Frontiers Lecture: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Astronaut Scott Kelly on Life in Space – Transcript

Neil deGrasse Tyson (Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium): So, welcome to the Lefrak Theater. I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’m the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium and I’m also your host of this evening’s Hayden Planetarium program. And you have all come to hear a conversation that I’ll be having with astronaut Scott Kelly.

And if you’re here at this event, you surely knew already that Scott Kelly has the record for the most consecutive days in space. Ladies and gentlemen, Scott Kelly.

Scott Kelly: Wow. Big crowd. Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you—oh, please. I haven’t said anything yet. Hey, it’s great to be here with all you today. Actually, it’s great to be anywhere with gravity. On that space station, I changed positions so many times you’d have thought I was running for president. Maybe. Someday.

Tyson: So, Captain—are you commander or captain, what should I call you?

Kelly: I was a captain in the Navy. Now I’m retired. But some people use “commander” because of the title on the space station or the space shuttle. Scott is perfectly acceptable.

Tyson: Commander Scott. So, dude, you’re in space more than anybody else in a row. You’re a Navy test pilot. So, were you at the top of your class in school?

Kelly: So, I often describe myself as a slightly below-average guy doing an above-average job. I was not in the top of my class, I was the exact opposite growing up in school as a kid. If I was in school today, I’d be the kid with ADD or ADHD.

Tyson: We now have diagnoses for kids that are not doing well.

Kelly: Yes. Yeah, I was just the stupid kid in the back of the room.

Tyson:Back then.

Kelly: Yeah, I wouldn’t pay attention.

Tyson: Before we had a diagnosis, right. So you’re not one of these kids in school where the teachers say, hey, he’ll go far.

Kelly: No.

Tyson: So, this is a stunning fact, because for you to not be one of those kids that everyone votes in the yearbook most likely to succeed. You’re not one of those kids where the teacher says, “He’ll go far.” You’re not the valedictorian. You didn’t get academic awards. Yet you accomplished what no one has accomplished ever before.

So, there’s a—that should tell us something about what our educational system may be missing.

Kelly: Perhaps. You know, I was this kid that, like I said, I couldn’t pay attention, I wasn’t doing well. Basically, my whole kindergarten through 12th grade and then my first year at college. And it wasn’t until I was struggling as a college student and I just happened to walk into the college bookstore to buy a book…

Tyson: Wait, so in college--

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So you’re a home-town guy, right? You grew up…

Kelly: Yeah, right across the river.

Tyson: We have the East River, we have the West River…which river?

Kelly: The West River. The Hudson.

Tyson: The Hudson. Jersey kid.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: Jersey in the house. Welcome.

Kelly: Thank you.

Tyson: So, raised in New Jersey. And then your first stint in college was where?

Kelly: I went to the University of Maryland in Baltimore County.

Tyson: Okay, because I think their flagship campus is in…

Kelly: College Park.

Tyson:College Park.

Kelly: That’s the one I thought I was going to, but I actually applied to the wrong school. That was the power of my ability to focus.

Tyson: And with the intent to major in what?

Kelly: I had this idea that I could become a medical doctor, even though I couldn’t do my homework.

Tyson: Yeah, that doesn’t…

Kelly: Wasn’t consistent, really.

Tyson: Yeah, we wouldn’t you to be our doctor if you’re the doctor who didn’t do your homework.

Kelly: Not then, no.

Tyson: No, no, no. And so you left college at that point?

Kelly: Well, I was on my way to leaving and I just by chance walked into the bookstore, saw a book on the shelf that got my attention.

Tyson: But you went into a bookstore to buy a book?

Kelly: No, to buy gum, I think. Not a book, I’m sure.

Tyson: Okay, so you had no intentions of buying a book in the bookstore.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: You went in there to buy gum.

Kelly: Or a snack or something. Potato chips.

Tyson: Okay. Then what happened?

Kelly: I saw this book on a shelf and it got my attention. I picked it up, I looked at the back and then the front and I started reading it and it interested me enough to take my gum money and spend it on a book and I took it back to my dorm room.

Tyson: And what’s the name of that book?

Kelly: The book was The Right Stuff.

Tyson: By Thomas Wolf.

Kelly: By Tom Wolf, yeah.

Tyson: Cool. So, had you not wanted gum that morning, who knows where you’d be today?

Kelly: I wouldn’t be here talking to you, I highly doubt it.

Tyson: This is the contingencies of life are scary.

Kelly: Yeah. Absolutely.

Tyson: So we’re not talking about the movie, The Right Stuff, which most of us have seen. Many more people will see a movie of a book than will have ever read the book. You actually read the book.

Kelly: Correct. Before the movie came out. 

Tyson: Before the movie came out.

Kelly: And they didn’t have Cliff Notes, either.

Tyson: Right. So, the book was talking to you.

Kelly: Yes.

Tyson: Even though nothing in your life indicated that you were the Right Stuff at all.

Kelly: I was the wrong stuff.

Tyson: You were the wrong stuff. The book, The Right Stuff, sang to you.

Kelly: Yeah, especially as the kid with the wrong stuff, I was like, well, if I follow this plan in the book, I could now have the right stuff.

Tyson: Did you get to tell this to Tom Wolfe himself?

Kelly: Yes, I did.

Tyson: Cool.

Kelly: I actually called him from the Space Station and thanked him …

Tyson: Whoa.

Kelly: … inspiring me.

Tyson: Whoa. That’s beautiful.

Kelly: Thank you.

Tyson: All right, so there’s still the arc of life that has to unfold. Just because you’re inspired by a book doesn’t mean stuff happens. So how does your life’s arc go from there? Because now you’ve got some ambition.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: Okay, so now what?

Kelly: Well, the spark is important. It was before I had this goal and this desire to do something really, really challenging, really difficult, that really spoke to me, it was impossible for me to pay attention, to study. But once I had that, that motivating thing that required me to become a good student, it wasn’t easy, but it was easier. And over time I taught myself how to pay attention when required and …

Tyson: So could it be—not that I’m any kind of psychological analyst, but could it be that a kid with ADD just simply hasn’t found the one thing that will completely preoccupy them yet?

Kelly: Absolutely.

Tyson: That could be an element of this.

Kelly: Yeah. And I think that’s an important theme of this book. It’s not only about space, but it’s also about this idea that a kid that was challenged academically growing up was able to change his life and you fast-forward seventeen years from the time I picked up The Right Stuff as a struggling 18-year-old to when I first flew in space was a 17-year period. And that seems like a giant leap, but really what it was for me was a bunch of really small, manageable steps. That was, you know, paying attention and studying.

Tyson: So let’s get to some of those steps. So, you leave University of Maryland and where did you—with book infused within you—and then where do you go next?

Kelly: So, I needed structure and I thought a school with a military environment would be good and…

Tyson: That’ll do it, yeah.

Kelly: Yeah. And one of the only ones I could get into at the time—I probably wouldn’t get in there now because it’s a much better school, but at the time it was the SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx.

Tyson: Bronx in the house. Got more from the Bronx than from New Jersey here, I’m getting.

