- Hi, I'm Mike Massimino.
I was a NASA astronaut for 18 years,
from 1996 until 2014.
I spent a grand total of about 30 days
living onboard the space shuttle in space,
over two missions.
It wasn't always easy on the space shuttle.
It was fairly small quarters.
There were seven of us,
so we had to really be respectful of each other.
Like many of you, I'm sheltering in place right now.
I'm inside my home, and it's kinda like being
inside of a spaceship again, self-contained.
So, based on my nearly 30 days of sheltering in space,
I have some tips for you
that hopefully will help you shelter in place.
[bell dings]
[quiet lighthearted music]
Embrace the situation.
I remember learning this from John Blaha,
who was an experienced astronaut,
when I was a brand-new astronaut.
He spent some time on Space Station Mir.
And he described his mission
as almost like a first half and a second half.
The first half he was really missing home,
and really wasn't taking advantage of where he was.
And he realized that, "Hey, I'm here.
"There's nothing I can do about it.
"I'm inside of this spaceship for a while."
He was up there for months.
And the second half, it clicked, and he said to himself,
"I am going to embrace this situation
"and take advantage of where I am and make the most of it."
And he said after he did that, he had a great time,
and the days just flew by.
While I'm sheltering in place,
I'm trying to take advantage of the situation,
embrace the situation.
One is I'm straightening out a little bit more,
going through things
that I haven't thought I'd ever go through,
and I'm trying to do that.
But also, trying to take advantage
of this new world we live in,
where we're communicating with each other over distance.
I teach at Columbia University,
I've been teaching my course online,
we've been having faculty meetings online,
and I'm getting to learn
how to use devices like this right now,
using my phone and Zoom, and being able,
I hope it's working, by the way, and I hope I'm recording.
But I'm starting to learn how to use these things now.
And I have got young people, some of my students
and my kids trying to show me how to do these things
so I can continue to communicate and send out messages.
And I'm learning a lot, I'm learning all about Instagram,
and all about ways we can communicate over distance.
And I think that a lot of these things,
that when this things clears up
and we're able to be around each other again,
I'm still gonna be using these tools
because they're wonderful.
So, embrace the situation.
Talk to mission control,
and be somebody else's mission control.
And what I mean by that is that when I was in space,
even though I was isolated from the planet,
I did have my crew mates there,
but I did feel kind of on my own,
and I really felt on my own when I went out to spacewalk.
I did have my buddy,
my spacewalking buddy, Mike Good with me,
but each of us were in our own little spacesuits,
kind of like our own spaceship.
And during my last spacewalk, I did four spacewalks,
on the fourth one, it was the most complicated spacewalk
probably ever attempted.
We were trying to take a piece
of the Hubble Space Telescope apart,
and something we weren't really sure we could do.
Well, I made a really bad mistake.
I stripped a bolt on one of the science instruments,
and I thought it was game over.
I felt like, "We're never gonna solve this.
"I have created this horrible problem,
"and we're never gonna find out
"if there's life anywhere else in the universe,
"and everyone will blame me
"because of this silly mistake that I made."
I remember actually looking at the planet
and thinking that everyone that could help me,
everyone that I loved, everything was down there
and I couldn't even get to a hardware store
to fix this problem.
It was like I felt separate from the Earth.
But, after about an hour or so of troubleshooting,
the ground mission control came up with a solution.
- [Ground Control] Houston, are you ready for this?
- [Houston] Yeah, we're ready.
- [Ground Control] Okay, Mass, you have a go.
- [Mike] Here we go.
[quiet lighthearted music]
It's off.
- [NASA Employee] The top half of that handrail was freed
by the fasteners being released very easily.
The lower one, one of the fasteners did not come loose,
and Mike Massimino used essentially brute force
to remove the handle at the lower portion.
It is now free.
- And the solution worked,
and we we're able to get the telescope fixed that day.
- [Ground Control] Mass and Bueno, I just want to,
while you're closing the doors here,
tell you what a great job you guys did today.
- And I'm forever grateful.
But there was a time when I forgot
that they were there to help me.
So don't forget that help is always there.
We're in this thing together.
And if you're feeling down, if you're having an issue,
a problem, you need help, reach out.
And, on the other end,
try to be someone else's mission control.
I also got a chance to work on the other end of it.
