Garrett Reisman, former NASA astronaut and SpaceX consultant, details his 95-day mission under Mark Kelly’s command, where bone density loss dropped to near-zero thanks to high-load exercise. He contrasts spacewalks—like fixing connectors with sunlight-induced thermal expansion—with underwater saturation diving, where a six-foot shark and pitch-black depths tested endurance. Reisman critiques NASA’s shuttle program for its $4B cost and deadly risks, praising SpaceX’s reusable Crew Dragon and Starship for safer, Mars-capable designs, though debris from China’s launches remains a global hazard. His work on For All Mankind (Apple TV+) ensured orbital realism, while his skepticism of Neuralink reflects fears of tech-driven inequality. Ultimately, Reisman frames Musk’s vision as humanity’s best bet against existential threats, blending ambition with pragmatic survival. [Automatically generated summary]
Which actually is kind of a bummer, to be honest with you, because you know this if you saw that video maybe, but the thing is, if you stay for a hundred days, they give you a patch, right?
I'm at day 95, and Space Shell Discovery shows up to bring me home, and Mark Kelly was the commander.
He goes, Garrett, it's time to hop in and come home.
And I'm like, man, I just need five more days to get that patch.
Can we just go around a few more times or something?
Well, back when I was going there, so that mission, my long-term mission was back in 2008. And back then, we were still losing bone density and muscle mass as we're going up there.
Which we knew back when I was going, but the problem was we had this machine that was kind of a first generation of the workout machine, and it could do large reps but low load.
So you're doing like a lot of reps at low weight.
And that helped, but what helps, it turns out, we found this out kind of by happenstance, but it turns out that high load, low reps works much better.
And so we got this new machine that you could really crank it up to 11, and the guys now that are working out on that thing are coming home with no muscle or bone loss at all.
Yeah, I mean, that was still kind of in the early days.
I don't know which machine he used.
He probably did use a new one.
But overall, it does take to get everything back, to get your full vestibular system back, your sense of balance, to get all your bone, all your muscle back to baseline.
And it must take a long-ass time to get everything back.
If you went from Earth's gravity to the space station, and you lived up there for a year and didn't do anything about it, and then came back to Earth, you'd basically be like, it would be hard to crawl, right?
If you don't try to fight it, the vestibular stuff...
would come back probably about the same rate, but you would be really hurting with your muscle atrophy and your bone.
So you would lose a lot of your skeleton if you're up there for a year and did nothing.
And you would also – all your muscles that you don't use, like in your legs and your postural muscles, so in your lower back, you're not using those anymore.
So they would just waste away to nothing.
You'd be okay in your arms because everything you do is with your arms.
That's how you move.
That's how you get around is by pulling and pushing.
Because the other thing that happens is you have this big fluid shift.
So right now, we have a lot of blood pooling up in our legs and our heart, its most important job, of course, is to feed the brain oxygenated blood.
And then when you take the gravity vector out of the picture, the heart sends too much up to the brain and the stuff doesn't collect in our legs anymore.
And it all shoots up here and you get to shift of all that blood volume to your upper body and your head gets all puffed up.
And then after a day or two, you get used to it and it doesn't bother you anymore, but you feel congested because you still have all this volume up here.
So your sense of smell and your sense of taste are all deadened.
I didn't see it right away because I was in the mid-deck, the downstairs of the shuttle, and there's only one window down there, and it's in the corner, okay?
So it's in the hatch, and it's like the size of a dinner plate.
And I was up there.
You got a lot of work to do as soon as you get up there, so I'm working like crazy.
And after about 30 minutes, I see this pale blue glow coming from that window.
And I'm like, that's the earth.
You know, I should have a look at that.
And I was super excited for this, you know.
So I wanted to be ready.
So I paused, I closed my eyes, I meditated, you know, call it whatever you want.
I just got ready.
And when I felt like I was ready, I floated up to that window and I opened up my eyes and I gazed out for the very first time at the earth from space.
And what that felt like It's really, really hard to describe in words, but if I had to pick one word to describe what I was feeling at that moment, it would be, meh.
Yeah, most people that have done it, they talk about this realization, this inescapable realization that we're all on this thing together and that all these boundaries of civilizations and cultures and countries and continents are all nonsense.
Do you expect to look down and see dotted lines between all the countries?
I guess it's inescapable when you look down and you see the planet and you realize that we're all...
In the same boat, you know?
But that didn't strike me as a sudden realization because I think it's because I knew that before I went.
You shouldn't have to go and strap into a rocket and blast off and look at the earth and know that basically we're all human beings, I think.
I mean, I think the things that unite us are so much stronger and more important than the crazy little things that divide us like race or sex or nationality or politics or whatever.
And at the end of the day, we have this one home, and we're all stuck here together.
So I had that strong knowledge before I went.
And maybe that's why when I look down, I'm like, yeah, there it is.
Okay, I get it.
But it wasn't like all of a sudden, like...
The shade was pulled back and there was suddenly a new realization about life.
They have the ability to alter the arms and the legs a little bit.
And they have...
It's actually three different size upper torsos.
There's a medium, a large, and an extra large.
But that's it.
It's limited.
And because it costs a lot of money to make different sizes.
So there's only...
