If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.
“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.
On Episode 165, Kate Rubins, NASA astronaut and flight engineer for the upcoming Expedition 64 mission on the International Space Station, details her passion for science, and her previous experience on the station, and her anticipation of conducting more research in microgravity. This episode was recorded on June 18th, 2020.
Transcript
Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 165, “Astronaut and Microbiologist.” I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be your host today. If you’re new to the show, we bring in NASA experts to talk about all different parts of our space agency and sometimes, we get lucky enough to bring in astronauts to talk about their story. So, today we’re talking with Kathleen Rubins, she goes by Kate. She’s a U.S. astronaut who is about to launch to the International Space Station this October 2020 for her second long-duration spaceflight. She first launched just four years ago for Expeditions 48 and 49, where she lived and worked in space for 115 days. For this podcast, we’re going to be talking about her education, studying molecular biology, cancer, and virology. We talked about her first spaceflight and sequencing DNA in space for the very first time. And we talked about her expedition. This upcoming mission where she may have a few extra helping hands joining her, after launching from American soil. So, here’s a little bit about astronaut Kate Rubins. Enjoy.
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Host: Kate Rubins, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.
Kate Rubins: Absolutely. Happy to be here.
Host: This is pretty quick that you’re going back to the International Space Station, what are your feelings?
Kate Rubins: I’m pretty excited about it. [Laughter] I got to say, you know, any time you get an opportunity to do a long-duration mission, it’s pretty exciting.
Host: Very cool. Well I know — we’ve ran into each other a couple times, but never got to do a podcast, so I did want to start right from the beginning from you. Going back to your childhood, growing up in, it says you were born in Connecticut, but consider Napa, California your hometown?
Kate Rubins: Yeah, that’s correct.
Host: OK. How was Napa? The only thing I really know about it is wine country.
Kate Rubins: It’s awesome. It’s actually, it’s a great little area in northern California. It was a nice place to grow up. And it’s actually got a lot of history as a rural kind of farm town. So that’s, it’s a neat place. And it was pretty fun to grow up and explore nature in California.
Host: See, if you go through your interests, it’s like all outdoor stuff. Running, swimming, and cycling. I mean you must have been outside all the time.
Kate Rubins: Yep, absolutely.
Host: Yeah. And exploring. I guess a little bit.
Kate Rubins: Yeah.
Host: Now, are you — are you really into wine at all? Is that a thing?
Kate Rubins: I should be, right? No. I’m really not an expert. [Laughter]
Host: I feel like it’s just a natural question growing up in Napa. Aw man, you must be like a total expert. But yeah, I totally get it. Now, you’re a scientist by heart. You truly are a scientist, you have spent a lot of time in the lab. Virology, molecular biology. Starting with your childhood, was there something, was there something that started early on that sparked your interest in science? Or maybe the microbiology element of things?
Kate Rubins: Yeah, absolutely. When I was, I was always interested in science. When I was about 11, my dad took me to a conference on DNA. And so, this was at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. And I think it was like a legitimate scientific conference, I’m not sure why they allowed an 11-year-old in. But it was incredible. I actually really encourage people, if they have kids that are old enough, to bring them to a scientific conference sometime, you know, who knows what they’re going to absorb. All I remember thinking is, this is so cool that these people get to do this for their job. And they’re all really excited about what they’re doing. I want to go learn about DNA.
Host: Wow. And that’s it. Right and then you were right on that path. Amazing.
Kate Rubins: I was hooked.
Host: Amazing. Yeah and so school, you went for molecular biology first, you did a lot of cancer research. And you spent some time out of the country, too. I believe it was in Africa. How was that?
Kate Rubins: Yeah. This was, a lot of the work that we were doing was looking at things like monkeypox and Ebola. Which are in places in Africa, some of them, monkeypox, for example, is endemic in some places in Congo. And so, to be able to study the virus, we really wanted to understand what was going on, what was influencing outbreaks there? How we could possibly stop them or prevent them? And we really wanted to study what was, what we could do in terms of sampling as close to the natural infection as possible. So, if you take a sample and you grow it in the lab for many generations, we don’t know what that effect has, you know, can you introduce some mutations that are unlike the original sample? And so, this was an opportunity to both help people during an epidemic in an outbreak situation, and then also, to get samples for research so we could try to develop some drugs and vaccines to prevent future outbreaks.
Host: How about that? How’d that opportunity come up? Say hey, we’re going to do — we’re going to be in the woods or, I don’t know if it was in the woods or not. But we’re going to be over in Africa studying all this, and you’re like, “yep, sign me up.” How’d that come up?