Kelly: Well, we’re in New York, so.

Tyson: So you’re saying that that helped to align what was otherwise misfiring pistons in your life. Is that a fair way to put it?

Kelly: The structure helped me focus and pay attention and give me the time to study without distractions.

Tyson:I have to ask—you have a twin brother, Mark Kelly. Did he have similar ADD issues?

Kelly: He doesn’t seem to. He’s never really talked about it. He knows that I did, I don’t know why or…

Tyson: How did he do in school?

Kelly: Once we got to the 8th grade, our dad sat us down. He said, okay, guys, you guys are going to go into a trade, trade school…

Tyson: Oh, because neither of you had grades…

Kelly: We were not good students. And my brother, somehow that got him on the straight and narrow and he became a really good student.

Tyson: So it became a threat.

Kelly: Yeah. Exactly.

Tyson: He was reacting to a threat of a trade school.

Kelly: Exactly. But I don’t even remember this conversation because I think I was looking out the window for squirrels. So I kept along on my path of destruction.

Tyson: So he remembers this conversation. You don’t.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: You were ADDed out of that conversation.

Kelly: He said I was there, but I don’t necessarily believe him.

Tyson: Okay, so there’s an important—so you basically parted academic ways in 8th grade.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: Okay. And so now you’re in military school. You’re standing straight and narrow and so now what happens?

Kelly: Well, I became an engineering major and I did better and I got a scholarship that eventually in their OTC, Navy ROTC program which, when I graduated, I became an officer in the Navy, and went on to flight school in Pensacola, Florida.

Tyson: Flight school?

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: What’d you fly?

Kelly: Eventually, the F14 Tomcat, but …

Tyson: That’s the one that’s in the movie Top Gun?

Kelly: Top Gun, yeah.

Tyson: But you did not see combat.

Kelly: No.

Tyson: So what did you do with the F14?

Kelly: Well, I was in an F14 squad and we were just never involved in the shooting part of the Gulf War. We were there during Desert Storm, but it was at a lull. But eventually I became a test pilot.

Tyson: A test pilot?

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: Oh, okay. That’s kinda one of the things that’s in The Right Stuff.

Kelly: That was an important check in the block towards becoming a space shuttle pilot. Kind of a requirement.

Tyson: This is The Right Stuff unfolding.

Kelly: It’s become better stuff. I started out with the wrong stuff. I would never say I have the Right Stuff. I might have better stuff than I did.

Tyson: You went from the wrong stuff to better stuff.

Kelly: Yes.

Tyson: Okay. So now you’re a test pilot. And so you have the discipline. You have some engineering background. You know how to manage your ADD, if it’s not removed entirely. That’s important to channel your emotional, intellectual energies, physical energies, surely, as well. And so how does NASA land in this? Because a lot of people in the Navy who don’t land at NASA.

Kelly: Well, as a test pilot, there’s certain points in your career where guys will apply to the space program and I actually never thought I was ready to do that, to send in an application, figuring—I didn’t have a master’s degree at the time, I was thinking maybe 10 years from now, this might be something that I could possibly--

Tyson: After you had achieved more.

Kelly: Yes. Ten years I think would be a good horizon for when I thought I might be eligible. But then I noticed my cube-mate, guy that shared a little cubicle we were in at work…

Tyson: You shared a cube.

Kelly: Yeah, I know that sounds funny, but we did.

Tyson: The whole point of cubes is to … so you have your own space.

Kelly: This was a U.S. government cube. A lot of employees crammed into that.

Tyson: A two-person cube space.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So your cube-mate did what?

Kelly: Yeah, he was working on a stack of papers. I asked him what it was. He said it was his astronaut application. I asked him to see it. And I thought no one would ever want to read something that thick. Then I asked him when it was due. He said in a few days. So I thought, you know what? I’m going to send off the exact opposite application, barely like two pages long, down to NASA, knowing that I would—absolutely knowing I would get rejected. And I didn’t, I got a phone call to be interviewed.

Tyson: So did your cube-mate become an astronaut?

Kelly: No. He did interview.

Tyson: I’d be pissed off at that.

Kelly: He did get an interview.

Tyson: I want to be an astronaut, I fill out the 40-page application. You don’t really care. You write two pages and they call you in and they don’t call me. I’d be pissed. I’d kick you out of my cube.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: All right, so you got the call. How did that work? What’d they say? “Pack your bags tonight?” How does that work?

Kelly: Yeah, so you go to Houston for an interview. It takes a week, a week-long interview that’s really more medical tests than interviews. Some pretty challenging medical tests. I don’t want to talk about ‘em here.

Tyson: We saw them in The Right Stuff.

Kelly: I think I mentioned—yeah, some of that is accurate. Didn’t have anyone sticking any needles into…

Tyson: That was fun to watch the electrical impulses in the hand.

Kelly: Yeah. I have been electrocuted a number of times for science, though. That’s a different story.

Tyson: If you had to be electrocuted, let it be for science, yeah. Okay, so a week of interviews and then when do you move into Houston?

Kelly: Then about six months later they call you and say, hey, this is—the guy who called me was a former astronaut, Dave Leestma. He said, Hey, this is Dave Leestma, would you come fly for us at NASA? And my immediate response was, “Fly what?” Because they have a lot of airplanes.

Tyson: Yeah, NASA has like T38s and things. There’s a lot of– the first A in NASA is Aeronautics. So National Aeronautics and Space Administration. So a big part of their portfolio is worrying about planes and the Bernoulli principle over airfoils.

Kelly: Lot of Bernoullis.

Tyson: Lot of Bernoulli, yeah. So they invited you to fly for them.

Kelly: Yeah, to become an astronaut candidate, which is what we used to—or we still call it, before you graduate from astronaut school.

Tyson: No, but did they say you were going be flying…?

Kelly: The Space Shuttle.

Tyson: Oh…the Space Shuttle.

Kelly: Yeah, I said, “Fly what?” And he said, the Space Shuttle. I said, okay, in that case I will come.

Tyson: Because otherwise you got planes where you…

Kelly: I had a good plane.

Tyson: You already got a plane.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: You don’t need somebody else’s plane.

Kelly: Got the coolest plane ever.

Tyson: You had a way cooler plane than a T38.

Kelly: Correct. Or of any other plane. It’s like the Harley-Davidson of fighter…

Tyson: He has to say that because he’s in the Navy. Air Force would have a different answer to that.

Kelly: Never even heard of those guys.

Tyson: So fly the Space Shuttle. So you said, “Bet”! So, six months after you applied, you were down in Houston?

Kelly: Yeah, about. Well, it was longer than that, but six months after I interviewed, practically, I was in Houston.

Tyson: Wow. So things can happen fast in the government.

Kelly: Yeah, at times.

Tyson: That’s very impressive. So, now you’re another astronaut. There are many. This is in the 1990s, so it’s the Shuttle era, of course. And so do you get your marching orders showing up? Do they say, oh, you’re going to be this kind of astronaut for these tasks? How does that work?

