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The Best of Year 5

Season 1Episode 252Jul 8, 2022

The Houston We Have a Podcast team picks their favorite episodes after completing the podcast’s fifth year. HWHAP Episode 252.

Houston We Have a Podcast Ep. 252 The Best of Year 5

Houston We Have a Podcast Ep. 252 The Best of Year 5

From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.

On Episode 252, the Houston We Have a Podcast team picks their favorite episodes after completing the podcast’s fifth year. The narrative portion of this episode was recorded on June 2, 2022.

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Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host):Houston, we have a birthday! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 252. I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be kicking off this discussion today. Five years ago this week, we launched the first episode of Houston, We Have a Podcast, and we’re still going. We’ve brought in so many scientists, engineers, and astronauts to talk about a huge variety of topics and share some incredible stories. This past year, we dove deeper into the Artemis program that will be returning humans to the Moon. We’ve continued to talk about station science, STEM inspiration, history, commercialization and more. That’s what I love about this podcast, there are so many different, unique things that we can talk about and so many topics that we can explore. We’re celebrating another great year of Houston We Have a Podcast, once again bringing in the podcast team, with a few new members, to pick their favorite episodes and play a segment of that for you today. Once again, we have producer and audio wizard Alex Perryman as well as producer and host Pat Ryan. We also have Belinda Pulido returning, who prepares the transcript for each episode. New members include Heidi Lavelle, who takes the role of creating the episode webpage and graphics, and Jaden Jennings, who as an intern has done a great job of researching topics and drafting episode outlines. If you’re new to the show, this should give you a nice snapshot of some of the conversations we’ve had so far. Happy birthday to us; let’s jump right ahead to reminiscing with the podcast team. Enjoy.

[Music]

Alex Perryman: Hey, it’s Alex Perryman, your friendly neighborhood audio wizard. I’ll start this celebration off with my favorite episode from this year with Episode 239, Crew-4. It’s always awesome to have astronauts on the show, and especially right before their first flight. And it’s no secret, I’m pretty biased in saying that the 2017 Astronaut Class, the Turtles, are my favorite, especially since they were the first class of astronauts that came in at the beginning of my career here. In this clip you’ll hear from Jessica Watkins, one of the 2017 class of astronauts, talk about how she chose her field of geology and how excited she is to fly on her first mission. Roll the clip, Alex…well, me.

[Music]

Host: But then you eventually pursued STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). You had some sort of interest in that and, and you decided on geology. Why geology?

Jessica Watkins: Yeah. You know, my, my journey to geology was, was not, exactly a, a straight path. I kind of came into school, into undergrad, thinking that I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. And after taking a few classes and really kind of getting settled in there, I decided that engineering, mechanical engineering really wasn’t for me. It just wasn’t something that I enjoyed. And so, I kind of found my way, kind of stumbled onto geology, once I discovered that you could study the geology of other planets, which was very exciting to me, and just kind of fell in love.

Host: So, and, and you got a chance to do that, right? I mean, you worked on, Curiosity rover and, and things like that. How was, and, and you did that so as an intern for NASA, right? How was that experience?

Jessica Watkins: Yeah, absolutely. I am so grateful for the opportunities I had to be a NASA intern. That really kind of opened the door for me and really allowed me to have different experiences that helped point me towards where I wanted to go in my career. Really helped me, allowed me to have hands-on experience, like working on the rover, that really just kind of fueled my passion.

Host: So I mean that, that, that goal, that, that aspiration to be an astronaut, must have stuck with you because then you ultimately applied and then got that call that you were going to be a NASA astronaut. What, tell me about that moment when you actually got the call?

Jessica Watkins: Yeah, absolutely. Certainly very surreal when you receive that phone call, you, you’re expecting a phone call one way or the other. But for me, certainly, when I look back now, I kind of, I had notes prepared in terms of what to say if it was a “no” phone call, but what, didn’t even have anything prepared for the “yes” phone call. So it was, it was definitely super exciting.

Host: Well, you’ve been training a lot to get, to get prepared for this moment, basic, you know, ASCAN training, right, so you got the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, you got, you know, T-38, that kind of thing. And then you’ve ultimately been training for this mission. So you got your space station training, you got Dragon training, and you’re doing so with a crew of three others, who, who we’re all talking to on, on this podcast as well. And I just wonder from, from your perspective, you know, as you’re training, as you’re going through this, learning more about the, the systems and everything, what it’s like being with this crew; tell me about Crew-4?

