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March 16, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:21:14
Edition 527 - Clayton Anderson & Richard Garriott

This time some listener stories - Plus an extended version of my conversation with astronaut Clayton Anderson - and my talk with British-American astronaut/explorer Richard Garriott - just back from Planet Earth's deepest place!

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Nice to have you there.
This is the online show where we have a little bit more time to ourselves.
Just reflecting on the fact that I have now been effectively locked down in isolation, more or less apart from a few days that I had in Bournemouth.
I think it was three days in September when restrictions were eased a little.
I've been in this situation of incarceration alone for a year.
And don't let anybody tell you that this does not have effects, because for me it's having physical effects, aches and pains everywhere, terrible sleeping and mental effects as well.
I think you may find, as I've found, that if you do this for long enough, it depresses you massively.
So that is an effect.
And I know a lot of you are telling me you're feeling the same about all of this.
So I, for one, can't wait to be allowed to get on with my life the sooner the better.
Thank you very much for all of your emails that keep coming in through my website designed by Adam.
The website is theunexplained.tv.
I'm going to do some shout-outs and a couple of listener stories.
Then we'll get to two very special guests.
One from my radio show, Richard Garriott, adventurer, explorer, the man who's not only been in space, but has also been to the poles.
And he's been to the deepest place on Earth.
His story about that is remarkable.
I had him on my radio show last Sunday and wanted you to hear that interview.
Also, I'll be speaking with Clayton Anderson, American astronaut.
An extended version of my conversation with him will appear exclusively here.
So two people, two very special people, both linked by the fact that they're an astronaut and very much into adventure.
So if you like that kind of thing, and Clayton Anderson particularly talks in great depth about what it's like to be up in space on the ISS, I think you're going to like this.
Two remarkable people.
Shout outs first then.
Aaron and Sarah, nice to hear from you.
Ian in Scotland, regular listener sent me a picture of a cottage pie that he'd made.
Ian, it looks fabulous.
At the moment, I'm living on microwave food.
And I don't think you can get a cottage pie to do in a microwave that's as good as the real deal.
You know, that you actually have to bake in an oven.
But that is not available to me at this moment.
It will be one day.
Margie in Australia.
What a great email, Margie.
I got it today and it was a real boost for me.
Margie, thank you very much.
And Raff in southwest London, Surrey Fringes, asking about Terry Lovelace.
Raffi has been on the show.
There's no question that he will be on the show again, but no, he has been on this show.
And if you go back through the archive, you will see Terry Lovelace there.
Now, a couple of listener stories here.
There are three or four of them, I think, I've got.
So settle back for these.
Then we'll hear Richard Garriott, British-American explorer, astronaut, and Clayton Anderson.
But before that, here are the stories.
This is from Lawrence, who emailed in the last couple of days from Tokyo, Japan.
Says, thank you for the great show.
Thank you, Lawrence, for that.
Listening for about a year.
I appreciate your guests and your journalistic approach.
I have a UFO sighting, my first, around about February 22nd, 2021, in the Tokyo area, 9 p.m.
The night was clear and cold and crisp.
The moon was out.
I was on the third floor deck of my house just to get some air and to take a look at the stars.
One o'clock, peripheral vision.
I noticed one leading red light and one trailing white light.
Not blinking, not strobing.
These lights were very faint.
They were what I perceived to be part of the same craft.
The craft was what looked like a translucent rectangle.
At a height, what I would say just a little higher than a helicopter flies, moving silently from south to north directly towards Hanida Airport in Tokyo, 10 miles away.
It's important to note planes never fly on a landing pattern to Hanida from that direction.
However, even if it was landing, only two solid dim lights, no strobe, no sound, and this was rectangular.
Lawrence says, thank you, Howard, for your dedication and hard work.
Well, thank you for the story.
I don't know what that might have been.
Some people may suggest a drone.
Doesn't sound like it.
If you live in Japan or have experience of these things, let me know what you think this may have been.
For Lawrence's sake, okay?
Jimmy says, this story, Howard, is 100% true.
When much younger and in college, I attended a party with a friend of mine.
We'd been friends for many years.
When we arrived, the host began to introduce us.
There were three girls playing with a Ouija board just inside.
Now, you know that I do not advocate the use of Ouija boards, but let's hear the story.
They asked the host to let the board tell them who we were because nobody knew us.
They asked the board my friend's name first, and it quickly spelled the name Stephen.
We laughed, as that was not even close.
His name was Vince.
The host introduced us to everybody, and the evening went on.
We'd always known that my friend was adopted as a very young child.
A few weeks after the party, his natural father showed up and asked his adopted parents if he could meet Vince.
That was agreed.
Vince phoned me shortly after he left his real dad with some very interesting news.
His name given at birth was Stephen.
Even spelled exactly the same way as the Ouija board had.
We agreed this could not be a coincidence.
To this day, I will not be involved with a Ouija board in any way, says Jimmy.
So strange, the board or the spirit or whatever it was knew his real name.
I can't explain that, Jimmy, and thank you for the nice things you said about the show.
What do you think about that story?
This comes in from Peter.
Our first house, this is about many years ago, my wife and I moved into our first home on Cromford Road in Langley Mill, Nottinghamshire, a know there.
It was an unusual house, as it was around the back of a row of terraced houses, and the front door was down an entry, or as you say in America, an alleyway, on the right.
Inside, it was quite old, but as a first home, it needed a lot of work doing to it.
Over the next few months, some very strange things happened, and you have to understand, I was a total sceptic at this time.
I didn't believe in ghosts at all.
One night, I was tiling the kitchen in the house on my own.
It was getting dark, but all of the lights were on inside.
Suddenly, something tugged sharply on the tail of my work shirt at the bottom, and I jumped out of my skin.
Well, you would.
This was followed by a scratching noise in the wall.
Several weeks later, we were in bed, and my wife said she could hear scratching and whining like a dog.
I joked with her over it, as the house to the left of us was completely empty, and the people on the front didn't have a dog.
I then put my ear to the wall and could hear the scratching and whining as if it was inside the wall again.
We went outside to check, but the house was empty, and the wall where I heard the noise was high up on the second floor with nothing joined onto it.
Months later, we had to have an electrician in because the lights kept switching themselves on, but he said, although the building had been converted back from being individual flats, there was no problem with the electrics.
The final issue came weeks later when we decided to go for a takeaway at the end of the street.
We were celebrating that night because we decided to sell the house.
We don't think somebody liked the idea of us leaving, though.
A rag doll, which was a baby daughter's, was sitting on the table and the room temperature suddenly dropped very low.
This was not the first time that had happened.
We purposely sat the doll in a certain way on the table corner because we felt something could happen.
It was a very strange feeling in the room that night.
When we came back from the takeaway at the end of the street, the doll had moved position by itself.
We literally couldn't leave quickly enough, and we did several weeks later after it was sold.
The couple who moved in afterwards never mentioned any problems after we asked them.
Maybe the house just didn't like us.
A second short one, several people have heard shuffling of feet in the living room of my mum and dad's bungalow, including my wife Mandy and I. We woke up and clearly heard the shuffling of feet, which has also been heard by my nephews and other family members.
Just goes to show many locations, many homes, people have these experiences.