The gloves that can tailor, because that's actually the most important thing.
But I'm getting my butt kicked.
And I got a needs improvement, which is a nice way of saying you failed.
But I wasn't ready to give up.
I went and I knew I was going to need help.
So I talked to the people that make the suit.
And they did some of those things.
They shortened up the arms.
They fixed it up a little bit for me.
And then I talked to the trainers and we said, okay, yeah, we got to think outside the box here.
If we give you the standard procedure, you're going to be at a disadvantage.
But maybe we change your body positions instead of going straight on to the work site.
Maybe we come at the work site from the side so you get more reach that way.
And we started working at it and we got better and better.
And the end of the story is that I got...
Eventually, I got the highest possible qualification to do the most complicated spacewalks we do, and I ended up doing three different spacewalks over the course of my career.
And that big tall guy that laughed in my face, he didn't get to do any.
So it's kind of like being a mechanic or a technician.
The way I describe it, but the suit is like so hard.
It restricts everything you do because it's blown up to about four pounds per square inch.
And so even just closing your fists takes work because the suit's like a balloon.
It wants to stay like this.
And so just closing your fingers takes effort.
And over seven and a half hours, that gets really fatiguing.
You're moving your arms.
Everything is – and the suit can only move – like you can't do this, right?
You can do this maybe.
So your ability to raise up your shoulders is really limited.
So you're trying to do all this work but you're working inside the suit and I describe it as like it's like trying to change the oil in your car while wearing a medieval suit of armor.
It really helps to have some kind of mechanical aptitude.
I mean, a lot of us like working on our cars or building things in our garage, hobbyist kind of stuff.
We actually started right as I was leaving NASA, which was back in 2010, we started kind of an informal program where we were going over to others' garages and doing car repair stuff just to get more hands-on experience with that kind of thing.
Everything we did was choreographed down to exactly what handrail I'm going to put my toolbox on.
I mean, everything is all figured out in advance.
But nowadays, and sometimes on Space Station, even when I was there, when things break, you don't have the luxury of training.
If we're going to do a shuttle mission, we're doing a really complex spacewalk, we'll do everything we're going to do in space at least 10 times in the pool first.
But these days, you don't have that luxury.
Something breaks, and you brief it, you talk about it, you have some PowerPoints, and then you're out the door and you've got to go do it.
So we identify like the most likely and most serious things that could go wrong, and we practice those in the pool, and we have all those procedures suitcase before we ever go.
But then sometimes you get a surprise.
Sometimes something breaks you weren't expecting to break, or it breaks in a certain way, or there's a complication that you weren't planning on, and then you've got to improvise.
Yeah, but you know, even if you're doing something that you rehearsed ten times and you think you got it all figured out, you still get surprised when you actually get up there.
The big one that I remember is on my second spacewalk, we're connecting this dish antenna and it had to go on top of this big boom, like a big pedestal.
And there was a connector that had an electrical connector.
And we had like an hour or so to connect the thing And without it connected, it wasn't getting any power or data to that antenna.
And it could get too cold.
And this gazillion dollar antenna could be a worthless hunk of junk.
If you take too long, you're on the clock.
Because when it was in the shuttle, it was plugged in.
It was getting its heaters were on.
And now you've got to plug it back in and get the heaters back on in a certain amount of time.
And so we're like, okay, we plan this.
We train this.
We get up there and the connectors won't go together.
Like, it doesn't fit.
And these two pieces of equipment sat next to each other for like a year in Florida, you know, like a warehouse.
And nobody ever thought, well, oh, maybe we should make sure this thing fits.
So we're shoving, and we're shoving so hard, we're pushing on this thing so hard that the guys inside the space station said they feel the space station shaking.
Like, that's how hard we were trying.
And then we see little metal shavings come off, and one of those, they can get in the connectors, and we're like, that's bad.
So we stopped.
And then this was like kind of my big hero moment.
You know, like in the movies, like Brad Pitt saves the solar system and stuff.
You know, this is my thing, right?
It's not that exciting.
But I had this idea.
I said, hey, the problem we were basically having was that the female side was too small and the male side was too big for it to fit together.
So I said to one of my crewmates inside, I said, hey, How long till the sun comes up?
Because, you know, it takes 90 minutes to go around the earth, and every 45 minutes the sun is either coming up or going down.
So it can't be that long.
And he goes, actually, about 10 minutes, because we're behind the earth, and it was dark, and then in 10 minutes, the sun was going to come up.
I'm like, perfect.
So I took the male side, and I held it in my glove, okay?
And I put it behind the structure.
I knew the sun was going to be coming from here, so I put it in the shadow.
And I waited for the sun to come up and it hit the female side.
And the temperature difference, if you're in the sun or in the shade, is it can be up to like 600 degrees Fahrenheit difference.
So I let the sun hit it and warm it up.
And I took the male side quickly out of my insulated hand and away from the shadow and I slid it in and went right in.
Now, that feeling that you were talking about of looking out the window where it was kind of meh, and then the difference between that and the spacewalk, is that where you get this real sense of being in space, above the Earth?
Yeah, that's breathtaking because you have this helmet that's like a giant fishbowl, and after a while, you kind of forget that it's there.