Jessica Watkins: Yeah. It’s truly a privilege to be able to train and, and soon fly with the Crew-4, with my, my other crewmates. They are each individually awesome in their own ways, they each have their expertise and, they, we each kind of bring something different to the table. So I’m, I’m really excited for us to kind of, bring all of that together. We really complement each other well, and I’m excited about what we are going to be able to accomplish.

Host: And what is it exactly you’re going to accomplish? I mean, you’re going on a, on a SpaceX Dragon, right, and so that, so that’s pretty cool, you got to learn what that system is, but ultimately you’re going to be on the space station for a long time. What are you doing on board?

Jessica Watkins: Yeah, the, the two main things that we focus on while we’re on board the ISS are science and maintenance. So on the science side, we do lots of different kinds of science: physical science, material science, fluid dynamics, we study biology, looking at cell and tissue growth, we also do Earth and space sciences, which is near and dear to my heart, as well as doing tech demos and studying ourselves, we become the experiment and we focus on human physiology and the cognitive effects of long-distance, long-term spaceflight, long-duration spaceflight.

Host: Yeah. I mean, when, when you’re up there, you’re going to, you’re going to do all of that stuff, right, you got that science and maintenance, and I think one of the beautiful things about working, you know, as an, as a NASA astronaut is the opportunity to, to connect with others on the ground. And I certainly, I mean, I know you’re experiencing now, you got a lot of people reaching out to you because you’re going to be the first African American woman on the space station to do a long-duration mission, and people who look like you are looking up to you and saying, I want to be, I want to be like you. So how do, how do you take on that role and start connecting and sharing your experience and that, and that position to try to inspire others?

Jessica Watkins: Yeah. I know, certainly an honor to be a, a small part of the legacy of, black female astronauts who came before me, and, you know, I think we are seeing an exciting future ahead of us as well. So it’s exciting to be a part of that. And, you know, it certainly mattered to me when I was growing up to have people that looked like me participating in the roles I wanted to participate in and contributing in ways I wanted to contribute. And so, to the extent that I’m able to do that, I’m, I’m grateful for the opportunity to return the favor.

Host: You’re, you’re going to spend a lot, a lot of time on there, you know, lots of science, maintenance, connecting with others, but of course you’re going to have some, some time to yourself and I wonder, if you’ve put some thought into just your own personal goals during the mission? Some of the things that you want to make sure that you set a time to truly experience or share or whatever you want to do while on board. Do you have personal things you want to do?

Jessica Watkins: Yeah. You know, I think first and foremost, the focus is on, you know, being a good crewmate and, all of the, all of the different aspects that that includes, including, you know, professional work life being, a, a, you know, helpful and productive crewmate, and then, as well on the more personal, emotional side as well. And then there’s the, the other part of being up there, which I think is being a good steward of the opportunity, kind of, as you were mentioning before, but bringing, bringing others with us. You know, we are lucky that we are the ones that get to go, but it’s important that we bring others with us. And so, doing that to the best of my ability.

Host: Very good. Well, well, Jessica Watkins, appreciate you taking the time to, to, to chat with me today, and I know you got a lot going on, so, so best of luck, on your upcoming launch, appreciate you, you chatting with me today.

Jessica Watkins: Thanks so much, Gary,

(Music)

Pat Ryan: I’m Pat Ryan, the producer and occasional host of The Little Podcast That Could. The Johnson Space Center is celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2022, and late last year – on episode 223, “NASA’s 60 Years in Houston” – I got to talk about the history of this little spot on planet Earth with John Uri. Today he is the manager of the JSC History Office, although he’s worked here for more than 28 years, including the Human Research Program and in the International Space Station program payloads office, and when I first met him he was the mission [scientist] for the Shuttle-Mir program in the mid-to-late 90s, when NASA flew a few of its astronauts to the Russian space station Mir to start getting practical experience in long-duration spaceflight. The story started as NASA began learning about putting human beings in space, and learned pretty quickly that the few office buildings they were using on their little patch of real estate in Virginia just wasn’t going to cut it when it came to selecting and training astronauts, building spacecraft and rockets, and figuring out how to meet President Kennedy’s goal of a round-trip to the moon in less than 10 years. Uri relayed the details of the story of the selection process, which pitted Houston against as many as 18 other sites around the country in what was a remarkably speedy process – took less than six months, including all the site visits – which they considered priorities such as access to water and air transportation, proximity to universities and cultural attractions, the support of local and national politicians, and a mild climate. Boy, isn’t that us. Well, it turns out they were actually going to pick an existing air base in Tampa, Florida, but the Strategic Air Command changed its mind about leaving that spot, so they went with their back-up pick: Houston. In this clip we talk about what this patch of sod actually looked like back in 1961, and the reaction some of the icons of the American space exploration effort had to this chosen land when they first put a foot down here, just ten days after Hurricane Carla blew through.