Maybe we all do.
You know, I've probably told you about moving very briefly when I worked at BRMB Radio in Birmingham.
I lived in a house that I rented in Bromsgrove.
I was only there for a few months.
And in between the people who owned the house renting it to me and them leaving, their son, who I'd met, died in a rugby accident.
And I could never go into that boy's bedroom.
They'd left his posters on the wall and everything.
And the bedroom was always cold.
And I always felt a presence in that place.
And one night, the light on the landing turned itself on.
And this was the landing outside the boy's bedroom.
Turned itself on by itself.
And it was one of the most terrifying things I've ever experienced.
Don't know what caused that at all.
It never happened again.
But I left for London.
I was offered a job at LBC Radio, IRN, after that.
But I've never forgotten that.
And I've always had, you know, great sympathy with those poor parents.
I never spoke to them again.
There wasn't an occasion, but after their son died in that way.
It's now a long time ago, but, you know, it made an impact on me.
Finally, Sean in Tranmir says, evening, Howard, I'm listening to your Edition 252.
That's a few episodes back with Penny Sartori talking about near-death experiences.
Your story about your grandfather, my granddad, basically in his dying moments, that's my dad's dad, was talking to relatives who'd passed.
He was talking to a curtain.
We couldn't see anything.
We could see it move, but he was convinced that he was talking to people who'd lived before and died.
So that was that story.
But this is from Sean.
He says, it reminded me about when my paternal grandmother died in a nursing home in Oxton on the Wirral.
She was talking to her mother and father in the hours leading up to her eventual passing.
I hadn't thought of it as a near-death experience.
Well, I don't know how you would classify it, Sean, but I think this happens a lot.
And I think people who work in hospices and other places will tell you, and hospitals will tell you, that these things happen.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed those.
And I'm glad I've been able to do some listener stories here.
Let's get to the guests on this edition.
It's going to be a long edition, this one, so strap yourself in.
First, let's talk to Richard Garriott about going to the deepest place on Earth.
You know, you have, I think, probably the most exciting definition of yourself that I've ever had to speak on the radio in all these years of doing it.
You are an astronaut explorer.
Talk to me about that.
I recognized your name as soon as I saw it.
When were you in space?
What did you do?
I was in space about 12 years ago, maybe 13 years ago, in October of 2008.
I flew privately on a Russian Soyuz rocket up to the International Space Station where I lived for two weeks.
And at that time, I was the first second-generation astronaut, and I flew with the first second-generation cosmonaut.
So my father was also a NASA astronaut, and I flew with a Russian cosmonaut whose father also flew in space.
That's amazing.
I mean, you seem to have made a life out of doing things for the first time, doing things that other people haven't done.
Because now you've made the headlines this last week for going to the deepest point that we know about on Earth, right at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
This is going to sound like the world's most crass question.
Forgive me for it, Richard.
But how did you do that?
Yeah, so, well, fortunately, you know, the deepest end of the Mariana Trench had only previously been visited by two other vehicles.
One two years before I was born by Jacques Picard and Don Walsh in, I think, 1959.
Then James Cameron, the filmmaker, about 15 years ago, went down in a little single-person sub one time.
And then the way I went down is with this very new machine called Limiting Factor, built by a gentleman by the name of Victor Vescovo.
And Victor has built the submarine where it can make repeated full ocean depth dives.
And so he has taken the submarine down to the deepest point in all five of the world's deepest oceans and now is putting together a scientific program where we are taking scientists down all around the world in their own backyards, generally speaking, to go down to these deepest points on Earth.
This is an incredibly deep point.
And I can imagine the forces upon that craft and upon you are elemental.
How deep is that?
How deep did you go down?
Yes.
Yeah, it is just shy of 11,000 meters, so about seven miles below the surface of the Earth.
That's deeper below the surface of the water than Everest is above the sea level.
And so it's a phenomenally great depth.
In fact, even falling like a stone in the water, it takes you four hours to fall to the bottom.
You then spend about four hours on the bottom and four hours to return to the surface.
And the pressure on the outside of the nine millimeter, nine centimeter thick titanium hull is about 10 tons per square inch.
And so that's enough pressure.
That's about a thousand times the natural pressure at sea level.
And that's enough to crush the hull, the hull that you're sitting inside of, the little meter and a half diameter ball you're in.
It actually shrinks by about half a centimeter due to that enormous pressure.
And is the way that the walls, the hull of this thing, you know, manages not to be crushed like a tissue in your hand, do you have to put, presumably you have to put reverse pressure out there?
So you're pushing out against the pressure coming in?
The only thing pushing out is the hull itself.
And the reason why that works is not only is it nine centimeters thick of titanium, but it is milled to being a truly perfect sphere.
It is, I mean, the numbers here are accurate.
It's 99.99% perfect sphere.
If it wasn't a perfect sphere, it would fold in.
One side would collapse compared to the others.
And so it is an engineering marvel to be able to not only go down there at all, but to have this machine that now can scientifically explore the entire global ocean, where prior to this machine, more than half of the deep places in the oceans were completely unavailable to anything other than these one-off attempts people have made many, many years ago.
It's just amazing.
Two questions in one.
What does it feel like to be down there?
And what is it like to be down there?
What can you see, if anything?
Yeah, well, so the fascinating part about going down there is that the first two voyages, the only other previous two prior to this machine, sort of went down, didn't linger there very long and returned to the surface.
And what they described was sort of a featureless, flat abyssal plain covered with mud.
But now the limiting factor, we spend four hours down there on the bottom.
And with thrusters, we go explore the deep rifts and valleys and significant shape of the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean.
So it is full of boulders and crevasses.
It is covered with silt.
And unlike what a lot of people saw, which was not much life, we also dropped three what are called landers, three beacons, three scientific instruments that are unmanned and don't motor around.
But we drop these three landers to help do science and help geolocate where we are.
And we often will put bait on them.
And it turns out there is bountiful life down there.
There's not only a variety of fish, but what we saw the most of on my dives was something called amphipods, little, they almost look like little headless shrimp, little blind headless shrimp that kind of come around and eat them, little mackerels that you put down there for them.
And then up on the ridges and rocks, there's a thriving community of what I would describe aesthetically as tube worms.
I don't remember off the top of my head the scientific name for these creatures.
But there is quite a bit of life down there.
And unfortunately, there's also quite a bit of human trash, including scientific trash.
It turns out the only way these deepest areas of the earth have been explored previously is with remotely operated vehicles.
Basically, a little robot on the end of a super long seven-mile tether.
And it has not been uncommon for scientists who go down to explore these great depths with a robot to, while their robot floats back to the surface, they just dump the tether, a seven-mile long optical fiber and power cable.
And on my dive, we literally landed on the bottom on top of one of these coiled up seven mile cables, which is a true hazard if that were to get entangled in the thrusters of the submarine.
So it's both literal plastic trash and the scientific trash that we're already leaving all over the seafloor is disappointing and problematic.
And that, Richard, is deeply depressing that we're fouling up the deepest place on Earth.
Physiologically, when you come back from that, how do you feel?
How much acclimatization or acclimation, as they say in the U.S., do you have to do when you come back from those enormous, unfathomable depths?