Kelly: So, at the time we were flying the Space Shuttle the Space Station didn’t even exist at that point. So our job was to train as either pilots or mission specialists.

Tyson: But it was funded. I mean, it was going to happen.

Kelly: Oh, yeah.

Tyson: The Space Station. But there was no need for the Shuttle with regard to the Space Station just yet.

Kelly: Correct. We weren’t flying Space Station flights at the time. We were flying science missions. And I somehow went from—and I think back on this, I’m, like, how is this even possible? But clearly it was—I went from kid not being able to do his homework at 18 to 17 years later being the first American in my class of 35 people to fly in space. And it’s pretty … thank you.

Tyson: As Yakov Smirnov says, America, what a country.

Kelly: Yeah, right?

Tyson: That this can happen.

Kelly: I’ll tell you what—and there are a few countries like this country where you can be a poor student growing up and still recover from that. And I’ve talked to other people that have had similar experiences, but a lot of other places, it’s really not possible.

Tyson: Yeah, it’s just not even possible.

Kelly: We are absolutely a country of second chances. One of the great things about living …

Tyson: It’s under-celebrated. It’s an under-celebrated fact. So, how do you get your marching orders? Do they say, guy’s this height, he’s got this health, he’s got this temerity, we’ll put him on this mission? Is that how that works?

Kelly: So, in my case, on my first flight, I had this Space Shuttle commander who I didn’t really know because I was a new guy and he didn’t really talk to the new guys very much. He had flown five times previously and in a conference room, or nearby a—we have this facility in El Paso where we would stop for gas in the T38 and he was passing through there the same time I was and he says, “Follow me.” And we go into this room and close the door and I was like worried that I had done something wrong to piss him off. And he pokes me…

Tyson: So this is when you’re a bad student?

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: This is the thought you have.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: If you were never a good student and you’re called into the principal’s office, clearly you did something bad.

Kelly: Yeah, well, I was a brand-new astronaut and I go in there and I don’t know what he’s going to say to me. And he pokes me in the chest, he goes, “You better have your shit together because we’re flying in space in six months.” And my response was, “I’ll have my shit together.”

Tyson: That’s good.

Kelly: That’s how I learned I was assigned to my first flight.

Tyson: A simple exchange of sentiment.

Kelly: You know, and I appreciate directness, so it didn’t bother me that much.

Tyson: Can’t communicate that in fewer words than that.

Kelly: No.

Tyson: So, and reading up on you, one of your missions was a Hubble servicing mission.

Kelly: Yeah, my first flight.

Tyson: Your first flight was a Hubble servicing mission. STS…?

Kelly: 103.

Tyson: 103. And so thank you for your service for the Hubble Telescope. It was an American treasure.

Kelly: Thank you.

Tyson: And so, most people don’t know, the Hubble Telescope was like the size of a Greyhound bus.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: I mean, it’s huge.

Kelly: It’s big.

Tyson: Yeah. And how many missions did you fly?

Kelly: I flew in space four times, twice in the Shuttle, twice in the Soyuz.

Tyson: Okay.

Kelly: And the Hubble was my first flight.

Tyson: And so the twice on the Soyuz, that’s necessary because we stopped flying the Shuttle. The Soyuz is the capsule or the whole vessel?

Kelly: It’s both. They decided that Soyuz was a good name, so they named both the rocket and the capsule Soyuz.

Tyson: Okay. It’s the most reliable thing there ever was in space.

Kelly: Very efficient. Russians are efficient about certain things.

Tyson: I think because the designs are simple, with less to go wrong.

Kelly: Can I ask you a question, though? Can we go back for a second? Can I interview you a little bit?

Tyson: Who’s interviewing who? Okay, what’s your question?

Kelly: So my Hubble mission, we flew right before Y2K and I’ve always wondered about this. But we had to come home early. Because NASA was worried that the computers on the Space Shuttle were going to divide by zero and we were going to go through a wormhole.

Tyson: You missed the opportunity for an excellent experiment.

Kelly: Yeah. What do you think? Possible? Wormhole?

Tyson: I did a calculation and we are quite certain you would have gone through a wormhole.

Kelly: Okay. That’s all I needed to know. Thank you.

Tyson: So, in my day, I probably coded anywhere between 10 and 30 thousand lines of programming. And my wife…

Kelly: Between 10 lines and 30,000 lines? Pretty broad range.

Tyson: Tens of thousands of lines. My wife probably hundreds of thousands of lines of code. And when you write software, there are always bugs in the software. And there’s just the bugs that you haven’t found yet if you think there’s no bugs.

So, the Y2K bug was like another bug. So you just sort of fixed the bug and if you don’t fix it, you find out what breaks and then you fix it after. We do this all the time with all the software there ever was. That’s why you get software updates.

So, I was fearless of Y2K because it was just another bug. And I made a bet with someone that no one would die because of the Y2K. Do you need a reminder of the Y2K problem? So, computers in the 19—when computers sort of came of age, scientifically, it was the 1960s and 50s. Then the public started getting them in 1980s and 90s. The earliest code that was written represented the date with only two digits available for the year. So 66 would be 1966 and 72… And there was a worry that, when the year changed from 1999 to the year 2000, that there would be no way to represent that year because in the codes themselves there was no place to insert that. Because character placement mattered in early programming.

And so much of that program was legacy to the functioning of modern things. So people worried that the whole world would collapse. I made a bet—in fact, I made a bet with Michio Kaku. I said no one is going to die from this. And he was prognosticating that nuclear missile silos would fire by accident. And I said, no. And you cannot count anyone dying who is driving recklessly to escape Y2K and accidentally kills themselves. That does count. Nobody died, we went through it like it was nothing. Plus, the whole world doesn’t go through it at the same time, right? It’s all spread out over 24 hours.

So I was fearless of it and that’s how it played out.

Kelly: My brother bet me I wouldn’t say “wormhole” in an interview with you. That’s the only reason I asked that question.

Tyson: Excellent. So you go up on the Soyuz; we’re not running the Shuttle anymore. I just need to know, just for economic purposes, what did your seat cost the American government on Soyuz?

Kelly: You know, I think at the time, probably around $55 million.

Tyson: $55 million.

Kelly: Yeah. Not cheap, but flying in space isn’t cheap, either, so. You know, we’re lucky to have that…

Tyson: Did you feel really valuable when that happened?

Kelly: No.

Tyson: I’m just wondering. Because I used to joke—not joke, just say, after the Shuttle, we would hitch a ride on the Soyuz. Matter of fact, we’re not hitching, we’re paying. You have your bus ticket, very expensive as it was.

So this gets you back and forth to what is now the assembled Space Station.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: And your second of these trips, you know and everybody knows you’re there for the long haul. Three hundred and plus days. It said on the video, 340 days.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: You knew going in you’d be up there for that long.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: And you wanted to do this.

Kelly: Eventually. I came to terms with it.

Tyson: Is that the same thing as wanting to do it? I don’t know.

So, this was a big experiment because you have an identical twin brother.

Kelly: Yeah, that was one of the experiments, yeah, this comparative study with my brother, Mark and I.