(Music)

Host: Now to say that it was being put in Houston may be factually accurate, but the site was pretty far out from Houston and had virtually nothing around it. There’s a famous photograph taken by a NASA photographer, Andrew Patnesky, of the site, with cattle grazing on it, and there was nothing around it. There was, my recollection from seeing some old photos was that really the only building in the area, was the West Mansion. There was, there was nothing here.

John Uri: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. This was basically Texas coastal prairie, and some of that had been converted into ranch land so, and some rice farms, and there were some fishing villages. But you’re right, and Houston, of course, those who know Houston, now it’s a big sprawl but back in 1961 the city didn’t extend all the way down here. In fact, the 610 Loop hadn’t even been built yet, or only parts of it had been finished, and so —

Host: And the Gulf Freeway was still under construction but —

John Uri: — and it was still under construction —

Host: — it still is today. [Laughter]

John Uri: — just, and there you go. It’s absolutely right. Has been, I’ve been here since 1987: one section has always been under construction. That’s a Houston inside joke.

Host: 1966 for me.

John Uri: There you go. So anyway, so yeah, you’re right. This was pretty much just coastal prairie, and there was not a lot of people living here. The population of this area, which included, like, Webster, which was mostly a farming town, and Seabrook and Kemah, they were fishing villages, was about 6,500 people total.

Host: Total.

John Uri: And so, compared to today, which is about, you know, that same area probably has about 100,000. And so, there’s one little road, a two-lane road called Farm to Market 528 that went by here. And so, but what happened was the Humble Oil Company, which is now Exxon, owned a lot of the land here, and they had donated 1,000 acres to Rice University, that Rice was hoping to attract some federal facility. They initially talked to the Atomic Energy Commission about building something here, but those plans fell through and then all of a sudden, hey, somebody is trying to set up a Manned Spacecraft Center somewhere, and they chose the Houston site, and it turned out that then Rice donated those 1,000 acres to the federal government. So, you know, a cost is always a consideration for these kinds of things —

Host: Right.

John Uri: — and that was a pretty good cost. And so, that’s why it was, it was settled here, but you’re right, it was very different from what it is today. And so, in fact, two days after the announcement, Bob Gilruth, who was the director of the Space Task Group, and later would obviously be named the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, he and some of his top aides came down to visit the site, and what was interesting is, some people may remember Hurricane Carla, that came through here about ten days before their visit. And so, they, you know, they got off their plane at Houston International, they drove down here, and of course, the Gulf Freeway was, I think, a two-lane freeway, and like I mentioned, a two-lane road out here, and there were, you know, boats lying by the highway that had been pushed up by the hurricane, there was a fair amount of destruction around here, and they’re thinking, my goodness, where are they sending us to? Now bear in mind, all these folks have been well established in Virginia, they had homes and families and schools and churches and so forth. And they want us to move here? And of course, in September, it’s still pretty warm in Houston, and there’s these things called mosquitoes and so, there’s, and they come down here and they look at the site, and it’s basically wilderness. The day before, somebody had come by to see it, and one of the hunters was around, he had just shot a wolf on the site. And so, there are lots of deer and alligators and all kind of critters. But anyway, they kind of saw the vision that yes, we could turn this into something, and this is where we’re going to lead human spaceflight from in the next few years, and that’s kind of how all that, all that developed. And it actually —

Host: And of course, the deer are still here.

John Uri: The deer are still here, and thanks to the pandemic, they’ve become very, they’ve kind of taken over the site. You can walk around these days and see them everywhere.

Host: And be careful to drive —

John Uri: Anyway, they had the vision. They could, they could see how this basically empty prairie could become, you know, the centerpiece of human spaceflight.

(Music)

Belinda Pulido: Hi, my name is Belinda [Pulido], I work with various projects across NASA, one being part of the Houston We Have a Podcast team to help with the weekly transcript. One of my favorite episodes from this year I’d have to say is Episode 215, “Redirecting Asteroids,” with Dr. Thomas Statler, DART’s program scientist based at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington. He talks about DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, a new asteroid system to use as a preventative mechanism for any dangerous asteroids that may be heading to Earth in the future. Enjoy.

