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 392, three astronauts from the agency’s most recent class discuss their first year of training and answer questions from our listeners. This episode was recorded May 30, 2025.

Transcript

Joseph Zakrzewski (Host)

Houston We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 392: Ask An Astronaut On Our Anniversary. I’m Joseph Zakrzewski, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more.

 

Happy anniversary to us! It’s Houston We Have a Podcast’s eighth anniversary, and we’re thrilled to be spending it with you and our newest class of astronauts, the Flies. And they’ll be answering your questions about spaceflight. We last talked to the class as a whole for their candidate graduation on episode 325, you can check out that episode to learn more about each of the 12 members, their backgrounds and their paths to becoming astronauts.

 

Joining us today are Chris Burch, Deniz Burnham and Anil Menon. We’re going to catch up with them and see what they’ve been up to in their first year of being official NASA astronauts. And later, our producer, Dane Turner, will be joining us for questions that listeners like you have been sending in. Let’s see what all the buzz is about.

 

<Intro Music>

 

Joseph Zakrzewski 

Anil, Chris, and Deniz, thank you so much for coming back to Houston We have a podcast today. It’s good to see you

 

Anil Menon 

Good to see you too.

 

Deniz Burnham

Thanks for having us.

 

Chris Birch 

Yeah, we’re happy to be here. It’s actually pretty exciting to see my classmates, because we’ve been so busy since graduation, I feel like I haven’t got a chance to sit down with them in a while

 

Anil Menon 

Yeah we’ve been all running around. Yes, it is good. Thanks for bringing us together.

 

Joseph Zakrzewski

Oh, absolutely. And that’s something that I really wanted to talk into is, you know, since the class was announced in December of 2021, certainly a lot was happening in the world at that time, COVID and the like. You’ve had two years of astronaut candidate training, and now you’re into your full time roles and what you’re preparing for, what’s it been like in that time since graduation to today, where you have been training, but it sounds like this is a great opportunity to reunite a little bit, Chris, I’ll start with you.

 

Chris Birch 

Yeah absolutely. So, you know, I think we, we all sort of started picking up a little bit of our office jobs and our ground support roles while we were still in our ASCAN training. But our training brought us together. We still saw each other for sims, or, you know, training in the in the pool, for spacewalk, spacewalk proficiency. But then once we graduated, we really transitioned full time into these jobs, and everyone sort of scattered to the wind, as perhaps a swarm of flies might tend to do, but it’s but it’s been good. It’s been busy. I’ve gotten exposed to a lot of different parts of of what we do at Johnson Space Center, working both with the current increment of supporting operations aboard the International Space Station, as well as supporting some development of Orion and Artemis II preparations.

 

Joseph Zakrzewski 

Wow, and Deniz is what’s life been like for you since you know, you started training and then graduation, and then here in this past year?

 

Deniz Burnham 

Yeah, I mean building upon what Chris said, you have the foundational training of the astronaut candidate training pipeline, so you continue to build off of that. It’s a lot of continuous learning, so you still have to maintain your T 38 proficiency, NBL runs Russian language that goes on forever and building upon the ground jobs we got to certify as Capcom, so supporting the real time operations, and ISS also doing increment lead operations too,

 

Anil Menon 

yeah, and I think, like something Deniz said really stood out to me. So I I just had this vision that I’d do this two years of astronaut training, learn all this stuff and maybe be done. But what really has happened is the learnings just continued a lot for me. So I’ve I found that I’ve just continued to learn about different things in space, like the space station and all the different contingencies we might do, or just how to fix things up there, or photography, how to be a better photographer from people who are doing things. So it’s been non stop learning, really, since graduating. So it just never ends. But I did graduate for I did finish fellowship and residency in my early 30s, and so I love just studying and things like that. And I realized that this job is one of those jobs, like many others, that you can just continue learning in. So I think it’s a good place to be in life.