Tyson: So we have to make sure the two of you are close enough physiologically at the point you went up that, when you come back, the differences can be ascribed to the zero G versus one G.

Kelly: Especially on a genetic level, but being identical twins, we were like 99.99 percent.

Tyson: No, I meant like one of you was not, like, obese and the other anorexic before you went up. You would presumably try to match your physiology.

Kelly: Yeah, we were relatively the same.

Tyson: Okay. But your brother had a mustache.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: Okay.

Kelly: He had one just like yours, actually.

Tyson: It’s a mustache, what do want?

Kelly: There’s a certain style, like you got the 80s mustache. You can have Mr. Peanut, you know? Which is not yours.

Tyson: Yeah, no, I don’t have Mr. Peanut. Mine is, like, I’ve had my mustache my whole life. I’ve never shaved it, ever. And so it’s just kind of left over from like the 70s. Yeah. I used to have big mutton chops, too, that was a big 70s thing. And I said no, this is too far. So I cut them into like Star Trek points. It was my homage to Star… We don’t have any—we can’t talk about your hair.

Kelly: No. I mean, you can talk about it all you want. It’s going to be a real short conversation, though.

Tyson: So, you go up. We have to ask—I know you get asked this all the time, but you must know that it is fresh in front of any audience that hears it for the first time. So, you’re in space. What’s it like being away from Earth for that long? You’re in the International Space Station with collaborations throughout Europe, Japan, Russia, at a time where there’s tensions between the United States and Russia. Yet you look out of the window down at Earth and it’s—there’s a certain tranquility to that. But you’re reading the news of the day. What is that emotionally for you?

Kelly: Certainly, looking at the planet, which is incredibly beautiful, can be just absolutely awe-inspiring and I feel so fortunate that we have this wonderful planet to live on. And it’s incredibly beautiful. There’s certain places that look kind of sick with pollution, but generally speaking you look out and it’s a brilliant view.

But, like you said, we follow the news often on the Space Station. I had, during the working, all of our waking hours, basically, a feed. Some news channel running to just try to keep us feel connected to Earth. But the news that comes from the planet is mostly bad news. They should call it bad news, actually.

Tyson: That’s a good point. For this hour, we’ll just have the bad news. Next hour, good news.

Kelly: But this was at a time where we had these beautiful, like, passes overhead the Mediterranean. Absolutely clear skies, beautiful blue water.

Tyson: Low cloud cover or whatever?

Kelly: Yeah, I mean, just incredible. But it was also the same time where these refugees were washing up on the beach in the Mediterranean. And it just doesn’t make sense. It’s that such a beautiful, incredible place has such conflict and death and destruction on it that, you know, spending that time away from the planet does give you—and I think most astronauts—kind of a renewed sense of empathy for the environment, for the people, for the human condition. Because you look at Earth, you don’t see political borders, you see a planet and all seven-and-a-half billion people of us on this one planet. And we need to work better to solve our common problems.

Tyson: So, you have a quote here, let me get it, make sure I get it right. Which is, it sounds like a cosmic perspective, which I think psychologists refer to as the overview effect. “We who have chosen to live in the Space Station together to trust one another with our lives, do not experience cultural conflicts.”

Kelly: Absolutely. And even when it’s the Russians that we—at times were our enemy and other times…

Tyson: Sworn enemy for 50 years.

Kelly: … yeah, in conflict with often, having issues that we don’t agree on. But you put us in space where the most important thing is our personal survival and how we each need to take care of one another…

Tyson: The interdependence of your expertise on the survival of the individual.

Kelly: Certainly, we’re all relying on one another, that all this other stuff just doesn’t really become an issue. We rarely even talk about it, and if we do, you kind of talk about it in an abstract way, as if you’re talking about not the United States and Russia, but maybe China and Germany. Two countries that we don’t—that we’re not from.

And it’s a really great thing to see. And it’s what makes the Space Station program one of the great successes is that it’s an international collaboration.

Tyson: So I ran the numbers on this. The International Space Station is the largest collaboration of nations there ever was outside of the waging of war. So, largest as in scale of cost.

So a close second and third to that would be the World Cup and the Olympics, of course, which are also international. But even though it’s friendly, you’re still competing, right? And still you get the occasional jingoistic flag-waving. Whereas in the Space station, it’s not that. It’s you’re really there with each other.

Kelly: Yeah, we’re partners, but also we’re great friends. And the guys that I’ve spent—and girls I’ve spent in space with are all my lifelong friends, including the Russians. Which, by the way, even though the Russians on the surface can appear kind of like gruff and…

Tyson: Stoic.

Kelly: Stoic. Once you get to know them, their culture develops close friendships more than the American culture, I was surprised to find out.

Tyson: So, like a strong, close friendship that you wouldn’t think would follow from the stoicism that you see on the surface.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: So, now we have to ask—so, thanks for these reflections on what it is to be in orbit. And presumably your outlook is not unique, as you said, among astronauts. You kind of get that view for free, for going up.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So, should we be sending leaders up into space?

Kelly: Yeah. So… perhaps. My Russian colleague, friend, I sometime refer to as my Russian brother from another mother, Mikhail Kornienko, Misha, that I spent a year in space with…

Tyson: So, Misha is a nickname for Mikhail?

Kelly: Yes. They have a lot of nicknames.

Tyson: This makes it hard to follow Russian novels.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: Because the same character gets referenced 12 different nicknames. And, if you don’t know that, you think there are more people in the story than there actually are.

Kelly: Absolutely. And the nicknames, in Russian, the diminutives, they call them, have different meanings based on exactly what you’re trying to say to that person.

Tyson: Wow, okay.

Kelly: It’s interesting. So there are like 12.

Tyson: But in fact that also means you’re indicating different levels of social intimacy with someone, depending on how you use that nickname, that’s interesting.

Kelly: Yeah. And Misha would often say to me, you know, if our countries want to solve our conflicts, any disagreements we have, we should just send our two presidents to space for a year.

Tyson: So, I get that, but then would you want to bring them back. See, that’s the real...

Kelly: That’s a different question.

Tyson: No, you can say we cut the budget, we have no budget to bring you back. The country lost interest in space.

Kelly: That is an entirely different…

Tyson: Time to cancel the space program. You can de-orbit like the rest of the lost satellites.

Okay, now you’ve been asked this, like I said, a thousand times, but I have to ask you again—other than what comes up in any given payload, like food you might like or other urgent supplies, apparently your pee is recycled for you to drink.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: Okay, could you give me more detail about that?

Kelly: Mass weight to orbit is very expensive and…

Tyson: It’s about $10,000 a pound.

Kelly: Yeah, $10,000 a pound.

Tyson: So what happens…

Kelly: So because you don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to launch water into space…

Tyson: That you would then just sort of release. So what do you do?

Kelly: So we turn our … we have a system that captures the urine from our toilet and then converts it back into water, which we drink. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You know, that guy drank his pee for a whole year? I actually drank everyone’s pee. It was all mixed together. But it does taste better than the water in Florida.

