Risk is Our Business with William Shatner & Scott Kelly

0:00This past December 2024, I was on a ship to Antarctica. That's one of my bucket list items. And I couldn't resist because there were some notables on board. And I said, this would make a good StarTalk episode. So I snared the one and only William Shatner, Captain Kirk. I don't know if you know, but he is a big fan of exploration. That's not a hard stretch, given what he's known for, crossing the universe during the TV commercials using warp drives. But he's also a deep thinker and he loves science. So I had to get him on the program. And also on board was NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. You may remember he's a twin with Mark Kelly.

0:50And both of them have been in space. But Scott Kelly in particular was sent into orbit into the International Space Station for 340 days, almost an entire year. He holds the record for continuous time and space for an American. He has a lot to say about exploration, and he's a big fan of Shackleton. And let's remember that every explorer who goes where no one has gone before is a risk taker. So if you encounter a challenge where you say, this might not work, this could be dangerous for some people, Captain Kirk included, risk is their business. It's a conversation I'm having with both of them for StarTalk on board a ship to Antarctica.

1:40Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

1:57Scott, we're in the Drake Passage right now. Could you give us a little background on that? Why are we listening? Why are we feeling nausea? What's going on here on Earth? Yeah, well, the Drake Passage is the part of the Southern Ocean where at the tip between South America and Antarctica. Cape Horn, the tip. Yeah. But where the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans meet, and it's very deep here, which causes, you know, with the prevailing winds that are generally west to east, some pretty big swells. And I think we're seeing about, I don't know, maybe 14, 15 feet right now, but they can get as high as 50 feet in this passage.

2:39Ooh. So we're in a cruise ship. What would this passage have been like in a wooden ship a hundred years ago? You wouldn't want to do it. But risk is our business. Yes, I said that. yeah i think it would be pretty harrowing um you know in this kind of even in this sea state in a in a ship like that but i can't imagine being at the you know swells of 40 and 50 feet i was just talking to my brother on the phone this is your twin brother twin brother you know when i last interviewed you on star talk i said which brother are you you said you're the good-looking brother yeah i just that's still true okay yeah but anyway he was telling me about being in the north Atlantic on a cargo ship because we were both, when we were younger, training to be merchant mariners in 80-foot seas and losing, you know, 20 containers off the ship.

3:37So if you think this is bad, just imagine that. So now, Mr. Shatner, my dear, your show, the original Star Trek series in the 1960s, was coincident with while we were priming our space program to go to the moon. But as far as your show is concerned, we were already there. Space was not a question about whether it should happen. It had already happened. It was a matter of learning to speak Klingon. As many fans of the show managed to. I can't count myself among those who are fluent in Klingon. Nor I. So were you just an actor at the time? Or did you participate emotionally in this idea that exploration is in our DNA?

4:38Exploration doesn't necessarily mean going to Mars and colonizing Mars. You can explore. For example, may I spend a moment on exploration and why exploration? A while ago, some years ago, I heard a story of a ranger in the forest in the Sierras occupying a cabin. And he was there, I guess, for fire observation. And while he was living in the cabin alone, deer came and ate the grass. And then one deer poked its head in the window to see who was there. And he struck up a conference and had a relationship with the herd of deer and discovered that deer had posted types of personality. There was the diplomat deer who poked his head in to see what was going on.

5:32There was the guard deer. There was a deer. So this herd group had assigned roles that he discovered that, my goodness, that's how we organize ourselves. When we were on the last island with the penguins. On this voyage, having just returned from Antarctica. On this voyage of exploration for all of us, for me certainly, of discovering new worlds, new whatever the language was, and seeing new civilizations, which were the penguins. and a penguin came up to the group that was standing, having landed, and the penguin, Mark, what are you doing here? Was that what it was saying? This was the diplomat penguin.

6:28Okay. And I thought, of course, this whole thing is a circle of life, and here's a penguin acting like the deer and the ranger and us, and this circle. I thought, wow, what a discovery of we're in this arid land that's rife with life, but you can't see too much of it. But it's there. And the penguins are a big part of it. And it's exploration. And it was a discovery. And I had the best time. Okay, so what you're saying here implicitly and explicitly is that humans aren't the only curious animals out there. That's right. The penguin was exploring. It was exploring in its own way. No. It was exploring in a very explicit way.