And you're just like, it's like, you know, the old Superman with Christopher Reeve when he's like flying around the earth and he's just like in his underwear or whatever.
It's like that because you forget.
Like if you ever have gone scuba diving and you get to the point where you just kind of forget you have the mask on.
If you spend a lot of time down there, you can get to the point where you kind of like forget that you're in this alien environment and it becomes like, you become one with it.
The problem is then if you stay, you build up all that nitrogen in your blood.
Now you can't go back up.
So like if you run out of air or you lose sight of your body or something, you can't go to the surface because within a couple hours you'll be dead.
So you have to stay down there.
And we use cave diving techniques that we did a lot of training for to be safe.
And we have redundant tanks, redundant manifolds, redundant regulators, and we had valves that we can flip around so we can always make sure we can get air without ever having to, in an emergency, ever having to come up because coming up is not an option.
With the sound of the ocean, like, lapping against the dome.
And you're looking down, and there's endless black, you know, just a black void.
And you're thinking about every single scary ocean movie, like Jaws, you know, The Meg, whatever, The Abyss, all those scary movies, right?
And you think about all this...
Things that could be down there can't help but going through your head so it's kind of freaky and then you finish and you put your mask back on and I took a big breath and I went down and I opened my eyes in my in my mask in the darkness with my flashlight and I saw like right in front of me this huge eyeball Like, about the size, I don't know, of a saucer.
You know, like this big.
Staring, unblinking, right at me.
And I freaked out.
I just tore off for the pool, for the moon pool and the habitat.
I jumped in there.
I surfaced.
I'm screaming.
I'm screaming.
And my crew come running thinking I've been bit by a shark or something.
The thing about it, what makes it such a great training exercise psychologically is if you had to get to a hospital, it takes about the same time from that habitat as it would from the space station.
In both cases, it takes about a day.
In the space station, you got to get in the Soyuz, you got to put your space suit on, you got to detach the Soyuz from the space station, you got to separate from the space station, you got to do a deorbit burn, you got to land, the helicopter's got to come get you.
But anyway, it's an incredible machine, and we'll never design anything like it, maybe ever again, certainly not anytime soon.
So despite its technological incredibleness, for lack of a better word, it had a couple key limitations.
One was, it's not that safe.
So we lost two of them, Challenger and Columbia.
And we could talk about that.
I knew the guys in Columbia, and that was really, really rough.
And then the second thing was it's super expensive because it took so much maintenance, even though it was reusable, or most of it was.
It took so much maintenance, it took a standing army to keep it running.
We're spending, I think, three or four billion dollars a year on the program.
And there's no way, if we wanted to build something that was going to be more cost-effective or safer, There's no way we're going to get a plus up from Congress of like an additional $4 billion a year to go do that.
The only way really to make it happen was to stop flying the shuttle.
So we took a very painful decision and we said, okay, we're going to retire these things so we can make something new.
And we know that there's going to be a gap period where we're not going to have anything and it's going to suck.
But the good news is, and the great timing about this conversation right now, is that gap ends this year.
Yeah, it has these side boosters, and one of them got stuck, didn't come off right, and they were starting to spin out of control, and then they punched out.
And the booster went kaboom, but it was, I think, if I remember right, I think it was 1.5 kilometers away when the rocket went kaboom, and it was fine.
And that's why Cape Canaveral is where Cape Canaveral is, because if you look at a map of Florida...
The Cape is where Florida has a little prominence that juts out to the east, into the Atlantic.
And that way you can go due east, which is generally what you want to do when you launch, or you can even turn a little bit north or south and you're not going to fly over anybody's house or Disneyland or anything.
And if something goes wrong...
In the old days, like on the shuttle, we actually had explosives on the tank.
And there were these dudes, these range safety control officers that would sit with the big red button.
Well, now the Russians and the Chinese don't necessarily honor that.
They actually, the Chinese have dropped Nasty burning boosters on, you know, it's sparsely populated, but they still have dropped these things on like villages and stuff.
But in the US we always, so we launch, and the reason that you usually want to launch to the east is you want to take advantage of the earth's rotation to give you like a slingshot effect.
Because if you go to the east, the earth is rotating this way.
It kind of slingshots you into orbit, going with the rotation.
And that's why you also want to be as close to the equator as you can, because if you're at the North Pole and you launch east, it's not going to help you, right?
But the lower you are towards the equator, the more of a slingshot you get.
And these boosters that fall into the ocean, do they have them documented, like where they're landing, so they know where these things are scattered out throughout the ocean?
And one cool thing was, probably the most famous booster that landed in the bottom of the ocean was Apollo 11, the Saturn V. And it was just sitting there, you know, as a fish habitat.
So when I was at NASA, they would send us out to do these PR events, and we'd go to schools, and I would go back to Jersey, where I'm from, and go visit all these school systems.
What part of Jersey are you from?
My parents are from Newark and I grew up in Parsippany.
Well, one of the reasons why I brought this up is I saw a video where you talked about how during your childhood you had a photo on your wall of looking at the earth from the moon, the photograph that was taken.
So I also go out and I do a lot of public appearances and do motivational speaking kind of stuff.
And I talk about the importance of both inspiration and determination.
So I found out when I was a kid that they were taking...