 

Joseph Zakrzewski 

Well, a little over a year has passed since graduation. We’re all a little older, a little wiser in our roles and what we’ve been up to. But looking back, you know graduation was back on March, 5, 2024, right here at Johnson Space Center and the Teague auditorium, family, friends, mentors, the like, were all on hand. It was a pretty big ceremony. Can you describe what it was like now that you have the gift of hindsight and can look back and what that moment in time means for you and how maybe any of that has influenced you, moving forward and going back to Chris,

 

Chris Birch 

I just have so many memories of looking out at the audience and seeing. Smiling faces of our instructors. You know, our Russian teachers, the people that helped us learn emergency response on ISS, and seeing how proud they were to get us to that day like that, that’s really stands out to me as something special. I don’t, I don’t necessarily interact with those people on a day to day basis anymore, although they do have like other operational roles. So I may see them, but it is just such a cool transition point in our careers to share with everybody and to celebrate with everybody, and so getting to bring those people along that are really the foundation of our team, to get us to do what we can do, that was really special. That’s what I remember the most. What do you remember Deniz,

 

Deniz Burnham 

when you’re living The kind of day to day, you kind of lose sight of the big picture and getting to kind of see all the memories flashing back. They did a wonderful job with slide shows and videos. It really is a very like wonderful feeling. You get to basically see like, Hey, we are capable of accomplishing hard things together, but you’re also getting to celebrate with your family, friends, instructors, as well as your fellow classmates.

 

Anil Menon 

Yeah, for me, I wanted to be an astronaut my whole life, and this, this was kind of the moment where you graduated and it happened. But I also remember thinking that what I liked about it is it was a big challenge, and it was a process that drove me throughout my career, and that moment was not really the end, but something that I just needed to reset goals and find other challenges and ways to grow. And so it was kind of like just just another step on a pathway. In hindsight, when I look back at it.

 

Joseph Zakrzewski 

And it’s fun to get everyone back together again. And I know you touched upon a little bit of what you’ve been up to since graduation, but from a personal standpoint, you mentioned that you know you don’t get together all that often. You don’t get to see your classmates, and I know when you go through training like you do, for that amount of time, and to spend that much time together and then work into your day jobs. What’s it like as classmates? Are there ways that you try and keep together? And it feels like each class you know, either keeps, you know, fun ways of communicating or fun ways of meeting up. But how have the flies been able to keep in contact and support each other? You know, in this time of transition, post graduation,

 

Deniz Burnham 

I would say the cool thing is now you also get to integrate into the larger office. And so, yeah, you might split up as a, you know, the class, but now you’re gaining so many more friendships too, because you’re kind of training in that silo as the class. So there’s always kind of positive sides to it. And then when you do get to finally come together. You get to kind of share these cool stories of what y’all although did get to split up, but you get to see different things do different types of training. I’m sure they’ll share their experiences as well. But like getting to kind of share those experiences and kind of live vicariously is pretty special too

 

Anil Menon 

Training was such an intense period that we got to know each other really well. I did EVA training with Chris, and it was so much time together, like figuring out how to overcome this challenge together. And Deniz and I were on geology training, and we had all this time to, like, learn how to work together. And so I think, like now when we come together, there are these moments like we might be handing off a Capcom shift, or we might be flying a jet together. And in those moments, this particular class, I feel like I know him so well that we know how to navigate all sorts of challenges together and just, I guess, be our best selves as a team. And so that’s really cool.

 

Joseph Zakrzewski

Well, and as a family too. I mean, I remember not too long ago when we were here at Johnson Space Center, and we were getting ready for that graduation, and we had chances to sit down with all of you, and we were doing fun videos of, who’s the best dancer in your class, who’s the funniest in your class, who’s having, you know, having a lot of fun. So it really is that family environment. It’s nice to see that, you know, it becomes a bigger role and part of a bigger family and and kind of, going back to now, what your roles are, what, you know, Chris, going back to you, what has life been like the last year? Has there been any standout experiences that you’ve had now that, you know, post graduation, full time activation that you’ve been a part of?

 

Anil Menon

I thought you were gonna ask, who’s the best dancer?