Kate Rubins: Yeah, it was actually, the effort was a joint effort between Kinshasa School of Public Health and the National Research Institute there. They have a lot of the infrastructure and really the world’s experts. We also worked with the Army Medical Research Institute. And we had people from my lab at MIT. So, it was this really great collaboration of folks that were all interested in preventing disease and epidemics.
Host: See, I feel like there’s so much work that goes into these fields. You have to be so focused on that. But there’s got to be some point in here where you think space. Where you think astronaut. Where did that start come folding into the mix?
Kate Rubins: Yeah, so that was actually in you know, 11-year-old me, my list of, you know, I wanted to study DNA and I wanted to be a biologist and I also wanted to be a geologist and an astronaut. So, I had three very important careers that I was ready to get to. Little bit later on, you know, as people say, “well, you know, astronaut’s not a real job. This isn’t, you can’t major in astronaut. Like, let’s be realistic and pick your actual career path.” So, I was realistic, and I stuck with molecular biology and it was great. And then my, one of my coworkers who actually, I was working with on some of these Africa studies said, “hey, I saw a job posting. NASA’s hiring for astronauts and you mentioned at some point you wanted to do this. You should apply.” And I thought well, what’s the worst that could happen. So, I put my application in.
Host: There you go. And then you — they wanted I guess what you had to offer. They wanted a scientist astronaut.
Kate Rubins: I think I got really lucky.
Host: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of people that end up applying and pursuing this. But it turns out that science is a very important thing now in terms of spaceflight. There’s a lot of active science going on in the International Space Station.
Kate Rubins: There absolutely is. And it’s going to continue to be a really important part as we start exploring more, this is one of the reasons that we are going to the Moon and we’re going to Mars. The amount of science that remains to be done on the lunar surface, discovering things about the Moon tells us about our solar system and about our own planet. And I don’t know a single scientist that is not itching to get to Mars. This is absolutely, it’s going to be one of the most incredible places to do research.
Host: You have to be one of them. Because then you’d hit all three. You’d hit the —
Kate Rubins: There you go, I’ll put that on my list. [Laughter]
Host: — the geology right there. Perfect. OK, so you applied. Do you remember that call? When you actually were accepted, “hey, we want you to come on and be an astronaut?”
Kate Rubins: I do remember. And it was a little unbelievable. You know, I was kind of like, am I sure that I’m talking to Johnson Space Center? This isn’t one of my friends playing a joke on me. So, I really did make sure that I was in fact talking to Johnson Space Center and they, I think I asked them, are you sure you want to offer me the job? They said yes. And I said well, that’s, you know, this sounds great. Very calmly. And then hung up the phone and was whooping and hollering in my office. It was a big celebration.
Host: Very good. Well let’s jump ahead to your first spaceflight. This is very cool for me, because I get to talk to a lot of folks — I get them right before they go on their first spaceflight. But you’ve been there before. Tell me about that experience of going on and being an astronaut and a scientist in space and working on all these great things.
Kate Rubins: Yeah, it was pretty incredible. The fact that we have so much research on the ISS, it’s just this incredible time to fly. So, I feel like you know, every day up there, you’re doing something incredible, it’s, sometimes it’s things that would seem mundane on the Earth. Fixing the space station toilet, right? Like nobody wants to go fix their toilet, that doesn’t sound like an exciting task. It’s awesome. It’s like the most complicated plumbing system you could imagine. It’s water recycling. It’s how we can survive in a closed loop environment. So, you can’t get too sad about fixing a toilet if you’re thinking about this is the future of understanding how we’re going to do water conservation and live in a closed loop.
Host: Wow. Unbelievable. Yeah, it’s those little things, right? And the International Space Station provides that microgravity twist on science. Something you can’t get here on Earth. And you got to do some of the first things like sequencing DNA, that was a big one. Because you were the first person to sequence DNA. And a lot of people, you know. I think if I said hey, “someone sequenced DNA in space,” they’re like, “they did what? What is DNA sequencing?” But it’s a big deal. So why is it a big deal?
Kate Rubins: So, it’s really a tool. It’s, this was a technology that we were trying to prove if it would work in microgravity. We didn’t know. It was kind of a cool experiment, you know, when you send something up and you go well, maybe this is going to work, and maybe we’re going to troubleshoot it a lot. So, we really were trying to see, would this work? Could it be useful? And we were able to demonstrate that we could do it. And so, once that happened, it opened up, just threw the doors open in terms of what’s possible. So, we really started pushing how much can we sequence? How many billions of base pairs can we get to? I think we sequenced a little bit over two billion base pairs. One of the things I’m really excited about for the next set of experiments is how do we expand this even more? Can we start doing multiplexing of our sequencing? And so that’s, bear with me here. You take a molecular barcode, and so that’s like ATCC or ATGC, these are the letters of DNA.