Not only fighter pilots, but also engineers and scientists to be astronauts.
Because I was totally super stoked by the whole concept of going into space.
But I had a mom that's scared of flying.
She was a typical Jewish mom.
I told her once I wanted to join the Air Force in a public restaurant.
And she started freaking out and started soliciting opinions from the other parents.
Would you let your son do this?
That's hilarious.
So I never thought, I knew that like being a test pilot was not going to happen.
So I thought being an astronaut wasn't going to happen.
But then I found out that you can be an engineer and be an astronaut.
And then like that was my eureka moment.
I was inspired.
But to be determined, I got that photo, and I put it over my desk, and it was like, that was my, like, that was the beacon, you know?
That was the goal.
And I kept working, and any time I was having a difficult time, I looked up at that thing and said, no, one day I'm going to hang that in the astronaut office in the Johnson Space Center.
So I left NASA in 2011 and I went down and met with Elon and I said, hey, I really like what you're doing here.
Can I help?
And he gave me a job.
So I went and I left NASA and I came here and I worked there for seven years.
Did a bunch of different things.
Eventually became our director of space operations.
So my team was responsible for operating mission control at SpaceX and controlling.
We have another Dragon capsule that we use for cargo, to take cargo.
And we've been doing that for a long time.
Up to the space station and back.
And so we would operate it in mission control, but we're also we're designing the crew one that we showed you.
So we were coming up with the procedures and all the rules of how we're going to use that thing and meeting all of NASA's requirements and helping to provide input to the guys designing the displays and the suits and the controls and the seats and all the stuff you need for people.
And so that was, you know, I did that for quite a long time.
What are your thoughts on this – what's happening now with space travel where it's transferring into the public sector or the private sector rather instead of being something that the government handles.
Yeah, because first of all, it's not quite that black and white.
In the media, it's all portrayed as commercial space and like these private companies are taking over.
The truth is, at least for the human orbital spaceflight that we're doing at SpaceX and that Boeing is doing with their vehicle, it's a public-private partnership.
And so NASA is working very closely with both those companies, and we're working together.
And in a way, it's not really that different from the way it's always been.
You know, like NASA didn't have a NASA factory that built the Saturn V rocket.
It was built here by, like, McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell built, if I remember right, North American built the command module.
And the lunar lander was built by Grumman.
So those were all private companies.
They're contractors, but they're still private companies.
And what's happening now is just a slight change to the relationship between NASA and the private companies, where NASA's not micromanaging quite as much as they used to.
We want you to get four people up and down to the space station." That's a bit of a simplification, because actually the requirements document is like, there are thousands of requirements.
But they don't go down and tell you how to meet each requirement.
They leave it up to you.
So now SpaceX has a lot more room to innovate than like North American Rockwell did when they built the vehicles back during Apollo.
And the other thing that's different is the funding, the way NASA's paying, it's firm fixed price.
Like the space shuttle, when we build an aircraft carrier, it's cost plus contracting.
Which has been terribly abused and has been horrible for the U.S. taxpayer.
What it says to the company is, it could cost whatever it costs, that's what we'll pay.
And in fact, we'll give you a profit as a percentage of the cost.
So your incentive as a company is to make the cost as high as you can so your profit is as high as it can be.
But they had to do it that way during World War II is when it started because Like nobody knew how much it was going to cost to build a P-51 Mustang because nobody did one before.
So they came up with this mechanism.
But now it's kind of been abused.
Now we're using it to do things that we've done before.
And then the third thing is that the companies own the intellectual property.
So what that means is like Rockwell that built the space shuttle couldn't like build a new space shuttle.
like build like space shuttle enterprise or something and then go sell tickets on it they weren't allowed to but we can so we can we're going to build this dragon we're going to take bob benkin and doug hurley two friends of mine are going to be the first astronauts to ride it to the space station and once we meet our nasa uh nasa's our number one customer they're paying the bills so once they are satisfied we can then go make another one and sell tickets and take you private individuals so really that's the the key difference
and i really think that 2020 we're going to look back at 2020 as a year that everything changed really yeah because because All those dreams of science fiction, like being able to take your vacations around the rings of Saturn and private space stations, all that kind of stuff that we grew up hoping would happen when we were older, I think it's really finally starting.
Because this is the beginning of that infrastructure, that private sector commercial infrastructure and ability to actually get it done.
Well, so what you can do is you can have a storm shelter, right, where you put like a lot of this shielding.
And then if you could detect the SPE, the GCR is there all the time, but the solar events, you can detect them coming, and you have enough warning time to get everybody into the storm shelter.
Yeah, but again, we keep getting smarter about it, and I think, you know, for like right now, we can send you to Mars and bring you back, and probabilistically speaking, you'd probably have like an additional 4-5% chance of developing cancer over your lifetime, which is not like a death sentence, you know.
And the thing about it, there's two things about it.
One, we keep getting better technologies, better shielding.
We can actually come up with...
There's ways you can do active shielding.
You can create your own magnetic field around the ship.
And so it'll almost be like Star Trek with like a force field or shields or whatever.
So there's ways that maybe we could do that.
There's also...
The other thing that we don't know...
We know exactly what radiation is out there.
We don't know exactly what that radiation does to humans.