 

<Laughter>

 

Chris Birch 

it’s definitely still not me. You know what? Something Deniz said stood out to me about we see each other in transitions. And so I one of my first jobs coming out of graduation was supporting the onboard crew, as we call the increment lead. So this is the A crew member in the office that is on the ground, not in space, supporting everyone that is working and flying in space. And so you are intimately involved in all of the daily operations. You’re helping see the big picture of the the cadence of an increment when are space walks going to happen? When are visiting vehicles flying up? When are new crews arriving and crews departing? And that was a really intense period, because you’re on the clock all the time, because we’re flying in space 24/7, and so it was really interesting, I think would prepare anyone incredibly well to fly to space station. And then I got the the benefit of handing over that position to Deniz, who who took it over recently. And it was, it was just really great to connect and sort of share, share that experience and see what she’d been up to. So that was really great. And then another, another piece on the completely other side of the spectrum, as opposed to supporting real time ops, supporting in the development world. And I’ve had some opportunities to support the Orion vehicle development, some of the decisions that we’re making to get ready for Artemis II, and I’m currently training to be an Artemis two Capcom to support that flight when it flies next year.

 

Joseph Zakrzewski 

And Deniz, what’s, what’s it been like for you? I hear the transition has made its way onto your plate, but what have, what have been some notable experiences for you in addition to that?

 

Deniz Burnham 

Yeah, so that was a like, Chris nailed it. That’s a great description of what it’s like. Just, you know, there, there is a funny saying about the increment lead position where they say you’re like a fifth member of the crew, but you’re the one left behind on Earth, and I super grateful for that honor. Yeah, Chris handed that over to me. It’s been a couple months now, and it’s a very, very cool opportunity to not only engage with the flight directors, the flight control team, but also advocating for the crew, and anytime they do reach out to you, it’s still super surreal getting a call from space. You’re always like, dude, what?

 

Joseph Zakrzewski 

Well, for you and Anil, the class at large, of the flies, a few, have been assigned to flight. So far we’ve seen Nicole Ayers, who’s currently on the International Space Station as a part of crew 10. Chris Williams is training to be a part of the next Soyuz rotation. And for you, sir, you’re currently training to follow Chris on 75s what has the last year been like and training been like getting ready for your first mission.

 

Anil Menon 

It it’s been like a dream, super cool, really fun kind of what I’ve wanted to do this whole time. Yes, I’m super excited to be launching in June of 2026, and so the run up to launch is really diving into the training that you will do in in space, and the things you’ll do in space. So you get your hands on the hardware, and you learn how to fix the different things, and you get to work with people who are training with you along the same time. So I get to hear from Nicole what it’s like being up there. And I definitely pay special attention to her pictures when she takes them, thinking like, hey, how do I do that? How did she get herself there that she’s able to do all that cool stuff? And I’ll be training side by side Chris, so as he gets ready for launch, and kind of we get to do a little bit of that together. And so it’s fun to just be a team on that. This summer, I’ll be doing summer survival training as part of that. And so they they’ll put us in a capsule that’s landed in the water, and we’ll learn how to egress that and get out without overheating and with all these space suits on. And that can be kind of challenging. And so all that training is, is stuff I just, I just love doing and being in those different environments and figuring out how to survive, and I’m especially looking forward to that launch in the future, just as a doctor, being interested in medicine, it’s like a real firsthand experience of all these medical things I’ve been studying my whole life. So it’ll be fun to see how that actually impacts the human body.

 

Joseph Zakrzewski

Well Congratulations and congratulations to all you. Thank you so much for coming and catching up with us. It’s been a treat to see what the last year has been like for you. It seems like you already got a good running start on what’s happening, but it’s great to catch up with you all today.

 

 

Anil Menon

Yeah, thank you. Oh, man, super cool.

 

Chris Birch

Yeah, excited to be here

 

Joseph Zakrzewski 

Now I see Dane is dragging in the mailbag into the room, and he wants to dive into some listener questions. Dane?

 

Dane Turner 

Hey everyone thanks for coming on today. It’s really exciting to have you here. And we let our listeners know ahead of time that you are going to be coming on, and we collected some questions from them. So if you don’t mind, we’re just going to ask you a few questions from our listeners.

 

Chris Birch 

Let’s do it.

 

Dane Turner 

So Krishi asks, I’ve heard about astronauts doing moderate exercise before an EVA. How does that help prepare them for the EVA and prevent decompression sickness?