Tyson: See, I used to think it was weird to drink pee until I realized that the water’s been around for like a zillion years on Earth. Doing all kinds of things. So who am I to say…?

Kelly: Yeah, who knows where that water’s been?

Tyson: Who knows where those molecules have been? So it gets recycled, that’s interesting. And what’s a typical supply from a cargo ship?

Kelly: Thousands of pounds of food, clothing.

Tyson: This is an un-crewed ship.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So…

Kelly: SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, ATK Orbital has it.

Tyson: So these are the commercial enterprises that have taken on, they’ve assumed the delivery task that NASA would have previously done. Now you just…

Kelly: Pay them.

Tyson: You just pay ‘em.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So it’s thousands of pounds of stuff.

Kelly: Yeah, food, clothing, spare parts, science experiments, gorilla suit, other things like that.

Tyson: Gorilla suit?

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: You mean like the NASA suit?

Kelly: No, like a gorilla suit.

Tyson: Oh. I didn’t know it was Halloween in space.

Kelly: Oh, it can be.

Tyson: And we were chatting early, I was surprised to learn this, I thought I knew everything about space. That these cargo ships that deliver—tell everyone what happens after they’re unloaded.

Kelly: Most of them, with the exception of SpaceX, all the other ones, the Russian ones, the Japanese one, the other American one, all become the trash hauler to get garbage off the Space Station.

Tyson: I see, so they have two purposes—to bring supplies and to collect—they’re your garbage dump. They’re your dumpster.

Kelly: Yes.

Tyson: And, okay, so now it’s all full up, now what happens?

Kelly: It undocks automatically, de-orbits and burns up in the atmosphere. So that shooting star your seeing might not be a star. Actually, it’s never a star.

Tyson: Could be like your poop.

Kelly: That, it could be your old underwear. Part of a gorilla suit.

Tyson: And do you orbit it so that it lands in the Pacific? Because you don’t want to hit anybody with it.

Kelly: Yeah, generally, yeah.

Tyson: So the Pacific Ocean is the big toilet bowl of space. I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

Kelly: There’s a lot of Pacific Ocean out there.

Tyson: It’s like a third of all latitudes on Earth.

Kelly: It’s such a big target, that’s why we choose to…

Tyson: You don’t have to aim precisely.

Kelly: You don’t have to aim very well.

Tyson: So what was the biggest physiological difference? We already know some, this audience would know that sustained time in weightlessness, you lose bone mass, this sort of thing. So that would be the obvious changes, but were there any unsuspected changes between you and your twin?

Kelly: I came back more handsome than him. And also a lot smarter.

Tyson: But, wait, you do grow in zero G?

Kelly: No. I stretched.

Tyson: What’s the difference?

Kelly: I think when you grow you actually, like your bones get longer. And when you stretch, your like spine just stretches out.

Tyson: So how much did you stretch?

Kelly: Inch and a half.

Tyson: So you were an inch and a half taller in space?

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: And then when you came back to Earth, how long did you keep that extra inch and a half?

Kelly: I’m not too sure, but as soon as I saw my brother, he made me turn around and put his hand over our heads and we were the same size again, so.

Tyson: So you shrunk back within minutes.

Kelly: A day. Twenty-four hours, at least.

Tyson: So you didn’t keep it.

Kelly: No.

Tyson: Wow, okay.

Kelly: So now I’m only 6’6” at my normal… 6’7”…

Tyson: Space made him delusional, too, apparently. So what was the biggest physiological—because you guys have been heavily measured for this. That’s the whole point. You were a living biology experiment.

Kelly: Yeah, we do a lot of science on the Space Station. Over 400 different experiments over the course of the year I was there. And some of those were research and human physiological of Misha and I and how we need to mitigate these negative effects over, that happen in space, so we can someday go to Mars or other places in our solar system.

Tyson: But doesn’t your exercise regimen mitigate most of that?

Kelly: Mitigates some of them, some of the effects. The bone loss, it does a pretty good job. On this flight, even though it was more than twice as long, I only lost a little bit more bone than I did on my six-month flight.

Tyson: Three hundred forty days, that’s like 10 months or something.

Kelly: Yeah, 11.

Tyson: Eleven months.

Kelly: Yeah. I’m counting.

Tyson: Good.

Kelly: And we lose muscle mass. There’s effects on our vision, on our eyes. But then there’s also the effects of radiation, all the radiation we get can affect us on a genetic level. And, interestingly enough, there was a study about our telomeres. Telomeres are things in our chromosomes that are an indicator of our physical age. Not based on when we were born, but physically how old we are. And the hypothesis was, I would go to space, I get all this radiation, stressful environment. My telomeres would get shorter, which is in the direction of older, compared to my brother Mark. And what they saw was the exact opposite. Mine actually got better compared to his. Doesn’t mean this is the fountain of youth, but it’s interesting science when your results are the exact opposite.

Tyson: And we’ve known for quite some time that not all radiation is bad. I mean, we evolved under low-level, ambient radiation in nature. That’s sort of a native—and so it’s possible to actually damage DNA, have DNA repair itself to a stronger state than it was in before if the level’s low enough so that it’s not completely destroyed.

Kelly: Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping.

Tyson: And so it sounds like that’s kind of what happened up there.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So, we will know if you live longer than your brother.

Kelly: One of my brother or I will know. One of us, one of us will not.

Tyson: Good point. Hadn’t thought that through, that question. A couple more points before we go to questions from the audience; we will have a microphone in each aisle for you and we’ll make sure we have time for that this evening.

So what’s your sense of things, the future of America in space. Is Mars on the horizon? You were in space long enough, that’s kind of how long it takes to get to Mars, even a little longer. So we have evidence that that’s a survivable thing, at least in one leg of it. So where are your ambitions there?

Kelly: Well, my opinion is we are explorers by nature. Civilizations that have existed, that have stopped growing and expanding and exploring have ceased to exist. So it is, not only is it in our DNA, I think it’s also a requirement for our country and our planet to continue to grow and expand, we have to venture out further into space. There are real returns we get from it in technology and improvements of our everyday lives at this investment—although expensive investment provide. And I would like to think that someday we will have the political will and the required funding to go to Mars or elsewhere.

My brother says, and I quote him, he says, getting to Mars is not about the rocket science, it’s about the political science if we want to do that someday.

Tyson: Yeah, no one is really saying, oh, this is so hard, we’ll never do it. The way, before we began the moon shot, people said oh, we’ll never go to the moon, that’s too complicated. That kind of language has stopped when we landed on the moon. And now, yeah, I don’t think anyone is saying that the technology is beyond us. It’s always is there money and is there the political will.

And just one last point. We were chatting over dinner, if you can share the same story with the audience, just what it is emotionally—presumably there were psychologists that analyzed you before and after your trip. Some of us might think that being in the Space Station for that long you feel cooped up and maybe feel a little claustrophobic. What was your biggest psychological stress? Because, when you shared it with me, I would not have expected that and I was moved and impressed to learn what it was for you.