Well, the interesting thing is, having been both to space and the deep, the personal physiological challenge of space is substantial.
It turns out, even though floating weightless in space is good fun, it's not very good on your body.
You have muscle and bone mass loss.
The interocular pressure in your eye goes up.
Long duration exposure can cause damage to your eyes.
It turns out even cell division, your general bodily health deteriorates while you're in space.
But going to the deep, it turns out the inside that little sphere that you're in, the pressure has to stay at one atmosphere.
It turns out that even though the pressure outside the sphere is a thousand times higher, there's really no point in allowing to go more than one or two atmospheres on the inside because your body can't handle it.
And so it's sustained at one atmosphere.
And so the biggest physiological challenge of going deep is actually temperature.
Despite the fact of you being much closer to the center of the earth, it is really cold down there.
Natural light only penetrates the first few hundred meters of the surface of the water.
And you're many thousands of meters down below.
And so it has been pitch black, literally no light for most of the journey down.
And the temperature has dropped to around freezing.
And so you board on the surface in tropical climates, but you board wearing winter clothes and layers so that by the time you're down at the bottom, when it's literally freezing, you are comfortable enough.
That number of miles down is a scary prospect.
It's incredibly dark down there.
We know that from science programs that we've seen.
Were you not...
Honestly, no.
Even the space flight, which statistically I would say was considerably more dangerous, I also wouldn't describe fear there either.
I mean, if you were at all claustrophobic, this vehicle was by far the smallest space that I've spent so much time in.
And you're acutely aware of the fact that just like in space, if anything goes wrong with this vehicle when you're at the depth, there's literally no one on the surface who could help you.
There's no other way another vehicle could reach you.
There's no crane or rope or chain that could be sent down to you.
And so you and your crewmate are really all that there is down there to ensure you're on survival.
And so you do pay very close attention to all of the training procedures and the safety features of this vehicle.
You take boarding it and operating it very seriously.
Your faith in the crew that helps you launch and return to the surface are all people that you need to also believe know their jobs and do their jobs very well.
I'm guessing, and this kind of ties space into those lonely depths.
I'm guessing that looking at the extremophiles that you found down there, the creatures that can survive those kinds of pressures and those kinds of depths and the lack of light and everything else, does that prepare us for what we might find ultimately on Mars or another planet?
You are exactly right.
In fact, that's one of my great joys of not just the two trips you've mentioned, but I've also, when I traveled to the poles, the same thing, we found cryogenic thermophiles, so animals that could survive in extreme cold.
At hydrothermal vents, we found creatures that could survive at both extremely high temperatures as well as in areas that are very acidic and have no free oxygen.
They metabolized sulfur dioxide.
And so when you think of life beyond the Earth, it seems, it's not only true that life exists, anywhere there's liquid water on Earth, there is life.
And it's very likely that the earliest life forms on Earth were not either the oxygen-breathing animals that we represent, nor the simple CO2 plants that we normally see on the surface.
But they really are more like these extremophiles we find in these unusual places.
And so when we eventually get probes to look under the ice in some of the icy moons around some of the other planets in our solar system, or these new rovers that are right now running around on Mars looking for the hard evidence of microbes, these extremophiles we're pulling up from these deep and exotic locations are very useful to make sure that we look wide enough as to how life might live on these other places.
Quick question.
Are you going back?
Oh, yeah.
Well, this is actually my fifth deep submersible trip.
It's the deepest of my submersible trips.
But I already have a couple of other more shallow ones being considered right now.
And of course, space remains a personal passion.
So I hope to get back there as well.
Well, a pleasure to speak with you, Richard.
And if you've ever got a little more spare time, I'd love to talk with you longer about your life and times.
And thank you so much.
You're described as British American.
What's your UK connection?
Yes, I was actually born in Cambridge.
So my father wasn't, my parents are both American, but he was a professor at Stanford University and took a one-year sabbatical to go work and study in Cambridge at the amazing radio telescope facilities that they have there.
Radio astronomy and radio physics was my dad's specialty.
So we spent a few years there over in Cambridge.
Astronaut explorer, a man of great bravery, Richard Garriott.
I'm going to do a longer show with him one of these days, very, very soon.
Here's an extended version of my recent conversation with Clayton Anderson, the American astronaut.
Originally from Nebraska, lives now in Texas, had a wonderful career of NASA, and we spoke at great length and in great detail in a lot of things you will not have heard about life on the International Space Station.
With Clayton Anderson, here he is.
Nice to be with y'all at midnight.
Well, whatever time it is where you are now in League City, where is League City?
League City is about halfway between Houston, Texas and Galveston, Texas, about 25 miles southeast of the Houston downtown.
Is that a good place for an astronaut to be?
Well, I'd say space is the number one choice for an astronaut to be, but if I had to pick a second spot, League City would be okay.
Okay.
Now, that's an interesting thing and a very revealing thing that you said there, Clayton.
Space is the best place for an astronaut to be.
I would have assumed that.
Are you missing it?
Oh, absolutely.
I retired in 2013, and I miss it most of it greatly because it's just the coolest thing to do that I've ever thought of.
So I wish I could go back, but I would say, honestly, to go back into space, I think I'd be bored after about a month knowing what the current crews on the space station are doing.
Meaning?
Well, when I went for my first five months back, way back in 2007, luckily for me, the mission timeline was such that I had something cool to do every single month, it seemed like, right?
So the spacing was really good.
I arrived in space, got acclimated.
Then the next month, I had a spacewalk to do, my very first one.
And then the month after that, a crew was coming from Earth to visit us.
And then after that, we were going to fly the robotic arm and grab a module and reposition it.
And then after that, a shuttle crew was going to come and take me home.
So everything was very well spaced.
There was not a lot of time to get bored or to sense that things were slowing down and that the action was low.
Now today, there's no guarantee or there would be no guarantee that I'd get another spacewalk or I'd get to fly the robotic arm or I'd get to do anything cool except work on a bunch of science experiments inside the space station, which for the scientists is cool, but oftentimes for the astronauts, kind of dull.
Right.
So for you, and I want to talk a little bit later in depth in the next segment about the ISS and what it's like to be there, what it was like for you anyway, to be there.
But at the moment, you think a lot of those procedural tasks would be the kind of thing that would bore you somewhat.
You want to be doing things.
You want to be out there.
You want to be making stuff happen.
Yes, for sure.
The life of an astronaut is pretty regimented.
And some tasks are actually fun, even when following procedures.
For example, one of the things I did in 2007 was I had to help wire the space station for Ethernet capability, right?
So back in the days when everybody had a cable that went from their laptop computer to a jack in the wall so that they could have internet capability, we actually did that on the space station in 2007.
And it was a complex task.
I had to make sure I got it right, but it was fun in that I was everywhere in the station, behind the walls, underneath the floors, and dragging wires and looking at color-coded connections to make sure I got everything exactly right with no mistakes the first time.
And those kind of things were a challenge for me, and they made me, I don't want to say necessarily excited, but they were engaging for me.
But a lot of the stuff you do on the space station can become mundane, can become repetitive.
Right.
So you like tasks that appear beyond the standard rotor.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And I would guess a lot of people here on Earth are the same way, right?
