After a historic 355 days in orbit, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth on March 30, 2022, breaking the record for the longest single spaceflight by an American. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Vande Hei discuss conducting experiments in space, the impact of extended spaceflight on humans, and the spiciness of space chili peppers.
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Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. This season of Smart Talks with IBM is all about new creators, the developers, data scientists, c t o s and other visionaries creatively applying technology in business to drive change. They use their knowledge and creativity to develop better ways of working, no matter the industry. Join hosts from your favorite Pushkin Industries podcasts as they use their expertise to deepen these conversations, and of course Malcolm Gladwell will guide you through the season as your host and provide his thoughts and analysis along the way. Look out for new episodes of Smart Talks with IBM on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more at IBM dot com slash smart talks. Hello, Hello, Welcome to Smart Talks with IBM podcast Bushkin Industries, Ighart Radio and IBM. I'm Malcolm Glabo. This season, we're talking to the new creators, the developers, data scientists, c t o s and other visionaries who are creatively applying technology and business to drive change. Channeling their knowledge and expertise, they are developing more creative and effective solutions, no matter the industry. On the final episode of the season. Our guest is NASA astronaut and retired Army Colonel Mark Bandahi. Mark holds the record for the longest single space flight undertaken by an American. He spent three hundred and fifty five days in orbit on the International Space Station, returning to Earth on March thirty. During his nearly year long stay in space, Mark conducted scientific experiments on behalf of NASA, including research where he himself was the test subject. By documenting the physiological changes he went through, Mark serves as an important source of data and understanding the impact of extended spaceflight on humans. I spoke with Mark about his experience as an astronaut and what he learned from living in space for a year. He told me about performing research only doable in space, times he felt true fear, and how seeing Earth from orbit challenged his personal beliefs and led him to become an advocate for mental health and sustainability. Okay, let's get to the interview, So tell me a little bit. Did you always want to be an astronaut? What? What? What drew you to space in the first place. I was always curious about space, largely because just trying to get my head wrapped around how we fit into the very grandest scheme of things has always been interesting to me. But I always thought of becoming an astronaut, like trying to become Spider Man. Like that's just not a realistic idea. It might sound cool, but that's like a superhero thing. So when I first joined the Army, my company commander, my boss, handed me a note because he knew I had a degree in in a technical field. That was a message from the Army saying that NASA wanted military people with these qualifications to apply to the ASTERNAT program. And I looked at the list and I had a bunch of them. That made me really excited. I thought, that's like, that's a possibility. And then um, when I went to grad school, had a lot of different things to possibly study, and it showed space physics, and just randomly, the Army said, Hey, we're starting a new career field called space operations. I signed up and got accepted to go into space operations, and I ended up getting loaned out to the Aston office at NASA to work in the Mischi Control Center, which, honestly, I love that job so much that I could be doing that till and never having been an astro, and felt like I was super blessed. It was amazing to live in history and just talking to the astronauts in space, helping them solve problems while I'm listening to what the flight control team is doing. That's a fantastic job. I absolutely loved it. During the three year period that I expected to do that, they're hired another class and that was That was the first time I decided to apply, and largely because my wife said, Mark, come on, you gotta try. Because I thought there's no way they would ever hire me, so I almost self selected myself out of that possibility. So really, I feel very very fortunate. I could have very easily not pursued this. I'm very happy it worked out, and I'm very happy I did pursue it. There's thousands of people that could do this job that never got the opportunity and may have done a better job than I did. I just somehow got the job. Yeah. Now, you had the record for the longest time in space, right, it's the record for an American astronut for the longest single flight. So Scott Kelly flew for three and forty days continuously, and I threw flew for three and fifty five days continuously. What is it about you that allows you to do that? Like you know, if you I'm I'm I'm gonna say, if you put me through the exact same training you went through, there's no way I'm spending three days I would have, I would lose my mind. I think what I'm gonna do is compare myself between the first flight and the second flight. After I came back from the first flight, I had no desire to go back. The big change for me between the first and second flight is I paid a lot more attention to my mental health. I got in the habit of meditating every day, and I think that helped me not only recognize the value of trying to appreciate the present moment and try to be curious about the present moment, but it also made me more aware of what internal habit patterns I have, and it gave me the ability to kind of almost be an external observer of those, so that when I I could recognize sometimes that hey, you're making up a very negative story and that's why you're grumpy right now. And that really helped me out with making a mental shift. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing when you're up. You know, why is it important to do various kinds of experiments and things in space? Yeah, great question. That's a really important question too. So it is a national laboratory, and it's it's unique because a lot of dominant forces on the ground are not dominant forces in space. So you get pretty interesting effects. Like when you make a flame on the Earth, because of the pressure differentials and the fact that the hot combustion products are lighter, they will rise up and go away from the flame, and that will draw in the auction rich gases that keep the flame going. So in space, those combustion gases will just make a ball around the source of the fire. Turns out that flames in space burn more efficiently and at a lower temperature, So there's some potential to have a cleaner burning combustion engine. But that just gives us a more depth of understanding of how these things work. It just gives us another way to change some of the the variables. Another thing that that we can do on the space station is sedimentation. If you take a solution over time on the Earth with the heavier items and that solution are going to settle to the bottom. Well, in space, there's no preferred direction for those things to go in because everything isn't. This what I like to call a free fall that just keeps missing the Earth. So we're in a continuous state of freefall. Solutions stay very homogeneous. You can do experiments like there's even the way we try to simulate the human body with body samples and try to understand how things work. In the space station, where those things float, it's a closer simulation to something being inside the human body. So there's this I could go on and on. Clearly there's a whole lot of different things that that allows us to do. And delicate structures, even protein structures that we could never make stay together on the ground, can stay together in space. Oh that's interesting. So it just gives you a it's like another context for trying to it and scientific knowledge. It just you've you've changed all of kind of the defining variables of the experiment. Absolutely, that's it's a very significant thing. Absolutely. And then there's also that the idea of what we're doing in the space station, not just for science, but for human exploration, because we're putting people in space for such a long period of time, we're getting a better understanding of how to keep people healthy. We can do technology experiments to try to figure out how to get things to work for these long er ation space flights where we're gonna put people much further away from the Earth than I was on my flight. Some of those experiments associate were associated with me being a subject of the experiments. Give me an example of a kind of health care related line of research. Sure, I'm very open about the fact that I lost eight percent of my bone density. That's not typical for somebody at my age and my activity level, But as a function of being in space, I lost eight percent of my bone density because no more you know, you're not exercising with any resistance at all. Is that? Is that the reason almost true? You spend all of your time except for when you're exercising, without really needing a skeleton to to to support you. Because that's why we have a skeleton. When you're in a freefall all the time, there's nothing that you have to use to resist the ground or to keep you standing on the ground. So we have a resistive exercise device on the space station that. Actually, it's very interesting. It uses vacuum cylinders as the source of the force. So when you expand the vacuum cylinder, unlike a spring, the vacuum cylinder the force will be constant regardless of how far you pull it, whereas with a spring, the more you expand the spring, the higher the force gets. So that allows us to have kind of what we want. But I like to tell school kids, if you imagine those vacuum cylinders being attached to one side of a seesaw pulling upwards and you on the other side of the seesaw pulling upwards, then you can change the mechanical advantage by moving where the pivot point is, where the fulcrum is, and so we have the ability to turn a crank and it can adjust the force you feel anywhere from twenty pound to six pounds. But even so, I'm stunned though by in the space of a year, even given determined efforts on your part to counteract the effects of the physiological effects of being in a zero gravity atmosphere, even then the effect on your body was profound. A lot. It's a lot, But I lost seven percent on the first flight, and I got it all back before the second flight, so I fully expect to get it all back. It does come back, and with if somebody ever, some archaeologists someday ever examined my bones, they would be able to tell that I had flung in space because the way that matrix is built is somewhat different. But I fully expect all of all the bone density to come back. You know, the series we're doing is it's called The New Creators, and we're really focused on the role the creativity plays in kind of pushing the envelopes of knowledge. So I'm just I'm just curious about you're up there in this strange environment doing what's sound like some pretty sophisticated experiments. Can you give me an example at the time when you felt your kind of your creativity was being tapped in a meaningful way in this experience. Yeah? Interesting. I would say there is an experiment called Celestial Immunity that involved us with uh small Petrie dishes that contained body uh samples. I don't know if it was a solution with some blood or or what or what, but I just know they were from various people, elderly and young people, and we would go through and use a pipette too inoculate them with various things, and then we would take these devices, put him in a black box to control the carbon dioxide and the temperature, and put them in a in a place to let them kind of incubate for a while. In the process of doing it, I think my creativity came in as I was describing the challenges that I realized that the the people who designed the experiment might not have realized we run into. And I was able to to use what I've had my hands on to to give them advice about ways we could change the experiment around. Because those peature dishes didn't have a lid, so they were just held in there by surface tension. And so the first