(Music)

Host: We’re going to start talking about this mission, DART, Double Asteroid Redirect Mission. So, if you had to talk to someone off the street and they said, hey, Tom, what’s DART, how would you start?

Thomas Statler: Well, DART is our first full-scale attempt to demonstrate that we can change the motion of an asteroid in space, potentially as a way of defending Earth against the hazard of asteroid impacts. And to understand this, it’s good to have, you know, the right mental conceptual movie going on in your head. So, to start with, you know, the Earth goes around the Sun. Earth orbits around the Sun in, in one year. The other planets also orbit the Sun, and all of the asteroids also orbit the Sun. And that means that any asteroid that is on an orbit around the Sun that never comes anywhere close to the orbit of the Earth isn’t dangerous. The only asteroids that are possibly hazardous are the ones that have orbits that intersect with the orbit of the Earth somewhere. And even then, nothing bad happens unless the Earth and the asteroid try to arrive at that intersection point at the same time. And that’s when you can have an asteroid impact on Earth. And that’s really pointing to the essence of what we call planetary defense, defending Earth against this natural hazard. The key is to be able to find the asteroids on those Earth-intersecting trajectories, find them well in advance of any collision, and to take steps years ahead of time, not to destroy the asteroid — don’t need to do that; in many cases, we wouldn’t be able to — but just to prevent that collision from happening. And that’s what we’re going to do with DART. We’re going to demonstrate one technology to cause that deflection that, someday, if we need to, we might use this technology to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth.

Host: So, the mission that we’re going, the mission and the asteroid that we’re going to, is not necessarily the asteroid that’s going to cause that devastating effect on Earth. It’s really a test to make sure that we have the capabilities for that asteroid in the future, if there is one, that would have such effects.

Thomas Statler: That’s exactly right. There’s no known asteroid that has any chance of impacting the Earth anytime in the next hundred years. So, the hazard is not from the asteroids we know, and the asteroid that we’re going to with DART is not a dangerous asteroid. The hazard is from the, from the asteroids that we haven’t discovered yet. And we’re searching for asteroids all the time. We certainly hope that we will never have to deploy an asteroid deflector, but we want to do the test now to make sure that we’ve got the ability and the know-how to do it if we should need to.

Host: Very good. But what are some of the assets, what are some of the things that we have in place, to watch what’s going on in the solar system around us and make sure we’re OK?

Thomas Statler: Well, the key thing for asteroids is telescopes. You need telescopes to essentially scan the skies, take a lot of pictures of the sky with a wide-field view, and look for things that are moving. The stars don’t move; they’re in the far, far distant background. But objects that are moving in the solar system, especially ones that are moving close to Earth, will move over the course of the night, and if you take a couple of pictures of the same patch of sky, you’ll see them move. And that’s, historically, that’s how asteroids have been discovered from the beginning. So, we use a variety of telescopes in various places around the world. We’ve got projects that are operated by universities, funded by NASA, some of them funded by other space agencies, other governments around the world. All work together to, as I said, scan the sky, look for objects that are moving, track those objects, send those data to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which is funded by NASA, that will calculate the orbits and determine whether each of these things that are just seen moving across the sky at night, is it an asteroid, what kind of an orbit is it in, and is it in an Earth-crossing or Earth-intersecting trajectory? And that happens every night, 365 days a year.

Host: Excellent. So, what about the destination of DART then? What is special about this asteroid that is the final destination of the DART mission?

Thomas Statler: Well, DART is going to a very, very cool asteroid. In fact, it’s two asteroids. It’s the system, the binary asteroid system called Didymos. And a binary, people may have heard of binary stars, where you have one star orbiting around another; a binary asteroid is like that too. There’s a larger asteroid and then there’s a little asteroid held in orbit by the very weak gravity of the larger asteroid, and it goes around it. So Didymos is a binary asteroid. The larger one, that’s called Didymos, is about 800 meters across or so. The smaller moon is called Dimorphos. It’s about 150 meters across or so, so kind of football stadium-sized. And the two of them are about three-quarters of a mile apart, about a kilometer and a little bit.