If you mow your yard once a week, that becomes very mundane, right?
But if you are putting in a pond with a fountain that makes a little river that keeps flowing all day, that might be a little more engaging for folks.
Right.
Okay, now that's very interesting.
I think that tells me, without maybe you knowing it, an awful lot about you.
And that's something else I want to talk about a little way down the track in this conversation, because we've known from the history of NASA and a number of people who've written books about it, including Dr. David Whitehouse, who you may know from the UK, former BBC Space and Science editor, who recently wrote the story of Apollo to mark the 50th anniversary.
But he talked a great deal about the way that they pick particular individuals with particular sets of skills.
And I suppose what I'm saying really, I was going to get to this later in the conversation.
We might as well do it now, is that NASA seems to very carefully compose the crews of missions.
If we look as far back as the moon mission, you will know this better than me.
You had Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
Neil Armstrong, the cool tactician.
Buzz Aldrin, the kind of man who would find and did indeed find the solution to a big problem by thinking left field.
You need different kinds of people.
It strikes me that there's a bit of Buzz in you, maybe?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Buzz was a hell of a smarter than I've ever been.
You've got to be pretty damn smart to get in there in the first place.
Hey, listen.
All right, we'll get to that point then a little bit later.
Let's talk about your story because a lot of us have dreamt as kids about being an astronaut.
I remember my big sister Beryl walked me to school in Liverpool when I was six.
And she said, what do you think you'd want to do when you're a big boy, when you're grown up?
And I said, Beryl, I want to be an astronaut.
Because everybody did then.
You know, everybody did.
And she said, we have qualifications here called A-levels.
She said, you have to get your A-levels for that, but you need to get a hell of a lot more than that.
And a lot of boys, a lot of people dream about being an astronaut.
Almost none of them achieve it, but you did.
Yes.
I have two stories that go with that.
I remember I was nine years old when my mom and dad awakened my brother and sister and I and plopped us down on the floor in Nebraska, where I'm from, in front of a black and white TV set.
And from that position, we watched nearly at midnight on Christmas Eve, the Apollo 8 astronauts go behind the moon for the first time in human history.
So I remember myself, you know, all we're seeing is a black and white picture of mission control, right?
A bunch of dudes with white shirts, skinny black ties, crew cuts, pencil protectors or pocket protectors in their shirt.
And if they wore glasses, there were those big, thick, black frame glasses.
And the flight director was barking out commands to these people.
And, you know, I need a go, no, go for translunar injection burn.
Retro, go.
Surgeon, go.
Capcom, go.
Fido, go.
Jeepo, go.
Everybody was going, you know, and then he calls the Apollo guys out in the capsule and he asked them for a go.
And I'm thinking, geez, do they really have a choice?
And they gave the go.
They did the burn.
They made it around the moon for the first time.
And when they went around that rock and all the communication, all the buzz I was hearing turned to basically static, right?
Because they couldn't transmit from behind a big rock.
And I was only nine years old, kind of freaking out.
You know, what's happened to these people?
Are they alive?
Is there a volcano that's erupted on the backside?
Well, the world collectively held its breath.
Meantime, all of those guys in mission control, who in those days all looked like Michael Douglas' character in Falling Down, didn't they?
They all looked a bit like that.
You know, they were pensively checking their checklists, looking at the screens, and waiting for communication to be re-established.
But the difference, probably, between you and me, I'd have been very much fixated on the danger of this thing and the fact that if I was the person doing that, there was a pretty reasonable chance I wouldn't come back.
Sounds to me like you were getting off on the excitement.
Yeah, I don't know that I ever thought about the bad side of all of that.
You know, my brother and I used to jump off of our garage roof playing Batman and Robin when we were kids.
So I guess fear was maybe stupidly, fear was not something I considered very frequently.
Right.
And so, I mean, you told me there were two stories, but at the back end of that one, they did emerge from around the moon and they paved the way for the moon landing on Apollo 11 a couple of missions later.
Is that the moment for you?
Yes, absolutely.
Then that's what I remember when I really wanted to be one of those people.
My mom would tell you that I was three years younger.
I was only six when we would discuss me becoming an astronaut.
And so in my hometown of Ashland, Nebraska, a very small town in the southeast corner of the state, we had a big carnival every July.
And one of the things was a kiddie parade where kids dressed up in costumes and the judges awarded prizes, right?
So we had no stores like Target, Costco, Walmart, the big box stores, I guess.
You couldn't buy a costume.
So mom put a hat box on my head and cut appropriate holes, put a pipe cleaner with a styrofoam ball in the top so I could communicate with aliens.
And she wrapped every inch of it, aluminum foil.
Wow.
And I'm in this parade as a Mercury astronaut.
And of course, you know, at our age, we'd be a bit self-conscious, but when you're a kid, you'd have been the proudest kid in town.
Absolutely, until I lost to a girl in a blue gingham dress with a picnic basket with a live shame.
Yeah.
Shame.
I mean, they were a bit behind the curve by the sounds of it in Nebraska then.
But, you know, I mean, look, I deeply sympathize with you because when I was a kid, we have a seaside town here called Rill.
There's no reason why you should have heard of Rill.
It's in North Wales, and it's a very nice seaside town.
I went there for a day with my parents, and I marched proudly up and down the promenade there in a Batman outfit, which didn't really fit me properly with an ill-fitting cape and a mask.
My sister thought it was hysterically funny.
My parents were very understanding.
God knows what the people of Rill thought.
So, you know, I was, you know, I definitely sympathize with you.
You said there were two stories that were formational for you.
What's the other one?
Or is that the other one?
That's the other one, the aluminum foil story.
So the Apollo 8 watching Mission Control on Christmas Eve, and then my mom wrapping me up three years earlier in a roll of aluminum foil.
Okay.
So that happens.
You decide that's what I want to do.
Did you announce that to your folks and to your teachers?
Yes.
On occasion, I found a way to let people know what I was dreaming of doing.
And apparently, based on the folks that I went to school with and college with, I continued to do that all the way through my college career.
And, you know, I don't remember a lot of that stuff now, but apparently it stuck with some of my friends and colleagues in that I would tell them that's what I dreamed of doing and I really hope to do it.
And that's why I ended up in Houston as a summer intern in the summer of 1981.
Right.
I mean, you made that sound really easy.
Getting to be an intern, I guess the queue behind you is probably several thousand people deep.
Well, back then, in 81, the only way I ended up at NASA and the Johnson Space Center was that a gentleman that worked for NASA had graduated from my college, Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska.
He'd graduated from there in 1961.
He worked at NASA at the Johnson Space Center and came home to Nebraska every fall to go pheasant hunting.
So this fall, my senior year, 1981, he's pheasant hunting with the career guidance counselor from Hastings College.
And as they stomp through the woods and look for birds to shoot, they're talking about things.
And the discussion turns to NASA and this young student at Hastings College who dreams of being a NASA astronaut.
And then the fellow says, well, NASA has an interim program.
I'll send the information.
So I applied.
I got a telephone interview.
Right back then, there was no Skype and all that good stuff.
So I'm sitting in my physics professor's office amongst his stacks of books and papers and things and chatting with a human resources rep from the Johnson Space Center who then ultimately hired me along with 39 other kids.