time I did it, I I put them very slowly into the box, I closed the box, couldn't see what they were doing, and I had to very gently move them over to to the place where they can incubate. And I had no idea if I was succeeding or failing. So I think there was a lot of conversation, a lot of observing, a lot of trying to draw on the unique experiences I'm exposed to to help out them. And it turned out I was an orbit long enough that the second iteration that came up, and they had, among other things, that had put a thin sheet of flexible plastic on top. So instead of having to try to contain everything there, we just had to puncture it with a needle and add the add the inoculation that way instead, tell me a little bit more about that paramit. That's that celestial immunity investigation. But that's like the best name ever for a science experiment. Um, I agree, it sounds like Jesus is involved in some ways. I agree, no, wrong, But what was that experiment about trying to trying to trying to investigate. We're trying to understand how the human immune system reacts to different situations. So again, I think it's a great experiment to highlight because a better understanding of the human immune system will help out everybody. So on Earth, we might do an experiment where we have a variety of of different cell samples that were exposing to various pathogens and studying them. And hear, what we're doing is repeating the experiment under a radically different set of of conditions and in the hopes that changing the parameters of the experiment exposed some new bit of knowledge or yes, And I don't know if that's been successful or not, but we do know. We do know that there are of viruses that are more virulent in space for some reason. We don't understand why their biological things react differently. What was the most fun thing you did when the Uh one of my crewmates, Caleb Baron, for some reason that two of us decided we're going to try to do some stunts together. So we we literally would just have our feet hooked underneath some handrails and push off towards each other and then do something like get curl up, hit our hands down low. It causes to each spin um simultaneously Eno directions to a couple of backflips and then land. And it took a lot of attempts before we actually made it look like something was in sync. I've never once done a backflip in my life, but I've done four in a row before I hit my head on something on the space station. UH. We grew hatch chili peppers. UH. I recently got a certificate from New Mexico that said, congratulations, you're a hatstronaut. So I'm proud to have that title. The thought we tarned cooking with them. We didn't cook with them. We of course, it was science. So we had to ship most of them back to the ground frozen carefully. But they were very nice about letting us have some of the chili peppers, and they warned us that the stress response to the space environment that these peppers have, they think would be that they're more potent. And I think they were more potent. They were shockingly spicy. NASA could sell those chili peppers to some fancy restaurant and it could be, you know, celestially, you know, celestial pepper soup or something. You know, what a great name for a dish. I'm sure that celestial foods will be the culinary trend of the future. Pretty soon, we'll all be paying extra for specially vegetables grown in space. Forget farm to table, try orbit to table. Getting aside, there was one thing I made sure to ask Mark. I wanted to know more about the relationship between the astronauts and space and the NASA team on the ground. New technologies are reshaping the way astronauts communicate with their counterparts on Earth. IBM, for example, is testing edge computing solutions on board the space station to try and reduce the time it takes to analyze and send data. But what does this information flow mean for an astronaut's day to day life and what happens if there's an emergency? I asked Mark for more details. Tell me a little bit about the role that technology plays in UM in all of this, I mean, you're you're doing these experiments, You're actively learning in this new environment. UM, what's happening with the data? How are you making sense of it? Processing it? Tell me about that angle on the on your work. The astronauts live in the space station. The ground control team is controlling the space station, so that data flow, the telemetry from the space station, and the commanding to the space station is happening just to actually get the thing of work, to get the lab to work, to make it. If we want to change the temperature, we could we could go ahead and go deep into the software we got on board that we're trained to use in case we lose communications with the ground. But if we even want to change the temperature, we just call the ground control team and say, hey, one of our crew members feels a little cold. We all agreed we should raise the temperature by a degree or something. They would change it. So they're in charge. We live there and we take we take care of everything that we possibly can. So data transfer is crucial to the way we operate the space station today. In your time up there, did you have any kind of moments of crisis? Did you ever lose communication with Houston? Two times we lost as you control. I think we got to the point where they told us to start executing the procedure and then we're able to call us off, or they warned us that it's possible you could lose you know, maybe ten minutes from now, there's a risk of you losing communications for example. Is that scary? What never felt scary to me? And I don't. I think the reason it didn't feel scary is because when we do that on the ground for training, when we do it in a simulation, the simulation is much harder because in space, the ground was trying to help as much as possible. But on the ground they give you a scenario where you call the ground, you get no response. Every everything is as bad as possible. So it was to me it felt just like a simulation. But where the trainers were willing to give us more help than they were willing to give us on the ground. So and the culture that I got trained in and that's worked for me really, really well, is