The best we have to go on is like data from some of the atomic bomb survivors and radiation workers that work in like power plants and stuff to take some dose.
But it's a different kind of radiation.
So right now, the error bars are really big.
So when we say like, oh, 5% chance of cancer, that's taking a very conservative estimate.
If we can find out what it really does to humans, maybe it's a lot more benign.
And maybe we can sharpen that pencil and say, yeah, it's acceptable.
Yeah, so that is something that's also not really a worry anymore.
The reason that Columbia took that damage was it was foam, like the big orange tank that's behind the space shuttle, it sticks up above the space shuttle, and some foam fell off of it.
We always had some foam shedding off the thing, and in the beginning we took that very, very seriously as a major problem.
But the thing is, there's this concept of, I'm going to forget the name of it now.
Well, let me just describe it.
So you get away with something for so long that you begin, it's normalization of deviance.
That's what it's called.
So it's when you get away with something for so long that something that was a deviant thing or something that was bad is treated as a normal thing.
And that's what happened to us.
Because we knew that that foam coming off could do damage to the space shuttle.
And in the beginning we tried really hard to do something about it and we treated it very seriously.
But it was hard.
We couldn't really come up with an easy fix.
In the meantime, we're flying, and nothing bad was happening.
What was really happening is we were getting lucky.
And then eventually, a big piece came off, hit Columbia right in the wing, and it shattered, made a big hole in the side of the wing, but nobody knew for sure.
And they made a bad decision to not, like, investigate it further, assumed it was okay, brought him home, and obviously you know what happened.
So that white stuff at the top on the capsule itself, that's kind of like the same material as the...
As the tiles.
But the heat shield on the bottom is called PICA. Phenomenic Impregnated Carbon Ablator.
So it's a different very high-tech material that is really, really good at withstanding tremendous amounts of heat.
That heat shield is way oversized.
You could use that thing at least 10 times.
And this really was originally designed for actually entries coming back from the moon when you're going much faster and you build up a lot more heat when you hit the atmosphere than just coming back from the space station.
And there's elements of this vehicle that are not reusable.
That trunk you see, the cylinder below the capsule is not reusable.
We throw that away.
The second stage on the Falcon 9, we throw away.
And, you know, Elon hates that.
The holy grail is 100% reusable, but affordable reusability, where you don't have to spend like a gazillion dollars refurbishing it in between flights.
And we're getting there, and the next vehicle is going to be the real, that's going to be the real, hopefully we will get that holy grail with this starship that we're working on now.
So there's going to be a rocket, and then that thing is going to sit on top of it.
There's something like that thing.
And then we're going to get both back.
The rocket will land on its tail, and then this thing, after it goes off to the moon or even Mars, it'll come back and also land on its tail, and then we'll get both pieces.
You know, there's potential for more advanced, more efficient thrust engines, and probably one of the most promising ones in the near term is actually a nuclear engine, a nuclear thermal rocket.
Where instead of using combustion to propel hot gases out the back of your nozzle, you actually use a nuclear reactor and you take hydrogen, you flow it over that, you heat it up like super hot and shoot it out the back without lighting it on fire.
And if you do that, you can actually get much more thrust with much less mass of fuel, like a smaller fuel tank but more thrust.
But in the short term, the advance you're seeing there with that star hopper is that it's still a traditional chemical propulsion rocket.
So it's got fuel and oxidizer, which is liquid oxygen.
Because no oxygen up there to have fire, you need the pyramid, right?
So you need the oxygen and the fuel.
And the spark.
And you have to bring your own oxygen if you're in space because you don't have the atmosphere anymore.
So you carry liquid oxygen and some fuel.
And in the Falcon 9, for example, it's basically kerosene.
It's rocket fuel, but it's RP-1, but it's basically kerosene mixed with liquid oxygen.
The engine you saw in that Starhopper is advanced and different because what it uses, it still uses liquid oxygen, but instead of kerosene, it uses liquid methane.
And it's actually not as efficient quite.
It doesn't have quite the specific impulse, which is a measure of efficiency.
It doesn't have that quite as good as hydrogen.
It's better than kerosene, but not quite as good as hydrogen.
But here's the thing.
You can make it on Mars.
And that's why Elon's building that engine.
Because you can go to Mars and you don't have to bring your gas to come home.
You have to wait two years for the trajectory for the plans to come back around so you have a window to come home.
So you do have to stay a while.
But the beautiful thing is if you can go someplace and gas up again, fill up your tank without having to bring all the gas with you, that's huge, right?
You can carry so much more that way.
And with the carbon dioxide that's in the Martian atmosphere, And the water that's in the ice that's on the surface of Mars, you can have a reaction process that allows you to take those two things and make liquid methane.
And you can have a tank of that ready to go and all done robotically.
You can get the telemetry back saying, we got the gas, and then you go.
It's like the pace of technological change is like really going exponential again, just kind of like it was during Apollo.
So we're back onto that really rapid, that fast track.
We kind of fell off of that for a little while.
And the nice thing about people ask me, like, what's the biggest difference between working at SpaceX and working at NASA? And I would say it's decision speed because we'll make up our mind quickly.
Now, the reason we can do that is we've got a tremendous amount of agility.