(Music)

Heidi Lavelle: Hi, I’m Heidi Lavelle and I’m a social media specialist at JSC. I work with the Space Station program and the podcast. I create the graphics for the podcast, so I get to think about how to interpret each episode visually. It was the incredible imagery that first caught my eye about my favorite episode, #243 “From Stars to Scans.” For this episode I chose an image of the whole sky that shows 22 months of X-ray data recorded by NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer payload, known as NICER, which is an X-ray telescope that’s mounted on the outside of the International Space Station. In this episode we learn how Dr. Rajiv Gupta, the director of Advanced X-Ray Imaging Sciences at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Dr. Keith Gendreau, the principal investigator of NICER, came to meet and collaborate to help develop a more compact and faster CT scanner for humans, using technology that helped test and calibrate NICER.

(Music)

Host: I, I’m actually going to throw in one more question, Keith, to you, and talk about, you know, what, we’ve talked about the benefits of world colliding and, and expanding this but, just, just ending with a sense of why, of, and, and I think you touched on this very briefly but, but to expand on it, the idea that the, the technologies that we develop for, for exploring the stars and for, and for spaceflight, how, how they can improve life on Earth, and, and this is one example, right, we’re talking about it, space technology, observing stars being brought into the medical field, but just this concept of, of why that technology transfer is important and why exploration to solve problems for, for space, can be brought down to Earth, why that, why that venture is, is important to continue.

Keith Gendreau: Sure. I mean, you know, we, with NICER on the space station, we spend a lot of time studying neutron stars, and the question comes up, why does this matter? You know, we, you know, neutron stars are, are really interesting objects in the universe and what we learn from studying those neutron stars will have direct impact on the world that we live in right now. We, our measurements of the radius and mass of neutron stars are driving nuclear physics right now. You know, how, how do neutrons compress, do they break down into quarks? You know, these are things that could lead to future forms of energy; they, they’re important for a number of reasons. The study of neutron stars themselves, so actually part of our NICER mission was something called SEXTANT, the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, and, and what that was, was to look at a subset of neutron stars called millisecond pulsars, that pulse with a regularity that is comparable to that of atomic clocks. And, but they’re, they’re naturally occurring in the galaxy. And, you know, atomic clocks form the foundation of the Global Positioning System, or GPS, that we use to navigate here on the surface of the Earth. But if we want to leave the Earth and we want to go into deep space, the outer planets and out of the solar system, GPS doesn’t really work for us because our GPS constellation of satellites is in medium Earth orbit. So one of the things we did with NICER in looking at neutron stars is to measure, is actually demonstrate how we could use naturally-occurring neutron stars in space as the foundation for a, a “galactic GPS” navigation system, and we actually demonstrated it on the ISS. And we got, we could, just using pulsars, we could figure out where the ISS was to ten kilometers. And that may not sound really fantastic compared to other navigation techniques, but what’s cool about this is that when we’re flying past Pluto right now there is no infrastructure that could give you anywhere close to ten-kilometer resolution in the outer planets, and we’ve been able to prove that here on the ISS. What’s kind of neat about that on the Earth is that, you know, we now have an independent way of steering atomic clocks, potentially, by looking at neutron stars as sort of a cosmic, you know, timescale that we could tie to. And this, you know, time is very important for a lot of things here on the Earth, navigation primarily.

Host: Fantastic. Yeah, lots of applications. Thank you both, for, for, for walking us through this fantastic story of technology transfer and, and, and talking about the benefits in, in each of your respective worlds in, in astronomy and of course in, in the medical field.

(Music)

Jaden Jennings: Hey everyone. My name is Jaden Jennings and I am a public affairs intern within external relations at NASA Johnson Space Center. One of the opportunities I get to have in my internship is scriptwriting and idea pitching for Houston We Have a Podcast. Basically, I get to help write the awesome content you guys hear every week and come up with new ideas for future episodes. This past semester, one of my first ideas I pitched included bringing on Mark Vande Hei to talk about his historic 355-day mission to the International Space Station. Getting to see this recording in person during my first-ever visit on-site, it also just so happens to be my favorite episode on the pod as well. That being said, here is a little snippet of Mark Vande Hei reflecting on his mission and how he kept a positive outlook during his one year in space.

[Music]

Host: When, when we last talked before your, before your launch, before your mission, one of the things that you mentioned was that on your first mission, you kind of went into it with this mentality that it would maybe be your last, so you tried to make the most of your experience and you did a lot, you spent a lot of time. Going into this, this mission, one of the things you said beforehand was that your anticipation was, you were going to pace yourself a little bit more, just take some time to let it soak in, take some time to, to really appreciate the moments and take some time for yourself. Is that how you started this increment or did you just kind of go full throttle?

