and perfect specimens.
It's almost like pro athletes, you think oh,
I want to grow up and be a pro football player.
It's like no, it's such a rare breed
that can be all those things.
You gotta be the best of the best.
I mean, it really is impressive.
I wanted to ask him about the workouts.
You know, what he benches in space.
Zero grav workouts. Zero gravity, yeah.
(upbeat electronic music)