Because sometimes when you make up your mind quickly...
But if you hurry up and figure out that you made the wrong decision and you have the agility to then say, okay, that was not right, let's try something else, then it works.
At NASA, you know, we had all these contractors and suppliers and a very cumbersome kind of system that we took a long time to make sure we made the right decision because changing things was prohibitively costly.
So NASA has this commercial crew program and they selected two commercial companies to partner with, SpaceX and Boeing.
And so Boeing is using an older rocket that's been around a long time called the Atlas V. And they built a capsule to go on top of that called the Starliner.
Well, I mean, it's the anchor tenant, if you will, the core customer is still NASA. Because NASA is going to use both of these rockets to replace the space shuttle, and we won't have to beg the Russians for rides anymore.
Yeah, I think SpaceX is really ready to go in March, very soon.
But I think we're going to wait a little longer because they're talking about extending the mission for Bob and Doug and keeping them on the space station.
So they need more training.
Sorry, Bob and Doug.
Well, they get to hang out in space for a little while.
He's got a lot of work to do here, so I don't think he's going anytime soon, but he does eventually, when we get this up and running, he does eventually want to go.
He talks about he wants to die on Mars, just not on impact.
And that's why if we send people and we live on the moon or we go to Mars and we live on Mars and we have data, like on the moon it's about a sixth of the Earth's gravity.
So we'll get points in between and then we can figure out if this thing is...
There's a lot of stuff that happens to you that may be completely solved with even just the smallest amount of G. But we don't know.
Once you start talking about missions that are that long, carrying all your food with you, bringing it all, becomes mass prohibitive.
You know, you just got to take so much, and that just means you need that much bigger of a rocket, and it just, after a while, it gets, you know, to the point where it doesn't work.
Was it because, like, there's not really enough dynamic pressure in a Martian windstorm to knock the antenna off the roof?
I'm like, nah, it's fine with that.
He's like, well, it's because we didn't have enough redundancy in the comm system, and that's not really realistic.
I'm like, nah, nope.
He goes, well, why didn't you like it?
I'm like, well, listen, I have a long day at work at SpaceX.
I come home.
I open up the book before I go to bed, and I'm reading this like, okay, I got 62 souls, and I got to cover 3,000 kilometers, and I've got 52 moles of nitrogen, hydroxide, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like...
It's like I'm still at work.
I want some escapism.
I want to go home and read a romance novel or something.
The only part of the movie, which I don't think was in the book, that was not realistic at all, was when he cuts his glove and does the Iron Man thing.
But they're not equalizing with the pressure as they go down, you know, when they do those, like, free diving things, right?
So if you're going to equalize, you're going to have to let the air out, or it's going to just expand and be extremely painful and hurt you.
So you could do that, but then eventually you get to the point where the pressure gets so low that all the liquid in your tissues starts turning into gas, and it's called ebulism.
And then you'll start getting this massive swelling, like your neck will puff up like that, and you'll get grotesque swelling wherever your blood is turning into gas, and all the liquids in your tissues are turning into gas.
That will start happening fairly quickly when you equalize, after you breathe out all that air.
You can counteract it by having squeeze suits, like suits with mechanical counterpressure that squeeze it and hold it in, like a blood pressure cuff kind of pressure kind of thing.
Now, what is the timeline in terms of, like, does SpaceX have a multiple-stage timeline, like a timeline for incorporating the Dragon Crew, and then a timeline for the Starhopper, and then a timeline for additional projects in the future?
Like, is he thinking along these lines of, like, charted-out progress?
But he's so driven, you know, and he's such a smart guy, and...
And he's really the most driven person I think I've ever met.
I'll give you a story to kind of illustrate it.
Once, when I first got hired by SpaceX, we did an interview with 60 Minutes.
And they interviewed Elon and myself.
And Scott Pelley was the anchor.
He talked to us and he said to me, Why did you leave NASA and come work for SpaceX?
You had like the best gig in the world, you know, going up on rockets and stuff.
Why would you do that?
And I said, well, if you can go back in time and you were a young engineer and you had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and work with Howard Hughes when he was doing all the crazy stuff he was doing in his day, wouldn't you want to be a part of that?
Scott Pelley looked at me with a deer in the headlights look because I don't think he knew what I was talking about.
But then I realized as soon as I said that, like, oh my god.
I just made a terrible strategic error.
I compared my boss to To Howard Hughes, you know, things didn't end up that well for Howard, you know?
We were driving in a rental car, just the two of us, in Florida.
We had a meeting at NASA, and we were driving back to the airport to get on his airplane to come back to LA. And I'm driving the car.
He's sitting in the passenger seat.
And I said, hey, boss...
Remember that time we're on TV and I compared you to Howard Hughes, you know?
I just want you to know I was comparing you to the young, dashing, starlit, dating Howard Hughes, not the old, decrepit, peeing-in-jars fingernail guy.
And I'm sitting there like waiting for him to say something.
And Elon will do this.
And he did this on your show, right?
He kind of like – if you pose to him a serious question, he'll consider it.
And he'll kind of go into this almost like a trance.
He'll stare off into space.
And you can see the wheels turning.
He's like focusing all of his intellect, which is considerable, on this one question.