Kelly: Yeah, for me the hardest thing psychologically was always the fear that something bad would happen to my loved ones or my friends, family, on the ground. And not my own personal safety. Because when you’re in space on the Space Station, if one of my kids, for example, was to get a serious illness, you’re not coming home. That is part of the deal. You know that the only thing that’s bringing you home early is some kind of an emergency in space. And for me that was always the toughest part of dealing with being in space for a long period of time.

One of the worst, absolute worst days I had during my whole year is I get a call from the ground. They say they’re privatizing the space-to-ground channel, so no one can hear what they’re going to say.

Tyson: That’s never good.

Kelly: Yeah, and the last time I had heard was when my sister-in-law, Gabby, was shot, Congresswoman from Arizona, my brother’s wife. That was on my previous mission with three months to go, so I hear this. Eventually they say, Hey, your daughter Samantha needs you to get in touch with her right now. It’s an emergency. So I go down to my crew quarters to get on the phone and then we have a cutoff of the comm for, like, 20 minutes. And I’m just sitting there thinking about her and what she was like as a kid, how’s she doing on Earth without me. And then, when I get her on the phone, I’m, like, hey, Sam, they told me there was an emergency, what’s going on? And she says, well, you know, I’m at Uncle Mark’s house for Claire’s graduation and her two cousins had left with their friends and then Mark and Gabby had to go out of town. She goes, I’m here in their house all alone and I’m lonely.

And I’m, like, what? I’m, like, I’m in space for a year. And you’re lonely? There’s seven-and-a-half billion people down there. Go find a friend.

Tyson: How old was she?

Kelly: 21.

Tyson: So, that other case, it’s Gabby Gifford, right?

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So the woman was shot at the rally.

Kelly: Yeah, she was at a … she did these things called Congress on Your Corner, where she would go answer questions of her constituents when she was shot.

Tyson: So she is your brother’s wife?

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: I’d forgotten that, thanks for reminding me. So it’s interesting, so you were so comfortable in space, that the only psychological stress you go through is worrying about people on Earth. I mean, that’s a stunning fact about you. And most people would be very introspective about this. The Space Station could crash, there could be a fire. And so part of the magnanimity of the overview effect, cosmic perspective is that Earth matters.

Kelly: Yeah. That’s everything.

Tyson: Dude, thanks.

Kelly: Thank you.

Tyson: If we could get the house lights up. You can line up in either aisle and we’ll be happy to entertain a few questions. Time for maybe just a few. So let’s start right here—yes.

Audience Member: Hi, so…

Tyson: And how old are you?

Audience Member: I’m 13.

Tyson: 13, cool. Thanks for coming tonight.

Audience Member: Thank you. How are your muscles affected when you’re in space? Because I heard that you get weaker because you’re in zero G. And were you working out frequently with your brother, too, while you were in space?

Kelly: Yeah, I’m not sure what he was doing when I was in space, I wasn’t keeping track of him…

Tyson: Because he was back on Earth.

Kelly: Yeah, he was there. But yeah…

Tyson: By the way, he was also an astronaut.

Kelly: Yeah, yeah. He flew in space four times for, like, 50 days. Compared to my 550, 500. I always said…

Tyson: Look what you started here.

Kelly: But, yeah, we do a lot of exercise, but you can’t exercise all the muscles. And it was interesting when I got back, there were muscles that are part of our vascular system that keeps our blood up in the top parts of our body. And those weren’t conditioned, so I would stand up after I got home and my legs would start to swell, just like this. I could feel all the blood rushing down to my legs. And I’m, like, this is not good.

Tyson: Wait, wait, so when you came out of the Soyuz from orbit, you didn’t just collapse into a pile of goo?

Kelly: No, they carry you out. It’s too bad they don’t let you walk right away.

Tyson: Because that would be… you’d be tripping and falling over.

Kelly: Yeah, I have video of me walking, and you kind of walk a little bit like Jar Jar Binks.

Tyson: Duly noted. Thank you. Yes, hello.

Audience Member: My question for you, Scott Kelly, is on, now that you’ve done all of this and you’re doing these book tours and these documentaries, PBS, what’s your next move? What do you want to do next?

Kelly: I want to get through today. And then tomorrow. And the book tour is going to be about six weeks, so come the New Year, I will have to find other challenges and I’m looking forward to that. I don’t know what they are and fortunately I’m lucky enough that it’s not something I have to worry about at this moment. But I’ll start thinking about that here in the next few months.

Audience Member: Okay, thank you.

Tyson: If they said to you at your current age, we’ve got a seat to go to Mars, would you go?

Kelly: If I could come back.

Tyson: Okay.

Kelly: I’m not a fan of the one-way mission.

Tyson: The one-way people, that’s a whole other subspecies.

Kelly: Yeah, Mars One.

Tyson: Yeah, Mars One.

Kelly: I guess that means one-way.

Tyson: One-way, correct. People lined up for that.

Kelly: Yeah, a lot.

Tyson: We interviewed one of these people who had signed up for it and was selected. We interviewed one of them for Star Talk. And I asked him—he was on video link—and I asked him what do your loved ones say about this? And he said, oh, my wife was fully supportive of it. I said, dude, think that one through, okay?

All right, thanks for that question. Right here, yes.

Audience Member: Okay, Scott, how long is the Space Station going to remain operational? It has to be reboosted every so often and, without the shuttle being around, how are you going to do that?

Tyson: Great question. And another one is, when is it going to be dropped into the Pacific Ocean? That’s a version of that question, is it not?

Audience Member: Well, I hope they keep it running indefinitely, but I have no idea with the budget cuts and everything how long that’s going to happen.

Tyson: Yeah, what’s the prognosis, Scott?

Kelly: We reboost the Space Station now. We do it … it varies on when we have to do it, it depends on the solar activity, believe it or not. At solar max, our atmosphere gets bigger. There is atmosphere drag where the Space Shuttle flies, so at solar maximum, we get more drag and occasionally…

Tyson: Plus it’s this huge…

Kelly: Yeah, huge structure.

Tyson: It’s a huge, sweeping device.

Kelly: Yeah, a big, giant sail looking, the solar rays are enormous. So we reboost it with the Russian Progress resupply ship. Actually, the Space Station on the Russian segment has engines itself that you can use. We tend not to try to use them because they have a limited life. Sometimes these reboosts are done in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping and you don’t even know. You don’t even notice.

The lifetime of the Space Station currently I think is planned till 2024. And, if we didn’t get any funding to operate it beyond that—I hope we do, but if we don’t, eventually it’ll be de-orbited into the Pacific Ocean.

Tyson: In other words, you’re budgeted through 2024.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: Yeah, okay.

Audience Member: Well, after all the work you did to put it up there, I hope it stays up a lot longer than that.

Kelly: Yeah, I would hope so, too. And I think it can. You know, as hardware ages, it becomes more—there’s more risks, there’s more challenges. But I think it’s a challenge that we could, if we have the right resources, that we can overcome.

Tyson: A quick question. How do you—is there much damage during heavy meteor showers?

Kelly: I was shocked when I went outside for the first time and saw all the little holes on the outside of the Space Station.