 

Anil Menon 

Yeah, I can dive in on that one, since it’s right up the Medical Alley. But basically, decompression sickness happens because nitrogen is leaving your body, and it’s getting into your bloodstream, and that those those bubbles, can basically do different things. So they can get stuck in your lungs, and they can make it hard to breathe. So it’s really that nitrogen leaving your body. So the more you can get rid of nitrogen, the less chance that’s going to happen. And why does the nitrogen leave? Because when you compress someone, you push more nitrogen into their body. Or if you’re going from a low pressure, sorry, a high pressure to a low pressure environment, you just give it the chance of coming out, kind of like if you were to take water higher and higher and higher and start boiling at some point. So the way you get rid of that is you can breathe 100% oxygen, and that’ll just replace nitrogen with oxygen. The other thing you can do is you can exercise while doing that, and just increases the rate of nitrogen removal from your body. So that’s one of the key aspects that NASA has developed to just increase our ability to change pressures safely.

 

Dane Turner

That’s really cool, Hauke asks, what sort of first aid training do astronauts receive before going to space? And how does someone perform CPR in a zero G environment?

 

Anil Menon 

Oh, man, lots of medical questions, but you guys want to tackle Yeah,

 

Deniz Burnham 

before Anil jumps in, I would say that for those of us that are not medical doctors, we actually get to participate in something that’s super interesting and very, very cool. It’s called Field medical training, and they send us to a hospital in downtown Houston.

 

Anil Menon 

Fun fact, it is actually the biggest Trauma Center in the nation.

 

Deniz Burnham 

For those of us that don’t have that experience like this, is such a unique opportunity for us, not only to do shifts in the emergency room, the operating room, you get to actually be partnered with our kind of expertise here at JSC, they give us some training, and then we get to get hands on experience doing IVs catheters. In as far as, like, the CPR portion of that question, just one quick plug for Johnny Kim, he actually has a recent post he just did demonstrating how you perform CPR in space. And definitely go check it out. But it’s very, very tiring to perform CPR in 1g right? But you can imagine, in order to perform it in space to kind of activate the major muscle groups, he’s actually pushing his legs against the ceiling. So definitely check out the post. Super cool. Any Elkin problem. We fact check that, and Chris can describe field medical training?

 

Chris Birch 

No, yeah, the field medicine training that we receive is really excellent. It is great exposure to to operating in an emergent environment where there’s real emergencies going on that we need to respond to. And of course, we hope to, and plan to never use those skills on Space Station, like performing CPR, but like Deniz said, we train for it. There’s special considerations that have to be taken into account when trying to do that successfully in microgravity. But we do other things, like blood draws. As you know, astronauts who fly to space are their own experiments. We’re very interested in how the human body changes in microgravity, so we will do blood draws on ourselves, on each other, and so getting this experience on the ground and lots of practice before you fly, is a really great training opportunity.

 

Anil Menon 

Yeah, you guys said it, well, I would just say for CPR, part of the question, there’s two challenges. One is to isolate the person so you can deliver shocks, because that’s often part of CPR and two stabilize yourself, so you can do really good, high quality chest compressions to, like the song, staying alive if you’ve if you’ve gone through a course, you just need to keep them at a at a high rate. So like that is done by putting people on a special board that isolates it from space station, because if you were to shock on space station, you could damage some of the avionics. That’s crucial. And you can strap yourself down right by the person, or you can stand on the ceiling and push upwards, which can be really tiring. And that’s the post that John and Kim posted on his Instagram, site that you can check out if you want to see it in action. As Deniz mentioned,

 

Dane Turner

that is so cool. I had no idea you guys got to go to the emergency room and actually participate in actual medical training there. So we’ve got another question. Andrew asks. I’ve heard EVAs are physically demanding on the upper body. Do astronauts train specifically for that?

 

Chris Birch 

Yeah, absolutely, and part of that is not just to train our readiness for EVAs, but also to prevent injury. So spacewalk is a little bit of a misnomer. We do most of the moving around with our hands and our upper body in these very large space suits, which are sometimes difficult to move and articulate, especially when we’re training here in 1g in earth, on Earth. And so we have a great team of trainers that help support us to make sure that we are doing all the right movements, moving the right way, stretching, strengthening the muscles that we that we need to be successful, and they’re awesome, an awesome resource. But I know, you know, a lot of us will still, no matter how much training we do, we still always come back to, man, I wish we had more grip strength, you know, because it’s, it’s really tiring. Every time you open and close those pressurized gloves, it’s like doing one of those caliber squeezes that you see bodybuilders do to get their forearms really jacked. So mine are not jacked enough. Can we can we say jacked, pumps or something pumped?