And that's what was happening.
So I waited.
And then he turned back to me and he said, you know, Garrett, I don't think it's an apt comparison.
I said, oh, okay.
Good, good.
Why?
I'm curious.
Why do you think that?
And he said, well, none of Howard's designs, as brilliant as they were, ended up really changing the way we live our lives.
So we don't send, like he made the Spruce Goose, which is an incredible airplane.
It was all wood, you know, trying to solve the problem during the war of rationing.
He said, we don't send our goods across the oceans in giant wooden airplanes.
We don't do that.
The H1 Racer was a beautiful airplane, but it was a one-off.
It never really led to a large design that changed the way people lived their lives.
So that was his objection, was not that I was comparing him to some creep, but that he wants, it's really important to him to have the legacy that Of drastically impacting the way all of us live our lives, so kind of the way Steve Jobs did or others that really moved the ball downfield for humanity.
And the fact that he does them all simultaneously, that he's involved in the Boring Project, he's involved in Tesla and SpaceX all simultaneously, and Tesla Home, solar, all the solar panels and making solar tiles for roofs, and he's doing so many different things at the same time.
Yeah, I've seen him do it, and I still don't understand it, you know?
It's like, I kind of burn myself out just trying to do one of those things.
He does all of them.
And he does have all the advantages of wealth, which helps, you know?
So, like, he'll...
Have meetings with us, and he'll walk out of his last meeting, and he'll walk across the street to Hawthorne Airport, hop on his jet, and he's at Palo Alto in a couple hours, and he can be first thing in the morning at Tesla, and he's got a staff that helps him, and he's got those advantages.
But that doesn't explain why he's able to do what he does.
Yeah, he's just an idea factory and what's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge.
I mean, I've met a lot of super, super smart people, but they're usually super, super smart on one thing.
And he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software and the most arcane aspects of that.
And then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy.
And he'll just go back and forth.
And his ability to do that across all the different technologies that go into rockets and cars and everything else he does, that's what really impresses me.
So his ultimate goal is to create some sort of a colony on Mars, but he believes that this technology will continue to expand to the point where we will be leaving our solar system.
We will be making human trips into other solar systems, into actual deep space.
Yeah, I mean, certainly, hopefully that's, you know, at some point, if we're going to survive, you take the really long view, you know, the solar system's not going to last forever.
Well, what we need is someone like Elon who concentrates on the solutions.
I mean, he's obviously got a full plate, many full plates, but someone like him to concentrate on solutions to some of the environmental problems that we've created for ourselves here.
The thing is, every time I talked to him, we focused on, and this is what he does, he focuses on the thing that we are working on.
So that's one of the ways he does his time management.
That's one of the ways he is able to do all these things.
It's like he doesn't sit around and BS with you about what's going on with, what's it, Neuralink, the company where he's making the chips that go in your head.
Once it happens, I mean, I don't want to be an early adopter, but once it does happen, and it really does remarkably increase your ability to interface with data, because that's the idea, right?
It ramps up the bandwidth in which people can access ideas and information, and it's going to change the way we interface.
Yeah, it's just to me, it seems like if you pay attention to the track, if you track technology like where it's going, things constantly improve.
We demand constant innovation.
And we're already wearing these things on our body and watches now.
A lot of people are wearing the Apple watches and the Samsung and all the Google watches.
And it just seems inevitable that it somehow or another advances to a point where there's a chip or something you wear or some plate that they put on the back of your head and screw in.
Especially coming from your childhood, having that image on your wall, and now really being a part of this massive change in the way human beings are going to be able to travel in space.
Yeah, I mean, it was like in the early days, it kind of like peak TV, I guess.
And it was like, it was just so good.
I mean, the writing was so good and the whole concept and everything.
All the things they're exploring.
Science fiction is always at its best when it's like an allegory and the way they explored things that were happening in society, like terrorism and stuff.
The way they were able to depict it in an alternate universe, I thought was spectacular.
I don't remember the numbers, but we weren't getting...
When I was there, we weren't getting live internet because all that bandwidth is being used for science to get all the data from the experiments and the video.
I mean, Battlestar, I'm watching Battlestar, and they're like, now I'm in the final season, and they're like, Finding Earth, and I'm like, it's right there.
And that's why, before I was going to mention this, when we were talking about, you know, science fiction and science fact and how there's this crazy feedback loop about you got to think about it first.
Like you go back and look at 2001 and you see these guys using tablets.
In 1960, what was it?
1968 that movie came out.
And you know Steve Jobs saw that and said, I'm going to make one of those, right?
And so there's this crazy interplay between fiction and fact, and I got to talk to Ron more about all this, and then he invited me to come on the set for the final episode of Battlestar.
I don't think people appreciated it enough, because it was on Syfy, which is not the most popular network, and it's also a reboot of a classic show, so maybe it had a bit of a stink to it, but that was so much better than the first version of it.
And now he came and one day he calls me up and he says, I got this new idea.
Can I come by?
Can we get together and maybe I can bounce the idea off of you?
And I was like, yeah.
So he came to SpaceX, and I gave him a tour of the place, and then we sat down in the cafe, and he said, okay, so I'm thinking about doing a show about NASA back in the 70s.
It'd be kind of like a period piece.