Host: OK.
Kate Rubins: You can make individual molecular barcodes. And then you can put those on your sequencing reactions, mix them together, sequence them all, and deconvolute that data. So that’s what I really want to do next time.
Host: And what is the significance of that? Why do you want to do that?
Kate Rubins: So that allows you to do a lot more with your single sequencing reaction. So, if you can multiplex, then you can do 100 different kinds of experiments at once in one sequencing reaction and you disentangle the data afterwards. So, you mix it all together, you do the sequencer, and you worry about the data analysis later.
Host: Huh. OK. Now there was a lot of other, you know, there’s a lot of science on the space station, you know, biology is just one of those things. There’s physics. And I’m sure you’re very interested in the biology of things. And you’ve already mentioned, like yes, this is, I’m so excited to do this when I’m back. I’m sure you’re excited to do more when you’re back.
Kate Rubins: Yeah, absolutely, the material science experiments are really fun. I didn’t know I would be super interested in material science.
Host: Oh wow.
Kate Rubins: But I’ve been following those a lot. And it’s a way to look at how materials form or melt or change their properties without that effect of gravity. So, when you take away gravity, when you perform your experiments in microgravity, you don’t have things like buoyancy driven convection, which is actually really strong in a lot of the Earth based experiments. You obviously are pretty much completely subtracting the effect of gravity. And you can do things that wouldn’t be possible with Earth based equipment. So, we can do electromagnetic or electrostatic levitation with larger sample sizes. It just wouldn’t be possible because gravity would cause that experiment to collapse, the whole thing would fall down in the chamber. There’s also some really interesting particle physics experiments. And I’m going to get myself in trouble here because I’m a biologist. But the cold atom lab just published, they had an incredible paper in nature. And this is ways that we’re using microgravity to push the boundaries of things we weren’t able to see before. So, if we’re interested in studying fundamental, you know, particle types of behavior, we can do this because we have the special properties of microgravity on the space station.
Host: It’s that facility that gets unbelievably cold. It’s marketed as the coldest place in the universe.
Kate Rubins: Yep, absolutely.
Host: Yeah. Wonderful. Wonderful. You spent 115 days on your first spaceflight. You came back. And you got involved in a few other projects when you came back, I believe Human Health and Performance, Human Research Program. So, you were in the scientific community for a while. How was that?
Kate Rubins: Yeah, that was great. So, I worked for some time in the Human Health and Performance group here at NASA. And these are the folks that are studying everything from the microbiology folks all the way up to human physiology. How can we use these humans on space station? Sometimes we are the experiment. So, we’re doing the experiments and then sometimes we’re donating blood or we’re taking samples and we serve as the experimental artifact. Or the thing that we’re observing in the space station. I also spent some time after that, working on development of new spacesuits. So, I was the EVA branch chief for the Spacewalk and Robotics branch chief. And we’re developing new suits that we’re going to use on the lunar surface. So, there’s a lot of incredible engineering work that’s being done at Johnson Space Center to develop these suits. They’ve been working on it for a long time and I think everybody is going to be so excited to see their suit. First, on the International Space Station. And then eventually, that is going to be the boot that puts a footprint in Mars and in the Moon.
Host: That’s right. I had a chance on this podcast to talk to Chris Hansen about the xEMU [Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit] and he was quoting you in the pool because you went into the xEMU, this new suit, and you went in and you were like, “oh, this is awesome.” What was so awesome about it when you took it in the pool?
Kate Rubins: It’s pretty incredible. They’ve worked a lot to improve the mobility.
Host: Mobility.
Kate Rubins: So, the spacesuits, spacesuits are big. I mean, they have a big job to do. They have to protect the astronaut from extreme temperature variation. So, you’re going, you know, 200 degrees in either direction. The vacuum of space. You have to protect against radiation. You have to protect against micrometeoroids hitting you. Then you got to keep the astronaut at a physiologic temperature. So, you can’t have them heat up, you have to be able to reject all of that heat. Has to be able to scrub your atmosphere. Provide oxygen, get rid of that CO2. Humans, you know, we’re terrible. We live in a really narrow band —
Host: — Yeah, we’re very picky. [Laughter]
Kate Rubins: — of physiologic parameters. It’s quite incompatible with space. So, it takes a lot of engineering to be able to survive these extremes of space. And the suits have to be pretty heavy to accommodate that. One of the things, when you’re moving around outside the space station on a spacewalk, you’re really confined by how much you can move your arms, you can’t really see, you can see right in front of you. But if you want to look down the length of the truss or along where you’re translating, where you’re moving, you have to move your whole body, and that’s actually really hard when you’ve got this 400-pound mass that you have to orient. And so, the xEMU does a lot to provide us with more mobility, the kind of mobility we’re going to need on the lunar surface to do long traverses and geology experiments. And there’s a lot of things that just make it more user friendly, so we can be more efficient on our spacewalks. All of our lunar sorties, every time we go do something on the surface of the Moon, is going to be a spacewalk.