Mark Vande Hei: I def, I definitely set a goal to have few goals, and to just try to, so I should be a little more careful about that: my goal was to journal every day and meditate every day, and to try to just soak it all in as much as possible. And I, I do feel like that I was successful with that.

Host: Do you think ultimately, looking at your whole year that you’ve been there, establishing that as a regular practice from the beginning through end, do you think that really helped to help you to just kind of, you know, be in the moment, stay with it, focus on your task, get everything done and, and not stress yourself out over the, over the year that you were there?

Mark Vande Hei: Definitely. I think, be it, let’s, let’s say you’re going to run a marathon and you’re on your second mile; if you, if on your second mile you think to yourself — I have 24 miles to go — it’s going to make that second mile really, really hard.

Host: Right.

Mark Vande Hei: But if you just think to yourself, OK, I’m on my second mile and how am I feeling right now, and just focus on that, or gee, let’s focus on my breathing; that can make that second mile feel a lot easier. And if you’re on your 23rd mile, you can think — I feel so terrible, I still have three miles to go! — or you could say to yourself, I already did 23 miles. There’s so many things, so many mental games you can play with yourself that will either help you or hurt you. And I definitely on this flight and – and I’m tapping the table a lot; I just realized I was like, for emphasis, going…

Host: [Laughter] It’s good.

Mark Vande Hei:…hey listeners, if you’re getting uncomfortable hearing me pound on the table, I was actually warned not to do that; so I apologize. Please stick with us, it’ll get better. So…I guess I’m more animated than I thought. Gosh.

Host: That’s good, that’s good.

Mark Vande Hei: So, you, like I was trying to say, you can play mental games that can make it harder for yourself or make it easier for yourself, and I feel like this time I was better about making it easier on myself than last time.

Host: So…ultimately when you were, when you were going through your, your, your, your day to day, one of the things that I, I recall listening to at the end, you know, you had a couple interviews at the end of your, of your, of your increment, of your, of your one year, and you talked about every morning you would get up and before everybody was up you would go right to the Cupola and you would just sort of sit there and you would meditate. It sounds like one of the things that was really important was the, the idea of being in the moment. As much as you’re willing to share about what exactly you were meditating on, what was sort of, what were you preparing yourself for, what was that practice, you know, that to, to really get you ready for the day and stay in the moment?

Mark Vande Hei: Well, there were different focuses…foci?…there’s different things I focused on. How to avoid speaking correctly by choosing different words. I chose to focus on different things and, but the process was always…paying attention to the environment, listening, recognizing the sounds that you’re in, just trying to connect with where you were and notice things that maybe you weren’t noticing. And then turn a little more inward, pay attention to your own breathing, do a scan from head to toe to see how you’re feeling, not, not to put a lot of thought into it but just recognize things. And then after that I would spend two or three minutes, again, just focused on my breathing, trying to just be very relaxed. And when I realized that I could do this in the Cupola with my eyes open, then I would open my eyes and just try to notice what was outside and try to appreciate what I was looking at, a lot of times. Now I could, I could tell you that that’s a big difference between when I would be in my crew quarters and I would be focused very much on what was going on in my head and just trying to recognize things.

Host: Yeah.

Mark Vande Hei: I, I probably was a little more scattered because I would see interesting things on the ground and so, I, I wasn’t as, as internally focused in those. But I really, really felt grateful to have the opportunity to, to just quietly sit and notice the Earth for 20 minutes. And I, and that’s an opportunity I’m really glad I didn’t pass up.

Host: Because, you know, I’m trying, I think a lot of us are trying to, trying to put ourselves in your shoes and just, you know, you’re in a tin can for a year, right? And it can be very easy to slip into that negative mindset. But it sounds like this practice of regular starting the, starting the day with gratitude, with some, with positive mindset, right, you talk, you gave the, the marathon analogy of not talking about how disappointing it was with how far you have to go, just appreciate how far you’ve gone; think, thinking what it takes to be a long-duration crew member. And a lot of the reason what we’re, you know, why we’re doing this, why we’re having an astronaut on the space station for a year, is to really get an understanding of what it takes, because a Mars mission is going to be almost double of what, of what you just did.

Mark Vande Hei: Right.

Host: Maybe a couple of extra months. I think the minimum time would be about 19 months, is what I counted…

Mark Vande Hei:OK.