So 40 of us went to Johnson Space Center in 1981 and I think 480 applicants applied.
So that was step one.
Yes, step one.
And at the back end of that, when you got selected, did you think, well, geez, there were 500 people there and they want me?
I must be pretty damn good.
I don't know if I ever thought that.
I think I thought I'm pretty damn lucky.
Because when I got there, amidst these other summer intern candidates, it's kind of like when I was selected to be an astronaut.
These people are impressive.
And it took a while for me to even begin to think that I was as qualified as they were.
Their experiences, their education, their mannerisms, the way they talked, even the way they behaved in groups and in meetings and things like that.
I mean, I looked at a lot of them in awe and thought, wow, do I ever have a shot at this?
Because I don't know that I'm as good as they all are.
But, you know, this is, I've come across this in my own life.
I have to say, you know, you couldn't see yourself as other people would see you.
I think that's the point.
They picked you for a reason.
And I'm sure that's true.
I could see myself as an astronaut, but I think the route along the way put me in positions where I began to question myself.
You know, I applied to be a Rhodes Scholar in Nebraska, and I made the finals with about 20 other people.
And when I got into the interview room, you know, they said, well, why do you want to be a Rhodes Scholar?
And I said, well, I want to study astronomy and astrophysics because I want to be an astronaut someday, and I think that will help me.
And they said, well, okay, if you want to be an astronaut, we don't think going to Oxford is going to help you do that.
So, you know, we probably won't pick you.
So that was my first step into, you know, doubt of my career path and my choices versus what others thought I should be doing.
But I stuck to the path.
I loved working at NASA.
You know, I was in the place where the astronauts were.
I was doing some cool stuff.
It didn't really matter if I got selected to be an astronaut or not.
I loved what I was doing.
I loved where I was working.
My career was going okay.
So being selected as an astronaut kind of became the frosting on the cake and something I still hoped for and still pushed for.
But if that were not to happen, it wasn't going to destroy me.
So Clayton, there you are working for NASA.
You got yourself in through the door and you find yourself, according to your biography, you find yourself for a good long time doing things that I guess I'm not an expert on astronautics, if that is such a word, but you find yourself for quite a while doing things that were backroom tasks.
Yeah?
Yes.
The way NASA works is interesting in that you have a group of what I would call design folks that kind of design the missions, and then you have the folks that operate the missions, the folks that are seen in the front room at mission control.
But for those front room people, there are a huge army of backroom people who support their front room counterparts.
So it's a huge team effort.
They like to say that spaceflight is the ultimate team sport.
And I spent some time in the back rooms, which was for a young kid like me was cool, right?
It was more as if you were on the sidelines at a baseball game versus sitting in the stands.
You know, you were close to the action.
You were listening to what was going on.
You had access to more information than you might have typically.
So, you know, being able to say I'm a flight controller is an important thing.
Right.
Well, I mean, it certainly sounds it to me.
But it's a little bit like, I don't know, if your aim is to go into space, which sounds like your aim definitely was, although you were not quite as burning with it, but it was, I'm sure, still within you.
You know, you must have yearned to be something else.
You must have, you must, there must have been something driving you to want to make the step that took you from doing all of that stuff, being a flight controller or training to be a flight controller and actually controlling the mission from the sharp end.
Yeah, when I was a young engineer, I started working with those folks who did most of the design work.
And even though that was unique, interesting, and fun for me, and I love the people that I worked with, I began to want more.
I was seeing the operational side.
I was seeing what those flight controllers and what those folks did that actually worked and trained the astronauts.
And that was very appealing to me.
So it actually worked out well that there were a couple of reorganizations that happened and allowed me the opportunity to swap over from being a design person to being a more operational person, which gave me some better exposure to the flight directors, to the folks that were in the mission control, to the astronauts.
And perhaps that was what helped me one day actually get selected as an astronaut because more people knew who I was.
More people knew of my work ethic, of what I brought to the table.
But it would still take several years of that.
And actually doing a third job change where I became the director of the Johnson Space Center's Emergency Operations Center.
But that sounds impressive.
What is the Emergency Operations Center?
Well, imagine a person in your local city who runs the operation that deals with disasters, that deals with terrorists, that deals with hurricanes, that deals with pandemics, that deals with all sorts of large-scale efforts.
So I ran the Johnson Space Center's version that meant I worked with the local police, the local fire, the local health, the FBI, all those kind of people.
So I tried to bring to the Johnson Space Center's emergency personnel the old plan, train, and fly mentality.
Believe it or not, the emergency folks at the Johnson Space Center did not really understand what it meant to plan for it, to train for it, and to execute it.
So that was a huge opportunity for me, a tremendous amount of fun to bring those techniques and help these people learn how to prepare for a disaster.
And we began to simulate those disasters, which they had never done before, believe it or not.
So we simulated emergencies, a kidnapping from the childcare unit.
We simulated a hurricane aftermath.
We simulated a terrorist bombing.
I mean, it was fun.
It was educational for everybody, and it made the Johnson Space Center much better.
I didn't even know the Johnson Space Center or any armature of the space effort in the United States was involved in disasters and preparing for those.
So you're telling me that, like when tragedy struck New Orleans or when the planes went into the towers, there would have been a NASA involvement?
There could have been.
It depends on where the disaster hits and what facilities are being impacted.
So, in Southeast Texas, with the Johnson Space Center being the place where all space missions are controlled, if a disaster hits that area, we have to be prepared to react to it, which meant things like moving the control center from Houston to Florida and things like that.
So you had to plan for that.
You had to make sure you had the equipment at both places.
You had to make sure that the folks who traveled were the right people, the minimum amount of people to travel so that others could go protect their homes, that sort of thing.
It was very, very integrated and very, very complex at the beginning as we figured out how to do these things that we hadn't really thought about before.
So what that teaches you, it sounds like you had plenty of skills in that direction anyway, but it teaches you problem solving.
Oh, absolutely.
Problem solving, even things that NASA maybe doesn't look for in an astronaut, but project planning, project management, budget, knowing how your budget works and what you should spend your money on versus what's important, what's not important.
And I think that's the biggest key is to get you to think about the big picture and to not think about being in the weeds, down in the weeds and the details.
That's for other people to do that have more expertise, right?
My job was to see the big picture, much like an astronaut might, and see how the mission needed to go to be successful if every individual then did their job.
Who picked you to be an astronaut then?
How did you get that?
Beats the hell out of me.
I think, you know, there was a the selection process is unique in that you turn in a lot of paperwork to an organization that's called the Astronaut Selection Committee.
And that committee has then a board that if your resume, what you submit is good enough, they'll bring you in person to meet you and to interview you and see what you're really like.
And it's very hard to get to that point.
It's easy to submit an application, but it's very hard to get that interview.
What are they looking for?
That's another good question.
They're looking for people that have unique experiences.
You know, a lot of people learned how to fly airplanes.
A lot of people got their scuba certification.
Some of them jumped out of airplanes.
Some of them climbed mountains.
Some of them did other high-stress environment activities.
For example, I refereed high school and college basketball.
So how did that tie into, I mean, that teaches you how to be a team player, yeah.