 

Anil Menon

I think you got great forearms

 

Chris Birch

Leave that in

 

Anil Menon

for the people who can’t see them.

 

Chris Birch 

Yeah, I’m currently flexing my forearms here, trying to get a good a good pump going on. Okay, that’s all I have to say about EVA training.

 

Dane Turner 

Well, now I know that you’re all waiting for your first space flight, but Michael asks, what do the stars look like from space?

 

Deniz Burnham

I mean, they look great, yeah, like,

 

Chris Birch 

well, well said, yeah.

 

Chris Birch 

Well, the stars look incredible. And I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see some of the recent photography that astronauts have taken aboard International Space Station. But it is phenomenal. You know, Don Pettit just returned from expedition 72 Nicole Ayers, our classmate, is taking some incredible shots up there, and she recently captured one of the aurora coming over the horizon of the earth, when you can see all of the beautiful stars above the curvature of the earth, and they are bright and steady and just incredible. When you remove that fuzzy filter of the atmosphere, and you get to look out from space station and get this incredibly clear picture into our Milky Way, it’s just beautiful. You can’t. You can’t replicate that. Even in the darkest sky you can find on Earth.

 

Anil Menon 

It never gets old. I love looking at those pictures, and it’s such a different perspective to look at it from up there. It seems like the planet’s alive. It’s just amazing.

 

Chris Birch

Yeah, it’s gorgeous.

 

Dane Turner 

Yeah, Don and Matt and Nicole have sent back some fantastic photos recently. I recommend to all of our listeners to check those out. Hilary asks, How do you eat and drink while on an EVA and how do you protect against choking?

 

Deniz Burnham 

Very carefully, you have a water bag that’s available to you that you get to sip on. There’s like a straw, essentially, that kind of is movable off to the side, and you can rest your chin on it during the six hour. EVA, but as far as food, you only take what you consume before and then you eat when you’re done.

 

Anil Menon 

Yeah. And if you were to choke, that’d be a bad problem, because there wouldn’t be anyone who could help you. So luckily, not eating food in there, and so you can avoid that. But there was a time when Luca got water in his helmet, and so we’ve, you know, it’s something that could be problematic, and was a scary situation then, but we developed procedures to handle all those things. So if that were to happen there, we have a memorized set of steps that help reduce any of the impacts of that and clear out the water and get back and we practice bringing each other back to the air lock when one of us can’t do it ourselves. We haven’t had to implement that, but we’re we train for it.

 

Dane Turner

Incredible. All right, so Bob asks, Has submarine design or operating experience played a role in the space program?

 

Anil Menon

There’s a lot of similarities between submarines and Space Station. We have two astronauts who are Submariners, if that’s the correct terminology for their profession, but they The similarities are that they are in a kind of an isolated environment that’s a controlled environment in the outside of that a hostile environment without those controls, like the environmental and life support systems. And so that’s very similar. The similarities are also being away from bigger groups of people for long periods of time working with a small team in that controlled environment. And so those are all challenges that they’ve learned to navigate many people have learned to navigate, and they’re able to translate that community and what they’ve learned there to making us all better. And so it’s really cool to work with those people. Kayla is one, and Steve Bowen another, Kayla Barron and Steve Bowen.

 

Dane Turner

So Lucy wants to know, Are you physically able to sing on the ISS?

 

Chris Birch 

Well Lucy, I am not physically able to sing on the ISS. But that’s also a terrestrial problem that I have as well. Let’s hear. But in all seriousness, yes, you can sing on ISS. We maintain an atmosphere very similar to what we have here on Earth. And so you could regale your crewmates with elegant ballads, if you had the skills to do so

 

Anil Menon 

could we get Deniz to sing? Deniz will use

 

Deniz Burnham

you’ll have to wait, wait and see. I’ll do it live for the album. There’s actually some pretty cool videos to check out too. We’ve had some very talented astronauts that have sang up there, and there’s some YouTube videos out there.

 

Dane Turner

very cool. Francis has the question, even though being an astronaut is your dream job, are there days that are still tough or challenging, and how do you get through them?