Host:… for like a minimum time. So just, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like seven extra months of what, of what you just did. That’s a lot of time. And so, to, to go into it with the right mentality and, and the right positivity…I want, I want to focus a little bit on, on that. The idea of positivity, not just focusing internally on what it takes to, to have that good mental space, but to be a good crew member, too, because you’re not the only person that’s going to be going to Mars, you’re not the only person there. You have to maintain a good environment, a good relationship. Can you talk about the, the experience on orbit and, and, and what it takes to be a good crew member and a good crew to be successful for such a long time, and not, not focus on negativity, but to keep that positivity and spirit up and, you know, be a good worker.

Mark Vande Hei: I think the first step in being a good crew and a good, good member of that crew is, is very much what I like to say is essential to leadership, is trust. If you’re trying to be a good leader, anything you can do to enhance trust between you and the people that you’re leading or, or if you’re just trying to be a good team member, anything you can do to build — the team is stronger with everybody trusts each other. And that means, if you understand other people’s motivations and you recognize that it’s, it’s, the motivations are not about that individual, it’s about more focused on the group. And, but of course to do that that’s got to be your motivation, too. I think the trust is a big piece and that means even sometimes when there’s difficult topics to bring up, if you have the type of climate where you can bring those things up and trust that the other person’s going to actually listen and recognize that even though the initial reaction might feel like, wow, this feels really uncomfortable for me to hear this, but I, it’s important to hear it. Gosh, there was times people would, would really make themselves vulnerable by, by talking about things that they were struggling with. And they were very grateful that when they did that, they made that the, the, the feedback they got from the rest of the crew members was a lot of sympathy and understanding as opposed to judgment or, or. So I think that what the meditation did for me, a lot, was help me recognize when I was filling in information that I didn’t have with a narrative that I was making up. And I think a lot of, if that negative mindset versus positive mindset is if you fill in those gaps with a story that’s a negative story or a positive story, and it’s not so much about making it a positive one as recognizing when you just don’t know.

[Music]

Host: Hey, It’s Gary again. I’ll wrap things up with my favorite episode this year, which was episode 232, “Her Passion for STEM.” This episode came together through a little bit of luck and good timing. As we were searching for more topics and episodes, I was approached by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement to dedicate a special episode to NASA’s efforts for Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. And Kris Brown, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for STEM engagement, which in NASA’s organizational structure is top-level leadership, she was interested in speaking. It just so happened that I was talking with Emily Calandrelli’s PR folks – Calandrelli being a well-known science communicator and influencer, who coincidentally wanted to have a conversation about girls in engineering. Lo and behold, a wonderful and unique opportunity was born to broaden the conversation to discussing this very important topic of inspiring young girls. At one point during our conversation I asked Emily and Kris to recall a moment where they could see the fruits of their labor in young girls. It was probably my favorite part of the conversation. After discussing the hard work that goes into communicating and trying to inspire, these powerful moments set in stone for me that these efforts can truly have significant impacts on a person’s life. Check it out.

(Music)

Host: What I like about the having both of you as guests is you both get to interact with people so much. Emily, through your areas, you get to have kids on your show, right, and you get to see their inspiration.

Emily Calandrelli: Mm-hm.

Host: And of course, Kris, actually seeing, you know, when you have these programs, these STEM programs and invite girls you get to, you get to see the inspiration. And I think one of the most rewarding things about being in a position like this, where we get to communicate to people and reach out and do all of these programs, is to, is when we see some spark of inspiration, we see it in someone else, right? Of course we’ve all experienced it, but we see it. I wonder if you each have a moment like that. Emily, we’ll start with you. If you have some student that you’ve worked with or someone you’ve maybe if you were a mentor to someone, and you inspired a career, you inspired a decision, some path that they took, if there’s something that really sticks with you as you look back?

Emily Calandrelli: Yeah. I mean, I’ve worked on a few different TV shows and projects, and I think that the one that I have seen the most impact from is “Emily’s Wonder Lab.” And I think that that is just because, A, it had a larger reach, it was on Netflix, and so it was an international reach, but also because I was nine months pregnant when I filmed the show, and so these kids were watching a nine-month-pregnant lady who didn’t mention at all that she was pregnant. I totally ignored the situation. I just happened to be a wildly pregnant person doing science on TV. And that changed kind of what they expected a scientist to look like, and so I have messages every day, I mean, the show came out a year and a half ago and I still get dozens of messages every day from families who talk about the impact that it’s had on their children, and not just their daughters but also their sons because of course this is changing what their sons expect when they think of a scientist and an engineer as well. And some of the stories will be like, my daughter — you know, my husband is an engineer, but she didn’t talk about science or engineering until she watched your show, because she finally saw someone who looked like her doing science. The past two Halloweens, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of girls that dressed up as me because they wanted to be a scientist for Halloween, and many of them even put like a pillow in their belly because they wanted to be very accurate and very authentic to what a scientist looked like. And that to me is the, I want to work on more projects like that, because when you see the impact that that has, you feel something. It’s hard not to see these messages and not get in your feels about it because it is certainly, it makes me want to continue doing this type of work, because you can see the impact happening in real time.