Well, it's actually a very good analogy.
If you think about what a basketball official deals with during an actual contest, first of all, you have to be physically fit.
You have to be able to keep up with those young kids running up and down the court.
Second, you have to know the rulebook like the back of your hand.
You have to memorize the entire rulebook to understand what the restrictions are for the game and then be able to apply those in very, very dynamic and fast-paced and sometimes controversial scenarios.
You have to be a diplomat as you deal with coaching staff and people at the scorer's table and the players themselves.
And you have to sometimes be the arbiter of justice when required.
So I found that being a basketball official was a tremendous advantage when compared to the things that astronauts have to do.
They have to know their procedures inside and out.
They have to be able to apply them at a moment's notice.
An astronaut has to be in good physical shape.
An astronaut commander needs to be able to make decisions sometimes that are frowned upon by others.
And an astronaut also has to be very diplomatic at times.
So I found the parallels to be amazingly similar.
And I was the only one that had basketball official on their resume.
Right.
So that would have drawn them to your attention or drawn their attention to you.
Let's put it the right way around.
So you had problem solving in one part of your life.
You had decision making and being able to turn on a dime in that part of your life.
So you had two of those things.
Presumably you had all the rest because you were part of the program, physically fit, mentally alert and capable.
So you put in for it and the picture.
Yeah, and I think the other aspect of this that's extremely important is your ability to work and play with others.
You know, I put in an application 15 times over 15 years.
And until the 13th time, I heard basically zero from anyone about ever becoming an astronaut.
So when I got that 13th application turned in and they reached back out and said, we'd like to interview you, that was a huge moment for me in that process.
I was going to be able to go in front of this committee and try to share the things about me that made me a better candidate than the other 2,400 people that applied to be an astronaut that year.
So what do you think you said that swung it for you?
Well, you know, that first interview, I didn't say it very well, apparently.
The little birdies that come chirp at you afterwards said that the committee was a little worried about my technical background.
So when I was pontificating about myself, apparently I didn't give them enough Information about my background as a technical person.
You know, it's funny, I don't know that I necessarily agree with them, but the astronaut selection committee has a lot of folks that think that an astronaut has to be hugely technical.
I disagree with that on a certain level.
I think that we have to be able to assimilate technical details as necessary.
And that sometimes, as I said before, technical astronauts get too far in the weeds because that's what they do.
They're technical people.
They want to know how things work.
They want to know what makes this happen.
And that's okay.
But oftentimes, it bogs down an astronaut in doing the astronaut job and the mission job.
And I guess, you know, technically, if you have a real serious problem when you're up there, then you've got a whole bunch of people who've got your back down on Earth.
Absolutely.
Now, that will change when we send humans to Mars.
And any message or any issue we have in the spacecraft that's close to Mars takes 20 minutes just to get back to Earth.
So you've got to be completely self-contained.
I want to make the last couple of minutes of this segment count.
So talk to me about the training then.
You get picked and you go through the training.
Now, we read all these things, and I certainly have done a lot of interviews about the Apollo process and how people were put through the ringer.
And some people nearly broke.
Some people did.
What was the training like?
For me, I was a space station long-duration astronaut.
So the training for me was slightly different than the shuttle folks.
Baby astronauts go through two years of basic training, just like any military person, right?
You have to be taught who the players are at all the NASA space centers.
You get some T-38 flight training.
You get a swimming test you have to pass.
You get a little bit of scuba opportunity.
But that's all the basic stuff.
And then the shuttle astronauts go off and begin to learn space shuttle systems, at least back then they did.
Whereas the rest of us who were going to be long-duration space station people, we had to begin to learn about the station systems.
In addition to that, if you were going to fly on the space station, you had to begin to learn Russian.
And that was one of the toughest things for many of us to do.
And that's not a simple task, right?
It's extremely difficult.
And it can be what limits you in your ability to get a flight assignment, how well or not well that you speak Russian.
Right, but you were obviously very dedicated to it.
So even though it was tough, you learned it.
Yeah, I kind of have a gift for Gab, I've been told.
So you learned the Russian.
You learned as much Russian as you would need up there to see you through all the situations that you would have to face above Earth.
What about getting picked for a mission then?
How did that happen?
You go through the training.
It takes time and you divert from the people who are flying the shuttle.
You learn about the systems on the space station.
You're all ready to go.
How do you get picked to go?
Well, the next step after basic training in the station systems and the shuttle systems training, they place you in a job.
And so you're responsible for doing things on the ground that will help those that are currently and going to soon fly in space.
And your job performance is watched carefully by the bosses in the astronaut office to see those things.
Is he technically sharp?
Is he a good team player?
Is he a leader?
Does he do and say the right things?
And so there's a lot of watching going on and a lot of behind the scenes discussions that will eventually lead someone to say, okay, we need to pick the tentative flight crew for missions A, B, C, D, or whatever it is.
And that's when you hope to be penciled in on someone's schedule in the astronaut office that you will fly on a mission in X months, X years, whatever it is.
And that's the key.
Once you're penciled in, they move you on a training schedule that begins to become much more focused.
And if you continue to perform well as that focus training flow starts, then they'll eventually announce you as a crew member for Mission X. When did that happen for you?
It happened for me around 2003.
Columbia had happened, or had not quite happened, I guess.
And I was recently assigned to a long-duration mission.
It started out being Expedition 12 on the station, then it went to Expedition 13, and then it went to Expedition 14, and then it went to Expedition 15 due to things like the Columbia accident.
But in the end, I was basically assigned in 2003 and would fly then in 2007.
Clayton Anderson, astronaut is here.
So Clayton, there you are.
After some delay, you find yourself going there.
Talk to me about the process of actually traveling to the International Space Station.
I think a lot of people would love to hear you talk about that.
I would travel to the space station via the shuttle, which is unique or was somewhat unique back then because we had a combination.
Some astronauts traveled to the space station via the Russian Soyuz, including astronauts and cosmonauts.
Some astronauts would travel to the station via the space shuttle system.
So that was good for me.
I thought it did cut down a little bit on my time spent in Russia.
But I had to go back and learn more of the shuttle systems and things like that.
But I was able to then, in my last several weeks before the mission, stay in America with my family.
And I had two young kids at the time with my wife.
And so that was very important to me because once I went into quarantine in Houston, I wouldn't see my kids or touch my kids or hug my kids for almost six months.
Geez, so it's just like the lockdown experience here, but years before.
Absolutely.
Although, in the lockdown, if you lock down with your family and everybody's healthy, you can have that physical contact.
No physical contact for you.
So the test of it, the trial of it begins really early.
Yes, it begins well before launch day, a couple to three weeks, I guess, because I had to pack my bags and leave and go to a facility in Houston where I was isolated with my crewmates.
And then when the time came, we flew T-38 jets down to the Cape in Florida, where we were again isolated as a crew just prior to getting on the shuttle for liftoff back in June on the 8th of 2007.
So that process was unique and different and very cool and fun, right?
It's my first mission.
I'm excited.
I'm ready to go.
I've trained for this.
I'm prepared for this.
Let's get the damn thing going, right?
And fortunately for me, everything went perfectly on launch and rendezvous and docking.