 

Chris Birch 

Of course, like any any rewarding job always has its challenges. And you know, I’m one of the things that comes to mind when I’m thinking about a tough day I’ve had recently is working in the development world and trying to figure out, how are we going to work best as a team, a flight control team supporting Artemis two when it flies. And so my role in that is, hopefully, as a Capcom to talk to the crew and trying to understand, how do I best communicate between these two different groups, the flight control team and those on orbit. And sometimes we try things and we don’t get it right, but there are always lessons learned, and we can pivot and iterate and try and make improvements. And so, you know, for me if I get frustrated and I think, Oh, I didn’t have the best performance on console one day, I try and remember that this is all part of the process, like progress and improvement is non linear. It’s not always monotonically increasing. And so you you sometimes get some of your biggest gains of improvement when you work through a period of challenge.

 

Deniz Burnham 

That’s really well said, Chris, and I think it also helps to take things a day at a time, right? You may have a rough day, but does not mean the next day is going to be rough. You know? You get to learn, you get to improve, and then you’re still getting the opportunity. Like it’s such a positively unique experience and environment, and you can’t help but be grateful for the experience. So just look forward to the next day.

 

Chris Birch

Have this rule in cycling, I’m doing a really long bike ride, that if it’s good, it’s going to get worse. If it’s bad, it’s going to get better. And so you always just remember that there’s always going to be these blips and just keep looking forward to the next day, like Deniz says, working one day at a time.

 

Dane Turner 

That’s a really great philosophy to have, and I think that’s going to be really resonate with a lot of our listeners, Lori asks, I’ve read the astronauts on their way to Mars will have to contend with the boredom during a long transit, but seeing as how much effort and resources are put into the ISS. Does NASA have ways to capitalize on the multiple months of travel?

 

Deniz Burnham 

yeah. It ties into the previous question. You spent a lot of time singing

 

Anil Menon 

ISS Is a good platform to learn about that trip to Mars. I think we’ll be up there. I’ll be up there for eight months, and during that eight months I’ll do a lot of fixing of ISS and research experiments and photography, and there are means to communicate with people. So I think if you extrapolate from that to a Mars mission, which could be a six to nine month transit period, one way, it’s very similar. And so I imagine that you’d be spending a lot of time fixing the vehicle that you’re traveling on, maybe the CO two removal device, or anything that can has high reps and sometimes can potentially fail. You’d be doing that. I imagine they’d also be putting science on board it, and you might be doing that science in route. And then the communication gets progressively more tricky. So you have very slow, calm delays going up to ISS, but when you start going to Mars, you start looking at like a 15 minute comm delay. But it’s not too dissimilar from just text messaging some of your friends that take 15 minutes to get back to you, probably rare for some of us. You know, you could have asynchronous communication with people on Earth, and they can figure out how to do that. What do you guys think it’s too perfect.

 

Dane Turner 

That’s a great analog. And before we ask our last listener question, we got a question from another podcast, another Science Podcast.

 

Sam Jones 

Hi, this is Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti from the science podcast “Tiny Matters,” a show about tiny things, from molecules to microbes, that have a big impact on our world and society, past and present. We answer questions like, “How was IVF invented?” “Why did the dodo bird really go extinct?”  And “how is wildlife thriving near the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site?”

 

Deboki Chakravarti

And today, we have a question for Houston We Have a Podcast. Did you grow up with a space hero or something or someone in particular that made you want to train to be an astronaut?

 

Deniz Burnham 

Well, as a little girl, I always talked about wanting to be an astronaut, and my grandfather always had a great love of astronomy and telescopes, and he would actually build his own, and I, like, the first time I got to look at Mars or even see the rings of Saturn, it was through my grandfather’s telescope, and that was always such a special moment that I shared with him, and so that that’s how I kind of maintained that love of of just kind of wanting to do space exploration through all these years, is kind of that shared love with my grandfather.