one that says, slow way down. If you're on an emergency on the space station, unless it's an ammonia leak. In all other cases, slow way down because the worst thing you can do is go so fast that you make a mistake and cause problems. But otherwise it's a very safe system. When I was leading newer crew members, I tried to encourage them to have a cold sure where if they had any confusion, that they would feel comfortable stopping everybody and say, hey, why are we going down this path that doesn't make sense to me? Because that could be the one question that gets us to stay on the correct path. You said you didn't get scared in that moment. Do you ever get scared? Mark? Oh? Yeah, I definitely get scared. I don't believe you. To give you an example, my experience of returning to Earth is everything's really interesting. While you're going through the atmosphere and you're in a ball of flame and the heat shields melting away, and see things that are melting away going past the window. That's interesting. But then when there's nothing to pay attention to while you're falling towards the earth, and this time you know you're in a trajectory that will result in you hitting the earth with nothing to do except wait for the parachute to open for what I think was probably a couple of very long minutes, and nobody was having a conversation. We're just all quietly waiting to find out if we're gonna live and we're gonna die. I didn't realize how afraid I was that it wasn't gonna work until the parachute actually opened, and how giddily overjoyed I felt when when it actually opened, because I was just like, we're gonna live. So yeah, I was scared, And again I didn't realize it until after the fact. Yeah. Yeah, Um, let's talk You mentioned at the beginning your sort of interest in mental health. Let's talk about that a little bit. You know, you you went through an experience which is exceedingly difficult and unusual and surely must have taught you a great deal about the kind of the challenges of maintaining one's mental health. Yeah, it was a good experience. But certainly those life skills doesn't matter if you're in space or not. Um I tend to get distracted easily, and so practicing trying to stay focused on one thing and paying attention and trying to maintain a sense of curiosity about something as simple as breathing is I think a really good practice to try to to expand your ability to stay focused and and actually even find joy and relaxation in it. It's it's very reassuring if you can get yourself to feel really relaxed no matter what's going on, that it's it's it's like you've got this island of comfort that you know is just internal to you. So I thought that was very powerful. It's not something that I how does the skill before my fifties at all. And I think meditation has certainly helped the awareness of the negative impact that the narratives that I would use to fill in the gaps and information I had was really powerful for me. And I'll give you an example that's associated with space flight. We have a module on the space station that's called the PMM. It's like the attic of the space station. If you have a task that takes forty that you've given you forty. Miss Ado. Part of every activity is typically gathered the material you need and a lot of time. That means you go into the p MM and it's not unusual to see somebody's just ankles and feet sticking out between bags as they're digging with a flash head lamp on trying to get deep into the into the depths of these bags that are bungee corded in place. And it can be very chaotic when you have to get multiple items, and if if you just loosely put it underneath the bungee cord and then bump the bungee cord, it can disappear very easily, So it can be very frustrating. So there was an instance I remember really well where I was had already spent twenty minutes trying to find stuff, and I still hadn't found the first thing, and I was getting mad, and I realized that the reason I was getting grumpy was the narrative I had was I the ground's going to start thinking of Vanda High is one of the slow, the slow guys on the space station. He always takes longer to do other stuff. But then I realized that I didn't know that that was just some detail I was adding, And then I thought to myself, wait a minute. For all I know the ground was bad, that they didn't give me enough time to do this, So what do I really All I really knew as fact was that I was on the space station and my job was to find stuff space hardware in these bags that are all bungee corded and floating around, and honestly, that was kind of cool, and I had really if it took me longer than they expected, then that was just a fact. It took longer than I expected. They didn't have to be a positive or negative emotion associated that was just a fact. So instead of as many times before I've come out of there feeling angry at the world, at the situation, just beating myself about not being good enough for my job, I came out being like, well, you know, this is kind of cool. It was just such a huge shift, And I think over time you perform better too when you give yourself a break like that. So I think there's this aspect also about being more accepting of yourself, being more curious about it. There's just so many things that I think have helped make my life easier. And again, by no means am I perfect. I. This is a continuing process that I'm still working out and struggling with. But it helps you to to keep your kind of perfectionist stick and self judgmental side and check absolutely, is that the most significant change that you've undergone. No, honestly that the most significant change for me was uh, well, the first big thing was when I first got to the space station. It was after a very long day and I had the next twenty four hours off to recover from that. I spent the first ninety minutes the first one time around the planet looking out the window in awe, and the first thing that struck me was how isolated the Earth looked. When you are looking at the Earth and in the sun and your eyes are adjusted to the sun, it makes the backdrop to the Earth space look inky black, like the definition of lack of light, like it's liquid. So that was shocking to me. Well, you say