And the next thing I knew, I was floating into the International Space Station upside down.
Right.
What's it, just to take you back slightly from that part, what's it like, though, to sit on the shuttle?
Because the shuttle had a history.
There was Challenger and Columbia before that.
Was there any fear, any trepidation as you're sitting there and you're staring upwards and about to blast off?
I think no.
NASA does a pretty good job training the fear out of you.
You know, you're so focused on what your individual responsibilities are that as you get into the shuttle and strap in, you're thinking about, or at least I was thinking about those things.
I wasn't thinking about anything going wrong.
Now, my family, as a contrast, I'm sure they were thinking about all those other things.
But I sat on my back in that chair preparing for launch and listening to what was going on, basically going over and over in my head my checklist of the tasks I was supposed to perform.
The only thing that took other brain cells away was the fact that I had to pee really bad.
Oh my God, what did you do?
I concentrated on Niagara Falls and the Platte River in Nebraska and the drippy water faucet.
I tried to urinate on my back into my diaper.
I did not achieve success.
God, I mean, that's, you know, a hell of a time to be, as we say in the UK, caught shot in that way.
Thank you for sharing that.
So post-urination, what was the flight like?
How did it feel?
It's amazing.
You can't see anything.
I was on the mid-deck, so there are no windows and I couldn't see anything, but you have your headset and your helmet on, so you're listening to the cadence of all the communication.
So you know what's happening by virtue of what you're hearing.
And as we got closer and closer to T minus two minutes and the inevitable launch that was coming, man, it was so exciting.
And when the solid rocket motor's lit and you're on your back and you feel that motion and you hear that, you don't hear a whole lot of it because you've got a sound system on your head, but you can feel and hear and sense the power behind you.
And then the three main engines kick in and you lift off and it's just the most incredible roller coaster ride you can imagine.
And you're behind you is this elemental force that propels you out of Earth's atmosphere.
What's it like to look out of the window, assuming you could, and see things go from light blue to dark blue to black?
I think that would be a very, very cool experience.
I know the commander and the pilot and the flight deck guys and gals get to see that.
You know, first you're engulfed in the steam of the flame trench that when the water suppression system comes on and hits that hot flaming gas and creates all that steam and smoke.
And then you rise very quickly from the launch tower.
And you're seeing the sky change.
And when it gets black and you're 100 kilometers up, you're essentially in space.
You've qualified to become an astronaut.
But the coolest thing is as it turns black and the shuttle engines shut off at eight and a half minutes and you hear this, it's somewhat of a hissing silence, if you will.
And everything around you is now weightless.
So if it's not tied down, it's floating by you and you can tell you are weightless.
And that, for me, was the pinnacle of the eight and a half minutes from liftoff to orbit.
Do you feel different?
Oh, absolutely.
It's hard to understand it when you're strapped with your seatbelt in your seat.
But once you take that seatbelt off and you begin to rise out of your chair or you take your helmet off and you just let go of it in front of your face and it stays right there, that is very, very cool.
So you come to the point where you're docking with the International Space Station and you're traveling through a bit of space first.
What's that process like?
So the bit from you're out of Earth's atmosphere, you're floating, well, you're weightless, and then you're heading towards that rendezvous.
There's lots of stuff going on between or once you hit orbit and then begin to prepare for your docking one or two days later.
Back in those days, it always took two days just because we wanted it to.
So the first day you convert your rocket ship to an onboard living quarters laboratory.
And then the pilot and commander and the flight deck crew, they're very focused on the rendezvous, which means at first they have to do a burn now and again to get us on the proper path.
But on the day of rendezvous, things really begin to happen quickly and there's lots of focus.
Everybody has a job to do.
Some are on a camera, some are on video, some are doing entering more burns into the shuttle computers.
And then the commander takes over the actual stick and starts to fly toward this thing.
And you look out the window and you see, holy tamoly, that sucker's huge.
You don't understand how big it is.
And as you get, we were 40 miles away, you could see it and you thought, wow.
You kept getting closer and closer and it kept getting bigger and bigger.
I mean, presumably, I mean, I'll never know what this is like for real, but all of those movies that you see, where you see various futuristic craft hanging there and glittering in the pure direct sunlight, if it's, you know, if it's available at that point, is that what it's like when you're looking at something of such scale and such unusualness?
There's no such word, but it works here.
That's what I'm guessing it must be like.
Yeah, I think so.
I was a big Star Trek guy as a kid and enjoyed the movies that came out with the Star Trek cast later and always found that that was fascinating, how they could make it look so real.
But when you're in a shuttle that's 122 feet from nose to tail, and then you're going to dock with this massive space station that's the size of a soccer pitch, and you look and see it, it takes your breath away.
And as you get closer and closer and the commander is calling out, people are calling out, you know, a half a foot per second, 25 feet, you know, all that stuff.
And you see it coming toward you and you're hoping, oh gosh, I hope we're on target and I hope the commander does this right.
And then he makes a perfect docking and we close the clasps and all the things that have to happen to make it a seal.
And then the excitement builds again because now it's time to open those hatches and actually meet your friends that are on orbit already.
What's that like?
Because we've all seen TV pictures that you tumble through the hatch and, you know, the Russian guys, women may say, you know, greetings, welcome to the International Space.
You know, what's that like?
Well, we had a Marine commander, C.J. Sterkow, who was very regimental.
And we had a specific order that we were going to go into the space station.
And I was last.
And I was the sack of potatoes that was going to be left on the space station.
But what they failed to tell me was the proper orientation as you go through the shuttle tunnel into the docking tunnel up to the space station hatch.
So as I flew through there, so excited to greet the people that were on board and give them a hug and see my home for five months, it turns out I came in upside down.
When I flew through the station hatch, all I could see were ankles and hairy shin.
Well, that's quite an auspicious way to make your start.
But I mean, this is how we learn, I guess.
So you get on board.
What's it like adjusting to the actual feeling of being there, being with these people who presumably you won't have met before?
You know, how is the...
How is that?
That's a good analogy.
And you're going into a new school building that you've not been in before.
You maybe have seen pictures and been in mock-ups, but once you arrive on the actual station and go inside, it was a bit overwhelming for me at first.
One of the first things you do is the station commander, at that time a Russian cosmonaut, Fyodor Yurchik, and he takes you on an emergency safety float through where you find and locate the gas masks and the fire extinguishers and the critical emergency equipment.
But the hardest part then is that the shuttle crew is going 90 to nothing because the very first thing they have to do is fire up the robotic arm and grab the, we had to grab the solar array that was in the back of the shuttle payload bay and bring it up to the station arm so that it could be installed because we had a timeline and it had to be met and everything was fast.
But here I was as the new neophyte space station guy who was trying to learn everything I could about the space station because these shuttle guys were going to be gone in a few days and I was going to be on my own.
And so I found the pace overwhelming.
I felt like I was drowning, that there was so much happening that I wasn't able to gather it all in and retain it.
It turns out that that feeling would go for several more days and it actually didn't get better until after the shuttle crew left and it was just me and Fyodor Yurchikin and Olig Kotov, my Russian crewmates.
Then things began to slow down and I think the ground took it a little easy on me, right, by making my schedule a little less hectic and gave me more time to acclimate and more time to figure things out.