 

Chris Birch 

Well, I didn’t have a space hero growing up, unless you maybe count Ellen Ripley from Alien. I thought she was, she’s pretty amazing. But I grew up reading a bunch of adventure writers like Jack London, who wrote to build a fire, and all John crackers books about climbing Everest. And I just loved dreaming about being in these remote environments, really pushing the limits. You know, I grew up doing a lot of white water rafting with my own family and some backpacking, and it was seeing all of these different people from different walks of life go and explore extreme environments that I think prompted me to want to be an explorer from a very young age. And it took me a while to find that route to being an astronaut through science. Who are, you know, are also pushing boundaries, exploring. I learned a lot about like Marie Curie when I was growing up, who’s one of the first female scientists to work in the field of radiation, pushing boundaries in that direction, and it it sort of clicked and fell into place for me to become an astronaut. It was a good fit, I think, versus having a specific astronaut, astronaut role model, although Deniz and Neil are pretty good role models right now,

 

Anil Menon 

not for cycling, but for me, yeah, for me, it was the books as well. I think I like Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And I kind of dreamed about maybe traveling farther than low earth orbit, but I saw, I realized it was a real thing when I saw an IMAX movie about NASA called the Dream is Alive. And I thought, well, that’s a really cool job. That’s as close as you can get to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And and it was in the back of my mind, it always seemed kind of out of reach, until I think I realized at some point that if you just consistently work hard at something, can make a lot of gains. And so, like, I did that and stayed with it, and saw the dream kind of come closer and closer to reality until now and so that those were my inspirations.

 

Dane Turner 

That is fantastic. And our final question came from two of our listeners, Cameron and Evelyn, both asked, What advice would you give to an aspiring astronaut? And Evelyn specifically asked for someone who’s not good at math.

 

Chris Birch 

Well, Evelyn, I don’t, I don’t think any of us came to NASA being already good at being an astronaut. You know, we started with with a clean slate, and learned one day at a time, and kept practicing and practicing and practicing. You know, we talk about our our space walk training that we do in the pool together. Gosh, none of us knew how to do that when we came here. And it took a it took a long time and a lot of hours. And you just, I think what was, what, what made it successful for us was even in that struggle, was finding some way to make it fun, turning it into a little bit of a game. So even even when I remember solving math problems that were challenging and hard and I wouldn’t get them right at the first time, if I could somehow turn it into a game that I needed to beat, like I’m going to beat this question, like I figure out how to solve it. That’s what got me through some of those challenging times in school.

 

Anil Menon 

Yeah, maybe I’ll double click on that and speak to Evelyn. And I heard you say you weren’t good at math, but sometimes we are the stories that we tell ourselves, and so I don’t think, I think probably important to just not tell yourself that and to just keep working at a lot of people felt like they weren’t good at math and went into math as careers, and we had enough time, I could share a ton of examples with you, but there’s a lot of ways to just keep working on something and be positive and kind of win in your mind first, because you need to do that and to be successful. And so I think you can rewrite that narrative.

 

Deniz Burnham

And as far as, like, what, generically, to tell an aspiring astronaut, just don’t give up on yourself. A lot of us have applied multiple times. You face multiple rejections. Hear, hear, Yeah, same. But you keep trying, right? Like, if it means that much to you, find a way, like, find a way to keep improving, try new things. But most importantly, or at least I could say for myself, I wanted to do things, have hobbies that I deemed to be life enhancing experiences, whether or not it worked out right, because ultimately, this is your life. Enjoy it.

 

Dane Turner 

That is some great advice. And I really appreciate all three of you being here today and answering these questions and just thank you so much for being here.

 

Anil Menon

Thank you. It’s our pleasure. Thanks for having

 

Dane Turner

Thanks for sticking around. I hope you had as much fun as we did.

You can check out the latest from around the agency at nasa.gov and you can find out more about our astronaut corps at nasa.gov/astronauts. Our full collection of episodes and all the other wonderful NASA Podcasts can be found at nasa.gov/podcasts.

On social media. We’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, X, and Instagram. If you have any questions for us or suggestions for future episodes, email us at nasa-houstonpodcast@mail.nasa.gov.

This interview was recorded on May 30, 2025.

I, Dane Turner, produce the show. Audio engineers are Will Flato and Daniel Tohill, and our social media is managed by Dominique Crespo. Houston We Have a Podcast was created by and is supervised by Gary Jordan. Special thanks to Chelsey Ballarte, Jaden Jennings, and Reagan Sharfetter for helping us set up and plan these interviews. And of course, thanks again to Anil, Chris, and Deniz for taking the time to come on the show.

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