Tyson: Went outside? You mean when you spacewalked?

Kelly: Yeah, doing a spacewalk.

Tyson: Most of us, when we utter that sentence…

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: ….we just go outside.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: Okay. When you—say it, when you spacewalked.

Kelly: Spacewalked.

Tyson: Thank you.

Kelly: Not much walking involved.

Tyson: I know, right? So you saw a lot of pit marks?

Kelly: Even, like, through metal handrails, there’s like bullet holes, some cases. And if that were to hit your visor, game over.

Tyson: The Right Stuff. Thank you for that question. Yes?

Audience Member: Kind of a bit of a spoiler alert already for the question that I had, because we talked about Mars One and the potential civilians that might go up, but after Challenger and we think with great reverence of McAuliffe and the crew, does—civilians in the space program ended after McAuliffe. So, is there any chance of that returning to NASA or what contribution can civilians make in space besides this Mars One, potentially?

Tyson: Just for context, the Challenge Space Shuttle mission may have been first to have civilians who were not otherwise part of the Navy or part of the astronaut program become a participant in the program and that shuttle exploded.

Audience Member: In addition to the civilians that potentially paid to be in space, right? The $20 million flight to [TALKOVER].

Tyson: The paid seats are in Russia, they’re not American seats.

Audience Member: Yeah, but is there room for civilians in space? What contribution can we make to space?

Kelly: So, most of the astronauts at NASA are civilians. There’s a certain number of people that are military officers, but I think that’s probably 30, 40 percent.

Tyson: I think he means like regular people.

Kelly: Some of those are regular people. There’s one sitting right here. I was kind of a regular guy.

Tyson: No, you were in the Navy.

Kelly: Yeah, Not on my last flight.

Tyson: But you…you…you were a test pilot.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: Don’t tell me you’re a regular guy, you’re not a regular guy. He’s talking about regular people.

Kelly: You mean like…

Audience Member: Yeah, Christa McAuliffe was going to make the great contribution …

Tyson: Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher.

Audience Member: …to education. Is there room for such a program coming back to NASA?

Tyson: Is there room for a poet, an artist, a musician?

Kelly: I think we should send kids to space.

Tyson: Ooh. Ooh.

Kelly: When it’s a little safer.

Tyson: Patricianly the noisy ones.

Kelly: Yeah. Absolutely there’s room and I’m excited about what companies like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, what they’re doing. And I hope someday I can go to space with my family and show them the wonders and what this place that has meant so much to me is like and share that with them.

Audience Member: Okay, thank you.

Tyson: Cool. Next over here, go.

Audience Member: I’ll try and make it short, but I’ve reading a lot about the smell in outer space, as well? And I read something that really confused me. So, space is a vacuum, but apparently it smells like seared steak. Is that true?

Kelly: Well, I think what you’re smelling is the…

Tyson: Your upper lip.

Kelly: Yeah. What you’re smelling is the exposure of the materials that are in the airlock or on the outside of the Space Station and how, when they’re exposed to the temperatures, to the sun, to the vacuum environment, they off-gas in zero G and smells in zero G tend to linger longer because there’s no such thing as lighter than air, because lighter doesn’t mean anything. So smells generally stick around for longer and, in this case, the smell you’re smelling is the stuff that was exposed to vacuum. But astronauts refer to it as the smell of space and it is very distinctive. Kind of like a sparkler on the Fourth of July is how it smells to me.

Tyson: So you’re smelling actual things in your vicinity.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: Rather than the emptiness of the vacuum of space.

Kelly: Yeah. You’re not smelling nothing.

Audience Member: It’s not dead stars.

Tyson: Yeah, no.

Audience Member: No, okay.

Tyson: If you’re close enough to a star to smell it, that would be the least of your concerns for your health. Next, here, yes.

Audience Member: I’ve had many experiences in my life that I used to refer to as psychic. Starting a few months ago after watching a documentary, I learned that I should be using the word “telepathic.” Which means that across distance you know, in my case, of the death of someone, even though it’s not something you learned officially.

Anyway, I also learned, and this is the reason that I’m raising it with you, that identical twins have a high experience of telepathy. By any chance, have you had that with your brother? Did he know anything about what was going on with you in space?

Kelly: No, we’re not those type of twins. But there were two twins like that sitting right over here. There’s one and the other one is… Where is she?

Tyson: It would have been interesting if this had been a documentedly verified phenomenon, to test it at the big distance of being in orbit.

Audience Member: That’s why I asked, because I want to prove it.

Tyson: However, consider that the Space Station is to Earth’s surface like Washington, D.C. is to New York City in terms of distance. It’s not as far out in space as you might think, even though we call it “space.” In fact, to a schoolroom globe, the Space Station is orbiting about three-eighths of an inch above its surface.

Kelly: And the moon is on the other side of the room.

Tyson: It’s 30 feet away. So that would not be the best experiment for telepathy at a distance. Just do it across the Earth if you want to actually do that experiment.

Next, over here, yes?

Audience Member: My question is I know your book is going to talk a little bit about antigravity. Will I be able to put it down?

Tyson: Ooh.

Kelly: The book?

Tyson: Oooh. Oooh.

Audience Member: I’ve been waiting months to say this.

Kelly: If you buy it. If you buy the book, you will be able to put it down.

Audience Member: Thank you very much.

Tyson: I think what he really meant was, if you buy the book, he doesn’t care what you do with it after that moment.

Audience Member: Fair enough.

Tyson: And his publisher’s here who can verify that. Yes?

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Elaine, I’m a farmer from Oregon and I’m currently working in…

Tyson: Are you an actual farmer?

Audience Member: I’m a real farmer.

Tyson: That’s a thing, still?

Audience Member: Mm-hmm.

Tyson: Well, welcome to New York.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Tyson: We’ve never heard of farming or anything like that. Actually, there’s some farms on rooftops.

Audience Member: Yeah, I actually work for a hydroponic company in Brooklyn called Gotham Greens and we’re a rooftop farm.

Tyson: Welcome. Thanks for advising us.

Audience Member: Yeah, you’re welcome.

Tyson: Urban farming, it’s a cool frontier.

Audience Member: So, anyway, I’m really interested…

Tyson: By the way, I bought…

Audience Member: Yes.

Tyson: I recently bought…

Audience Member: You can interrupt me anytime.

Tyson:…bee honey from one section of Brooklyn by bees that are from the rooftops.

Audience Member: Yeah.

Tyson: And it cost like four times as much as …

Audience Member: Yeah.

Tyson: And just tastes like honey. I’m thinking, no, this is not worth it. But it’s kind of cool, right?

Audience Member: Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Tyson: This is like urban honey. But, sorry to interrupt, go on.

Audience Member: It’s okay. So, I’m really interested in the veggie plant growth facility on the Space Station. And I read a lot of your experience with the harvest of the zinnias on Valentine’s Day and space mold and I was just trying to gain some perspective from you what the direction of human growth of food on space flight or on Mars or…

Tyson: Cool. Yeah, what’s the status of that in general?