One of my jobs was to talk to the astronauts in space,
what we call capcom position in the control center.
And I always tried to do what I could
to make my friends who were in space feel more at ease,
particularly during a tough situation.
Reach out, be the person that people can call for help.
Be their mission control.
And don't forget, your mission control
is there to help you as well.
Exercise, exercise is very important in space,
even on the short missions that I was on.
Longer missions, it's really critical,
because in zero gravity, there's no load on your muscles,
you can lose bone mass as well, bone density can go down
if you're not exercising, 'cause you're floating around.
On the space shuttle, when I was flying,
we did have an exercise bike we called the ergometer,
and we we're able to ride that thing
to get a little bit of exercise.
But we also had some therabands that we could stretch out
and get a little resistive exercise in,
upper body, even lower body.
And I got to spacewalk.
So we did a lot of spacewalking,
and that was complete exercise the whole time.
Exercise, I think, for our missions,
was just as important for your mental wellbeing
as for your physical wellbeing.
And I think it's the same thing
here on Earth at these times.
I think it's really important
to try to get your exercise every day, whatever that means.
I've set up this kinda wacky sort of gym in the basement
with a few weights and other, I don't have a,
I like going to the gym, that's not happening.
Actually, to be truthful, I don't like exercising at all.
But getting outside, we can still run,
we can enjoy the outdoors, take the dog for a walk,
take yourself for a walk.
It always made us feel great in space.
Even just getting 20 minutes of exercise
on an exercise bike.
So get your exercise.
Enjoy the beauty around you.
I think sometimes we get so wrapped up
into what we're doing, what our chores are, our task,
or whatever it is that's occupying our brain,
we forget to take a second and look around.
And this happened to me on my last spacewalk,
my fourth spacewalk.
I was done a little bit earlier than my spacewalking buddy.
Mike Good was still doing some work near the telescope,
and I said, "Well," I said to myself,
"I'm gonna go to the air lock
"and start getting things ready for us to go inside."
And while I'm doing this, my good friend,
one of my best friends, Scott Altman, our commander,
comes over the comm loop, and he says,
"Hey Mass," that's my nickname.
He goes, "Hey Mass, what are you doing?"
And I said, "Well, I'm inside the air lock
"getting ready to come in."
And he goes, "Is there anything you're doing now
"that can't be done later?"
I said to him, "No, I'm just trying to get ahead."
He goes, "Well why don't you stop what you're doing
"and go outside and enjoy the view?"
- [Scott] I want you to take a look around
'cause your spacewalk with Hubble
is about to come to an end.
We're bringing you in as soon as you close the doors.
- Okay, thanks, Scooter.
The view is magnificent.
And I thought, "That's a pretty good idea."
Plus, my commander was telling me to do this
so I felt like it was an order, I had to do it.
So I go outside of the air lock into the payload bay,
and I clip my tether in,
so I'm not gonna float off into space.
So I have a tether hook on a handrail,
and I let go with both hands,
and I just laid there in the payload bay
of the space shuttle and looked at the Earth.
I think it's really important to enjoy the beauty around us.
So take the time to enjoy the beauty.
Or, if you really don't want to go outside,
just stay inside and watch something.
Watch a couple Wired videos, something like that.
Some of my friends had to have something to do,
and we got delayed on our landing by a couple days,
and I thought this was the greatest thing
at the end of our mission,
'cause we had nothing to do for two days.
We got waved off 'cause the weather was bad,
we couldn't land in Florida.
So we were stuck in space.
I thought this was great.
And I just spent all my time looking out the window,
enjoying the beauty of planet Earth.
But my crew mates, they needed something to do.
They were going crazy.
So they decided they were gonna watch movies.
There was this one point in the mission toward the end there
where I'm looking out the window,
we're coming, it's nighttime, we're coming over Australia.
I can see the city lights in Australia.
There was a thunderstorm out over the ocean,
and I could see the lightning lighting up the clouds.
It was just magnificent.
And right then, one of my crew mates, Drew Feustel,
yells up from the mid-deck, he goes, "Hey Mass!"
I go, "What?"
He says, "Come on down!"
I go, "Why?"
He says, "We're about to watch 'Nacho Libre.'"
You know the movie about the wrestling with Nacho Libre?
And I thought to myself, "There's no way then."