So, but within two weeks, I was rocking and rolling.
What was it like to look back at Earth for the first time?
That's the most impressive thing I think about spaceflight is your ability to go to a window and see the planet below.
It's the most beautiful thing.
It is artwork.
You can fly over the deadliest place on Earth, like the Sahara Desert, and it's beautiful.
You don't think of it as a deadly place.
You think of it as a beautiful place.
The backlands or the outback of Australia is incredibly beautiful, but I've never been there, but I can only imagine how dangerous it is if I were to be dropped in the middle of it by myself.
The first time I saw my hometown of Ashland, Nebraska, I had prepared to snap photographs and all I did was cry.
I can understand that.
It must have been a very moving experience.
It was incredible And it was not expected.
You know, as I said, ready to take photos of the place, but then to see it and just have everything leave my mind except: wow, I'm flying over the place where I was born and raised, all the people that made me the person that I am.
And here I am living my dream.
This is the pinnacle.
Yeah, this is the pinnacle.
I can understand.
Did you spacewalk?
Six times.
What's that like?
That's the second most amazing thing about outer space, I think.
To leave your vehicle, I left from the station all six times.
But my last, let's see, my second, third, and my last three were all with a shuttle docked.
So it was incredible to go out and crawl around this massive, complex engineering Marvel that we called the shuttle and station stack.
And then to be able to let go with everything but one hand and hold on and look down at the earth rolling by at five miles a second.
Isn't that terrifying, Clayton?
I don't know.
Again, I think I was trained well enough that the terror and the fear was gone.
And it was more of I marveled at what I was being allowed to do.
My fear was for messing up.
My fear was don't make a mistake.
Get everything right so that you get a chance to do this again.
And you did.
Fortunately, I did.
My first spacewalk on July 23rd in 2007 lasted seven hours and 41 minutes.
I was outside with a Russian cosmonaut who fancied himself, I guess, he had done two Russian spacewalks in the previous month.
And so now he had never done one before, but now he was a veteran and he was giving me lots of advice.
And as we went out the door that day, I was the lead spacewalker.
I was in charge and responsible for everything over that seven hours and 41 minutes.
So when we came back in the hatch, having successfully done everything with no mistakes, I was pretty euphoric.
I can imagine, well, I can't imagine actually, but I can have a stab at imagining how that feels.
You know, you literally are on top of the world.
20 weeks then, as we come to the end of all of this, and I could talk to you all night, but 20 weeks up there, do you ever get to a point where either fear or fatigue, one of those things takes over, or is it all so focused that there's no time for that?
No, I think I was up there long enough where frustration and fatigue combined to make me a bit of a hard ass with the folks in the control center.
You know, there's only so much frustration I could take when they told me to do things that I considered to be stupid, to be useless, repetitive, and not necessary.
Imagine for your listeners who live in their house, wherever it may be, and someone over in America calls them on the phone and starts telling them what to do with things on the inside of their house.
Who has the better wherewithal to understand what makes the most sense, is the smartest and most efficient?
It's the person that lives in that house, not the person that's making the phone call.
And so we would get crossways, or I would get crossways with them when they were trying to make me do things that I didn't think were necessary or important.
And of course, the later I got into my mission and the more fatigue that I was experiencing, the more frustration I experienced.
And so the worse that got.
So there came a time when my wife and I kind of had to say, hey, we got to get over this.
We got to make this mission in successfully and not worry about all that other stuff.
Which clearly you did.
And then the time came to go.
Was it a wrench to leave it?
It was.
It was a sad day for me.
It was an exciting day because from the moment the space shuttle discovery lifted off in October 2007 to come get me, I was pretty excited.
And then the closer you get to that day you're going to get in the shuttle and undock and go home, the more I began to miss or the more I began to sense that, oh man, this is all coming to an end.
This was really cool.
I can't believe the stuff we did.
And so it was a sad day for me to leave the space station and head into the shuttle.
Not to mention the fact that the shuttle is a lot tinier than that big old space station.
So you become one with your crewmates pretty quickly on the space shuttle.
Well, no, there was no time in this conversation to ask you about all of that stuff.
But I saw a guide to the space station, and they were showing, I've never seen it shown on video before, what it's like to use the lavatory, the toilet there.
Not a very private experience, and neither is sleeping.
So you have to adjust to that all pretty quickly.
Yes, I was fortunate on the space station in that I had my own private sleep station, like a little, think of a phone telephone booth that you can close in and make dark and sleep quietly in.
That was nice.
The shuttle, you have to sleep communally, basically, which makes it a little more complex.
I wouldn't sleep in that situation.
I would just, you know, you need to be, we all like darkness and peace and train and stuff.
It probably isn't like that there.
Yeah, the shuttle was definitely not like that.
The station is more accommodating to that.
The Russian service module has two private sleep stations in it.
The U.S. Node 2 now has four sleep stations in it.
So you have a total of six, which is why that's your target crew size.
So that allows everybody to have a private sleep station.
Those people you met up there, are they friends for life?
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
I miss Oleg and Fyodor, my Russian cosmonaut buddies.
I miss them a lot.
And the separation of America to Russia makes that even more difficult.
I see them occasionally, maybe on an annual basis at get-togethers that a group called the Association of Space Explorers holds.
But of course, with COVID this last year, we had to cancel everything.
So I look forward to doing those events again so that I can give Oleg and Fioda and their wives a hug and a handshake and catch up on their children and their lives and what's happened to them.
A unique kind of camaraderie.
I wish we had more time to talk.
That's one of the duller things about having to do radio.
You cannot talk for as long as you want to, and I want to talk for longer.
What was the one thing that you learned in your periods on the International Space Station that you think might help people who go to Mars?
I think it's important that they manage frustration.
I wasn't very good at that.
It turns out I got better.
But you have to kind of understand how frustration enters your life and then multiply it.
Because if you go to Mars, you won't be able to look out the window and see your beautiful home floating by only 250 miles away at five miles a second.
You know, when you're three days from Earth, Earth is going to look like a little dot.
And the more you travel, the longer you're headed toward Mars, the smaller it gets.
And so the isolation is going to be incredible.
And it's just going to be you and your crewmates.
So that team mentality and that managing frustration mentality is going to be hugely important, I think, to the success of that type of mission.
Once Mars comes into your window screen and you're able to see it and it's getting bigger every day, the closer you get to it, that will bring excitement and renewed impetus, I guess.
Yes, for holy cow.
I'm so glad we suffered through all that six to nine.
Because now we're here.
She was.
I'd love to talk with you more.
Hope we get to talk again.
Thank you for being so generous with your time, Clayton Anderson.
My pleasure, Howard.
And anytime, just give me a holler.
Clayton Anderson, astronaut.
Before that, Richard Garriott, astronaut and explorer.
I'm going to the deepest place on Earth.
What amazing people.
We try and bring you many of those here on The Unexplained.
More great guests than the pipeline here.
Do send me your guest suggestions if you'd like to.
Just send me an email through the website, theunexplained.tv, market guest suggestion, and I'll get on it.
Okay.
More great guests than the pipeline.
Yes, I've said that bit, so better go.
Please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much indeed.
Take care.
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