It'd be kind of like we'd have a cast of characters, but they're all working on Apollo.
And it would be true to real life, but it would be the drama of the people behind the scenes.
I said, oh, that sounds pretty cool.
He goes, yeah, I'm also toying around with a slight twist to that where we use an alternate reality.
And in this alternate reality, we start at that point, but things turn out differently.
And we started talking about how close the Russians were to actually beating us to the moon, which not a lot of people know about.
But when I was over there in Moscow, I got to see actually they have a warehouse where they still have their lunar lander, for example, that they built.
They were really working hard on it.
So we started what if-ing.
Like, well, what if the Russians got there first?
What would America have done?
How would things be different today if that seminal moment of Neil and Buzz stepping out on the moon was instead Alexei Leonov, a cosmonaut, doing it, right?
And I was like, that is freaking genius.
I mean, that was like a—I thought, I want to see that show.
That's like a great premise— And he pitched that to Apple and they bought it.
And then he called me up and said, you want to work on the show?
We have another group of people, a couple of other people that help out too.
But I get involved in like everything.
So I was in the writer's room where we're first coming up with basic ideas and sketching out like multiple seasons and character arcs and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, if it gets to the point where, like, but that's the beautiful thing about, like, doing this with television is you don't have to actually be right.
You just have to be believable, which the bar is, like, when I'm teaching my class at USC, I gotta be right.
But when I'm like, yeah, well, maybe this could happen, you know, with a TV show, it's easier.
They really do because it's really important to them.
And so, yeah, I've ended up making wholesale changes to episodes.
The original idea, I try very, very hard not to interfere with their creative process because they're really, really good at that.
And I'm not worthy.
But I'm like, yeah, okay, I see what you're trying to do.
You want this guy to be the hero.
You want this person to feel remorse.
And over the course of time, this person has a change of heart.
I get the story.
But what if, instead of doing it this way, what if the events occur like this because this could actually happen?
Right?
And so I tried to change it.
And it was one – like episode 9 and a little bit of episode 10 of season 1, we ended up sitting – I ended up sitting and working very closely with the writers and changing all the technical content to fit – to make the story work in a believable way.
When we do that and then you see it on the screen, it's so incredibly rewarding.
It's incredible that you've gone from NASA to SpaceX and now to be able to create television shows that you can actually enjoy.
Wow.
One thing I wanted to ask you about space is we always hear stuff about space junk, about satellites and just junk that's floating around the atmosphere.
How much of a concern is that and what could be done about that stuff?
In certain orbits around the Earth, low Earth orbit and also at the geostationary orbits, that's where you can put communication satellites and they stay over one spot of the Earth.
Those are very polluted.
There's a lot of junk and it is very dangerous and it's a real problem.
It's hard to clean up.
Over time, eventually, even at higher altitudes, there's still a little bit of atmosphere, like individual atoms.
Eventually that slows you down.
Those collisions eventually slow you down.
So eventually it comes back, but it could take a long, long time.
So the most important thing is don't make any more junk.
That's like the best thing we can do.
And we're getting much smarter.
Like at SpaceX, we take our second stages in all of our NASA missions, and after it's accomplished its mission, we keep enough gas in the tank to burn the engine one more time and bring it back in one piece so it doesn't blow up into smithereens and cause more junk.
Whenever we do anti-satellite tests though, China did one relatively recently and we've done them in the past.
Those are like the worst because they create giant clouds of junk and we still have to live with that.
Because we've seen the map of the Earth and all the different satellites that orbit it now and all the different pieces of junk that have been identified.
Yeah, we tend to not really react until it's a really big problem, but it's a big problem.
And when I did my first spacewalk, one of the things we had to do was we had to bring in this handle that we're going to use on a subsequent spacewalk.
We call it a D-handle.
It's just basically a half-inch piece of aluminum around like this that you can attach to something and then carry things.
So he had this big chunk of aluminum, and we brought it inside, and my spacewalk partner Rick looked at the thing when we came inside, and he saw a hole shot straight through it.
It's like about a millimeter in diameter.
It's really small, but it went right through this half-inch thick solid aluminum.
And he looked at that, and he said, man, if that hit one of us...
And he didn't have to finish that statement, because if this stuff is moving...
Generally speaking, about 10 kilometers per second.
So that's like roughly 10 times as fast as a rifle bullet.
So if something like that hits you, it could be a fleck of paint hitting you at that velocity.
If it hits you in the suit, you're in 100% oxygen environment, and you're just going to flame up.
I mean, you're going to instantly combust.
It's going to be really a bad day.
So he didn't have to, like, he said, you know, when he said that, he didn't have to finish it.
And we both looked at it.
And then I looked at him and said, yeah, but you're six foot four.
So statistically, much more likely it's going to hit you.
Well, depending on where you are, so in Earth orbit, there's much more of man-made junk than there are micrometeorites, but there are those too.
When you get out away from Earth orbit, like if we're going to go back to the moon, then there's no more human-made junk, but those micrometeorites are still out there, and they can do the same kind of damage.
But there's a lot fewer of them.
The density of those things is a lot less than what you experience.
So if you go to Mars, I'd worry about the radiation first, and then the micrometeoroids are down the list.