Kelly: So, when I was working on these flowers in space and trying to bring them back from the brink of death, only really because some guy trolled me on the Internet and said I was no Mark Watney. So hue kind of threw down the gauntlet.

Tyson: You didn’t make poop potatoes?

Kelly: No. I could not. So I’m growing these flowers and Sergei Volkov, one of the cosmonauts says, Scott, what is with these flowers? Why you grow these flowers? And I said, well, the idea is, like if we can grow something more complicated, we started with lettuce, then flowers, then maybe tomatoes, I said, was the example I gave, we could grow something we could eat. And Sergei, in a very Russian way, says: Tomatoes. You don’t want to grow tomatoes. You want to grow potatoes. Because you can live on potatoes. You can’t live on tomatoes.

Tyson: Yeah, that’s true.

Kelly: And you can also make vodka with potatoes.

Tyson: So the first real crop experiment will be vodka and other … whiskey and beer and wine, I guess, is the whole…

Kelly: Yeah. But the idea is to supplement our nutrition. It’s not to grow all of the food, it’s to supplement on the way to Mars, as an example.

Audience Member: And also, I just applied for an internship with NASA, with Raymond Wheeler at the Orlando Plant Growth Center, so if you could put in a good word for me, that’d be great.

Tyson: Next question here, yes.

Audience Member: Hi, when did you…

Tyson: And, how old are you?

Audience Member: I’m 10.

Tyson: Ten. Well, welcome.

Audience Member: Thanks.

Tyson: Yeah, one of my first visits to this museum was when I was 9 and 10, so welcome. Come back more, okay? So, go for it.

Audience Member: When did you get the most scared in space?

Kelly: When my daughter got lonely.

Tyson: Your 21-year-old daughter got lonely.

Kelly: I was so scared. And she was lonely, I was lonely out in space. No, but I was most scared when she called me, or I called her and she said she was lonely. Other scary moments…

Tyson: Wait, wait, wait. You told me that, when you were in space, they, NASA allowed you to see the movie Gravity.

Kelly: Yes. Yeah.

Tyson: So that didn’t kind of freak you out?

Kelly: No.

Tyson: Okay.

Kelly: It’s a movie.

Tyson: It’s The Right Stuff here.

Kelly: It’s a movie.

Tyson: Oh, it’s a movie. Okay.

Kelly: Yeah. But, yeah, I would say I was never really scared. Maybe a little nervous at times. Space junk coming at ya. There was a time when we couldn’t move the Space Station out of the way to avoid the space junk. We didn’t know how fast it would get. It was going, Russian satellite going 35,000 miles an hour at us. You know, the relative speed reached 17,500, approaching each other. And we thought we could get hit. That was a little scary.

Audience Member: Thanks.

Tyson: The Right Stuff.

Audience Member: Scott, congratulations on the new book, first of all. You mentioned earlier, you talked a bit about how, when you’re in space and you’re looking at the Earth, how you get the sense of the sort of why are we at war with each other? How can such a beautiful place harbor so much violence? And at the same time during your lifetime you said you served in the Navy and you served during the Gulf War How do you reconcile these things, these parts of yourself, these experiences? And what do you think we could learn from this perspective, of both being part of the military and also part of a more peaceful endeavor?

Tyson: That’s a great question.

Kelly: Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m not the type of person, though, that looks back at things. I generally try to look forward, so that’s not actually something I’ve ever even thought about, having this perspective in space and that being somewhat in conflict with your job, your former job being to kill people, right? Which is what the job of the military generally is.

So it’s not really something I’ve considered much. But if I was called to serve my country as a fighter pilot again, I’d do it in a second. Because I think it’s my duty to do that as a citizen and … thank you.

But the people that decide to use those kind of powers need to be very, very careful in how and when we do it and, because…

Tyson: Because it’s not good enough to be powerful, you must also be wise.

Kelly: Correct.

Tyson: Yeah, okay.

Kelly: Thank you.

Tyson: Thank you. I’m sorry for everyone—these are the last two questions right here. Go ahead.

Audience Member: Can you see the stars in space?

Kelly: Can you what?

Audience Member: Can you see the stars in space?

Kelly: See the stars?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Kelly: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Audience Member: What do they look like?

Kelly: You can see more of them because you don’t have light pollution, so there’s more stars. They don’t twinkle, because the twinkling is from the atmosphere, I guess, and you see them definitely brighter, more of them and it’s …

Tyson: You can see stars in the daytime.

Kelly: No.

Tyson: Can’t you?

Kelly: No.

Tyson: Your eyes don’t adapt to it?

Kelly: Yeah. Sun’s too bright to see them during the day. But on the dark side, even with the moon out, you can see them. Especially when there’s no moon, they’re incredible. And you can see the Milky Way, too.

Audience Member: Oh, wait. How do you know if it’s day and night?

Kelly: How do you know?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Kelly: If you could see the sun, then it’s daytime.

Audience Member: Ahhh.

Kelly: But that’s not…

Tyson: Yeah, but you see the sun for 90 minutes.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: You count that as a day?

Kelly: Forty-five.

Tyson: Forty-five, because half and half.

Kelly: Yeah.

Tyson: So your daytime lasts 45 minutes.

Kelly: Generally, yeah. That’s a good question, though. That’s a very good question. I actually had some, a friend of mine, smart friend, recently asked me, hey, where do I look for the eclipse? So, that’s an example of not a good question…Yours is a very good question.

Tyson: Yeah, cool. Thank you for that question. Ladies and gentlemen, the last question of the evening. Yes?

Audience Member: What do you for--

Tyson: And I forgot to ask—and you are how old?

Audience Member: Nine.

Tyson: Nine. And how old are you?

Audience Member: Eight.

Tyson: You’re 8? Isn’t this past your bedtime? It’s past my bedtime. And this is a school night, right?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Tyson:Yeah, okay. But this is the way better thing you could possibly do is come to this and go to school late, okay? You get Scott to write you a late pass for tomorrow in school, okay? He’ll do that.

Kelly: Got it.

Tyson: You got this? Okay.

Kelly: I was great at writing notes when I was his age.

Audience Member: So, what do you do for your spare time in space?

Kelly: I took a lot of pictures of the Earth. I wrote in a journal because I thought I might write a book. I talked to my family on the phone, we have a phone. I watched movies and TV shows occasionally. I watched Game of Thrones. The whole thing.

Tyson: So you just binge, you binge.

Kelly: Twice. In space. Yeah, you have a little time every day to do stuff like that. Played with my food.

Audience Member: What’s your WiFi password in space?

Kelly: Huh?

Audience Member: What’s your WiFi password in space?

Kelly: What’s the WiFi password?

Audience Member: Yeah, in space.

Kelly: It’s NASA1234.

Tyson: So if you’re ever on another vessel and you’re tailing the Space Station, you can hack in…

Kelly: Absolutely.

Tyson: NASA1234.

Kelly: 1234, yeah.

Tyson: And the SSID is just Space Station.

Kelly: Something like that.

Tyson: Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking Scott Kelly.

Kelly: Thank you. Thank you.