Host: That’s exciting.
Kate Rubins: Yep.
Host: Bunch of moonwalkers in the not too distant future, very, very cool. You also spent some time in Russia. I remember being on the trip, the landing trip where you were actively deciding, “I wonder if I should do this?” Because you would be in Russia for a long time, and then you ended up doing that. What is that job and how was your experience?
Kate Rubins: Yeah. So, we have a really strong partnership. We have an international partnership, and that’s not just with Russia, but that’s also with the — ESA, the European Space Agency. The Japanese Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency. And then there’s many other countries that contribute different science experiments or payloads on the space station. And our partnership with Russia has been going on for quite some time. We worked together pretty much all aspects of the space station functioning. So, we have U.S. modules, and Russian modules. And European and Japanese modules. And the Canadian arm. And so, all those pieces have to work together. As part of that, we have a huge collaboration and cooperation on the ground to get all of these agencies working together. And some of the work over in Russia was to support the crews that are training out there. We do training at all these partner sites. And then to support the launches and the landings in Kazakhstan.
Host: OK. Yeah. So, you spent a year there. And how was life in Moscow or, were you in Star City, maybe?
Kate Rubins:Yeah, I was in Star City. So, Star City feels a lot like JSC, it’s a space campus, essentially. There’s a lot of engineers there. There’s a lot of people who train astronauts and cosmonauts for spaceflight. And it was a really neat experience for me to be able to live in the home country of one of our partner agencies and really understand how they function, how they get their cosmonauts prepared for spaceflight. And how their agency works to support the International Space Station every day.
Host: OK. Wonderful. And you’re going back here soon. You’re on the accelerated course right now.
Kate Rubins:I am.
Host: You are actively training. But you’re not here for very long, you’re going right back to Russia because you are, that’s where you’re going to be until, I guess until your lift off.
Kate Rubins: Yeah, I launch in October.
Host: Yeah. Very, very soon. Now what’s interesting about your flight is yes, you’re launching in October, yes, you’re lunching from a Soyuz again, but there’s a chance that you’re going to have some extra helping hands onboard.
Kate Rubins: Yes, I am almost certain of it. So, the current crew that’s up there, this is our incredibly exciting, our first crew in the Commercial Crew Programs. They’re onboard right now. And when they come home, we’re going to continue this Commercial Crew Program. So, we’re going to have additional launches. And I’m really hoping to be joined by some of our SpaceX or our Boeing friends. They’ll be NASA astronauts, but they are training on these vehicles and when they come up, they’ll be, we’ll be all together as a space station crew.
Host: Doing a heck of a lot of science. [Laughter]
Kate Rubins: We hope so.
Host: Well that is going to be awesome. Kate, I wish you the best in your travels and when you go to Russia here soon. And then on your lift off not too far after that. So, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today.
Kate Rubins: Thanks. And hopefully, I’ll talk to you again at landing.
Host: I hope so.
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Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kate Rubins today. Godspeed to her launching this month, October 2020 with her crewmates, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, they’re launching for Expedition 63 and 64. You can watch her launch live at our website, NASA.gov. We have NASA TV up at the top. You can also find our stream on YouTube. If you want to watch Kate throughout her mission, she’s going to be tweeting at her Twitter handle @Astro_Kate7. You can follow her there. If you want to listen to more podcasts, we have a lot of them at NASA.gov/podcasts. We’re there, too, Houston We Have a Podcast. You can listen to any one of our episodes in no particular order. If you want to know more about what’s happening aboard the International Space Station during Kate’s mission, that’s at NASA.gov/ISS. She’s having some crew join her from the SpaceX Dragon, that’s the Crew-1 mission. If you want to know more about that mission and that program, that’s at NASA.gov/commercialcrew. If you want to talk to us at Houston We Have a Podcast, we’re on the Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform. Submit an idea for the show and just make sure to mention it’s for us at, Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on June 18th, 2020. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, John Streeter, Kelly Humphries, and Brandi Dean. Thanks again, to Kate Rubins for coming on the show. Godspeed on your mission. We’ll be back next week.