Host: It is important, right? I mean, you do it, and that you mentioned this whenever you were talking about inspiring girls, that what helps you to help communicate that is, is that true — that, you know, that true sense of passion. Making sure that that is coming forward, not necessarily that presenter style, but that you are putting your own passion into that style, and you have a feeling that it’s helping people but it’s not until, you know, it really becomes true whenever you hear those stories. It has to mean the world.

Emily Calandrelli: Absolutely. Yeah, it really does.

Host: Kris, I wonder if you have a similar story. Lots of STEM programs around NASA; I wonder if you’ve overseen any of them or talked to any of the girls that have been a part of it and have a story that came from some of these programs?

Kris Brown: Yes. I think first off, I think, Emily, your story is so, such a, paints such a vivid picture of how important it is to have powerful role models out there, men or women, and the ability for these young people to see themselves and connect in a really powerful way. I’ve had a whole number of what I characterize as goosebump moments working with students. Working especially with young girls, and underserved and underrepresented students who, like me when I was their age, are limited with respect to what’s available to them, and especially with respect to out-of-school experiences for them to explore STEM. I think that the one example that I would give that is actually not that, because it was with college students, that was incredibly fulfilling for me, is I spoke to a group of college students, men and women, and we had a very lengthy question and answer period that covered all kinds of topics. It was unlimited what they could ask me, so they wanted to know what I found most challenging in my career, what was most exciting, how did I manage people, what was that like, how did I approach work/life balance, what it was like to be a mother working in STEM, very similar to the story Emily just shared as her nine months pregnant self on TV. Afterward, a number of students came up to me to talk to me about how powerful the conversation was for them from a number of different angles. None of them really had anything to do with the technical studies they were doing. It was about life as a, as a STEM practitioner and what my STEM journey was like. But one young woman in particular came up to me, to the stage, and she was in tears, and I thought, oh boy, what did I do? And she told me that sharing, sharing my story and my experiences had literally changed her life in that moment. And that for years, she told her parents that she wanted to be an engineer, and they had always counseled her against it because they viewed engineering careers for women to be just too difficult. And so, at the end of that conversation, she said to me, I have made the decision to switch to engineering, like today, and I’m going to contact my advisor and I’m going to call my parents to let them know that I am going to be an engineer. And for me that was kind of one of my big goosebump moments because it was really evidence of the power of, of a voice merely sharing a story and being out there, allowing, helping a student find her way. So, it was very powerful.

(Music)

Host: And that’s it: that wraps up our fifth year of Houston We Have a Podcast. We’ve had so much fun, and thank you to the listener for tuning in to our episodes, leaving reviews and all of that – we love the reviews, it really helps us to understand what you the listener want to focus on, so please go to wherever you’re listening to Houston We Have a Podcast, go and leave a review. I believe it’s out of five stars we would recommend five, but it’s up to you on how you like to rate us. But give us some suggestions and honest feedback because we’d really like to continue to do this and make sure that we’re tailoring it, tailoring it to you the listener. We’re one of many podcasts across the whole agency, so you can check them all out at nasa.gov/podcast; we also have our full collection there, along with different categories if you want to listen to particular kinds of episodes. So we have an Artemis collection, we have a Space Station collection, and it’s categorized and organized very nice, nicely. So if you want to check those out you can go and listen to them, in no particular order. We’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so go to the NASA Johnson Space Center pages and use the #askNASA to talk to us, you can submit a new topic or maybe ask a question, just make sure to mention it’s for us at Houston We Have a Podcast. The narrative portion of this episode was recorded on June 2, 2022. Thanks as always to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Belinda Pulido, Heidi Lavelle and Jaden Jennings, who are instrumental to make this happen every week. And thanks to you, the listener, for listening and reviewing and sharing this podcast, which helps us to recognize the value of the product and it really keeps us going. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on once again, and tell us how we did. We’ll see you next time.