shocking, It was shocking because I don't think it was like I had never seen something that black. It was just like again, I I if you can imagine taking a ball and dropping it in a in a in a pool of black ink. That's that's what it looked like. And I knew it was I knew it was emptiness, but it was it just there was an emotional impact in that, and I think, uh, I think there's been people that have been it's it can be hard to grapple with the sense of the Earth being isolated. Later on in the flight, as I was getting ready to come home again this is my first flight, I felt like I should be going back to the Earth with some unique perspective and some type of change to me. And I thought, am I blowing this? Am I like, I don't know what that is. I had this incredible sense of smallness. And I say that because another thing that struck me looking at the Earth was when you look towards the horizon, the atmosphere looks like a varnish on a rock. It's like a puddle in a parking lot. It just looks super thin. So recognizing that first of all, and then recognizing that on that same horizon, none of the mountains show up. They're too small. So these things where we perceive as huge relative to the size of the Earth are unobservable on the horizon. But then the only thing about the largest structure that humans have ever built, and how that compares to the largest mountains, and then how big we are compared to those structures. I just I felt like any sense of self importance I had was stripped away. So I was really struggling with is that what I'm gonna come home with? This this idea that that that there's this meaninglessness to it like that was really troubling to me, And also had a lot of time to think about my mortality because I, you know what, I might not survive this, So it's a for me at least. I don't tell him that everybody has had his experience, but for me, it was a very thoughtful time. Yeah, I realized that you had. I was struggling with the scale of things when really part of my role is to be attentive to the scale I choose. If I'm studying a plant for my whole career, or maybe I'm sitting around the dinner table and being attentive to the scale right there, which is just my loved ones around the table, or maybe you're studying the structure universe, just being attentive to that scale. The scale you choose, and we have the flexibility to pick it and they're all okay. But just kind of accepting that I thought was was a big leap for me. UM. So, mental health advocacy is something that you've become quite interested in. The sustainability has also been an idea that UM is that something that also grew out of your those sort of observations when when you were in space that interesting sustainability. Yeah, I do think that I did spend a lot of time on the space station thinking about, well, this is probably my last time in space, what's my what am I gonna do after I work at NASA? What is my purpose here? And I love being outside. That's why I joined the Army as opposed to the Air Force. I I just the idea of being outside and being comfortable in challenging environments is something that's always been appealing to me. And I also feel like with devices that we all carry around that are engineered to distract us, I think it's very easy for us to stop being attentive to the environment that we actually live in. I I do think we've got challenges ahead of us. The climate change is is atmospheric change. Again, I've already mentioned my perception of the atmosphere is that very thin resource, and I really want to get that message across the people, because it's easy to think of the earth as so big that how could we possibly impact it? But really it's not the whole earth we're worried about. It is just this thin layer we live in. That idea you as well as concern that we're getting so sucked into screens that I would love to get involved in helping younger people appreciate that there's other alternatives, that there's an outdoor world that's super interesting, and I don't think a lot of young people are getting the opportunity to compare one way of living to the other like we have. We grew up without those things. We know what it was like and how much fun it could be without having a cell phone in your pocket all the time, and a lot of people are growing up without that. So I'd love to get involved with getting people to experience that. Yeah, yeah, well wonderful. Thank you. Some of this has been really fascinating. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, Malcolm. It really really was a pleasure. Um. I feel blessed I got to talk to you, it was really a wonderful opportunity for me as well. When Mark was looking at Earth from orbit and grappling with how insignificant we all seemed, he said he felt troubled by the possible meaninglessness of it all, But then he realized it's up to human beings to choose the scale we pay attention to. We decide what's worthy of our attention and what's meaningful. That might be something as expansive as studying the cosmos, or as immediate as having dinner with our loved ones, or as minute as the well being of a single hatch chilly pepper plant. This piece of wisdom from Mark is a great place for us to end this season. Pay attention to the scale you choose, because creativity begins when we give attention to something previously unnoticed, a minor detail overlooked, a bigger picture still unseen. As we strive to be new creators in our work and in our lives, let's remember that new insights can be found wherever we choose to look, as long as we're attentive enough to see it. Thanks for listening to Smart Talks with I b. M. This is our season finale, but Stay tuned for more smart Talks coming soon. Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano, David jaw, Royston Reserve, and Edith Rousselo with Jacob Goldstein. We're edited by Sophie Crane. Our engineers are Jason Gambrel, Sarah Brigar and Ben Holliday. Theme song by Gramoscope. Special thanks to Carl Migliori, Andy Kelly, Kathy Callaghan and the eight Bar and IBM teams, as well as the Pushkin marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and i Heart Media. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Glama. This is a paid advertisement from my BM