And I said, "I'll watch it when we land.
"I'm looking at something right now."
And they were off watching "Nacho Libre,"
and I was looking at the most magnificent sight
that was just outside our window.
So, my recommendation to you is,
yeah you can stay inside and watch a movie
if you want to do that,
but, don't forget that there's a lot of beauty in our planet
just outside your window.
Pursue meaningful distractions.
So, and I wanna stress meaningful, if at all possible.
What we found when we were flying astronauts
to the space station at the beginning,
I was working in the control center
as the capcom, talking to 'em, and they were like,
"Oh, they have a lot of, oh they had some,
"they don't have as much to do here or there,
"and what are they gonna do?
"They're up there for a long time."
And, so there was different ideas,
like they could take inventory
and count how many bags of ravioli they have left,
stuff like that.
That's not necessarily very meaningful.
What we found was, a better activity to do
was to come up with a hobby,
something that you really enjoy
in your free time when you were up there for that long.
So a lot of the astronauts on the space station
got into photography.
I mean, that's the best thing
you could do probably up there.
We have some great cameras.
You have the most beautiful scenery you've ever seen,
looking down on our planet.
And so they got into photography, and different techniques,
and how to do the time-lapse stuff,
so you can do orbits, and fly into the aurora.
Some got into doing artwork, some got into playing music,
but you want to have something that you find
to be what I would say a meaningful distraction.
So, find yourself a meaningful distraction.
Put the time to good use.
Stay connected, I think we have lots of ways now
that we didn't have years ago to help us stay connected
to what's going on, and to each other.
In space, we were concerned about being far away
and not connected with what's going on
with the world and our families,
but we were able to do things, like email.
Just like your computer at home, we have computers in space.
I'm checking our flight plan, see what I need to do,
and I also can check my email.
I've already gotten some email from my wife and my kids.
And it's great to be able
to stay in touch - Houston,
- with 'em like this. - we'll have to start with--
- Video conferences and social media.
I was the first one to ever send a tweet from space,
and I was thrilled that they asked me to do that,
because it gave me a way to help with staying connected.
I could share what I was doing.
So I think that that's really important.
Check in on people that you care about.
And also tell 'em what you're doing.
Share your day with people.
Let 'em know what's happening, stay connected.
Being back on Earth,
an interesting transition.
I was so concerned about my mission for so long, for years,
and in it, we flew the missions,
and after each one, I was happy that they went well
and I was a little disappointed
that they were over in some ways, and you get back to Earth,
and you start realizing the things that you missed.
And what I thought about when I was away
when I was in space, I thought a lot about my family.
I missed things like the weather.
There's no rain, or wind, or snow,
or anything like that in space.
It's beautiful, but you miss some of those things.
And so what I've found is, after I got back to Earth,
I just wanted to be around people.
I just was so grateful that I was back
and I could be doing the things that I really enjoyed
and around the people I really loved again.
I never complained about the weather anymore either.
[chuckling] I kinda like the rain.
We don't have that in space, but we have it here,
and we kinda take it for granted, I think.
I think this is kinda similar to that.
Right now, I'm supposed to be at opening day
at Yankee Stadium, [chuckling] as I'm talking to you.
'Cause they're not even playing any baseball games,
and who knows when we're gonna get a chance to do that.
And I haven't been around a lot of my family members,
and I miss a lot of people, and big public gatherings.
I miss all that stuff, and I'm sure you do too.
But we're gonna get over this.
And hopefully what it'll do
is help us to appreciate what we have during our good times.
And remember what it's been like now,
all those things you miss.
When you get back to doing 'em,
make sure you really enjoy them,
and don't take 'em for granted any longer.
That's one thing that I learned coming back to Earth.
[lighthearted music]
As an astronaut, the way I found, the best way
to prepare for missions and to do things
was to hear from other people that had done them
and what their experiences were.
So, please, we have a comments sections
underneath all of our videos,
and we would really appreciate if you gave us your comments
about maybe what you learned from the video,
but also how you're coping with your sheltering in place,
'cause we all can learn from each other
and help each other out here in this situation.
And, also, remember, subscribe to Wired.
It doesn't even cost anything.
You can watch all these videos,
and you can spend your time in isolation
watching a bunch of Wired content.
So, please let us know how you're doing,
and thanks for watching.