7:16What are you guys doing here? You're two legs. You don't waddle. Some of us waddle, but... You point to me that I waddle. Let's go back 60 years ago. You're an actor. By the way, by the way, I don't know if you knew this, but William Shatner appeared in two distinct episodes of The Twilight Zone. Yes. And quite memorable episodes at that. Predating, of course, the Star Trek series. You're an actor in Hollywood. Yes. And so was there anything in particular that drew you to the part? You're talking about Star Trek? Yeah, Star Trek. I was in New York doing something in New York. and they had made a pilot of Star Trek, and NBC didn't want to buy the pilot.

8:10They had faults with it, but they loved the idea, and they wanted, for the first time, I'd never heard of it before, I've never heard of it since, they said, we'll give you another, whatever the cost was, to make another pilot, recast it all, and they called me, I was in New York, they called me, would I come to Hollywood to see this thing that they had made with the idea of playing the captain. So I was like ushered in. Can I presume you had no idea what impact that would have on our culture at the time? None whatsoever. And I saw the thing that NBC had turned down. I thought, that's pretty darn good.

8:47It's a little pedantic. It's a little, you know, here we are, we're sailing the five oceans. Whereas the guys in the capsules are all friendly And, you know, there isn't this distance between this. I suggested a little more camaraderie and humor and we sold the pilot. So when I look at this, by the way, I don't know if anybody's ever been to Comic-Con. The one, at least in San Diego, I don't know if they also do this in New York. The very last session is a Starship Smackdown where every single starship, spaceship ever appeared in fictional storytelling is put up on display, like drawings of them, photos of them.

9:36And you vote. There are people arguing the case of one ship or another of which is the greatest of ships. the year the Starship Enterprise won that, what carried the day was a simple fact that no ship before then ever displayed in storytelling was ever designed to just explore. Every ship you ever see someone get into and out of in a science fiction movie or story, it's designed to take you to a destination. That's why those ships existed. So this as a concept is like, oh my gosh. Exploration was paramount in why the ship existed at all. It was designed. I mean, what you've said is valid. The truth of the matter is the designer of the ship had designed many versions, put them on a wall and invited all the executives in to see which aspect of which drawing they loved.

10:47And then he combined what everybody loves. It was like a potpourri of... Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. NASA's done that before, I think. See that again? NASA's done that before. That's why they get canceled. That's a space shuttle. Space shuttle is an amalgam of ideas stapled together pretty much. It's a noble looking ship. It looks like it should go someplace. Unfortunately, it's not powered, right? The space shuttle orbiter, it's got wings and jet nozzles out the back. So it seems to me, wherever you are, you ought to be able to choose, let's go someplace new. And in fact, that's what they did in the film Armageddon.

11:34Yes, but in real life, once they start their approach, they've got to land it. That's one of the reasons why Armageddon violated more known laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made. So just tell me about the space shuttle, what it meant. if its only job, as fun and versatile as it looked, if its only job was to get you to orbit... Well, that's not, that wasn't its only job. Oh, please. So the space shuttle is one of the most, is the most diverse spacecraft we've ever built, and probably will be so in our lifetime. But it has one serious limitation. It's heavy, and it doesn't carry enough fuel to get out of low Earth orbit.

12:21But it does launch people, It launches cargo. It can build things. It built an International Space Station. It can be its own science laboratory. You can do spacewalks from it. And that cargo bay is huge, as far as I can tell, because it launched, it deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. And my favorite, my favorite size analog to this Hubble telescope, it's about the size of a Greyhound bus. Which means you could lower a Greyhound bus into the payload of the shuttle. Yeah, something that weighed up to 50 ,000 pounds. Whereas the Soyuz, if you use that as the counter example, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft is really only designed to launch three people and a very small amount of cargo.

13:05And that's it. It does it very well, but it doesn't do very much. You've been up more than once. Have you been up on each of those craft? Twice on each. Twice on each. Yeah. So now maybe because the Soyuz is not as complex as the shuttle and the orbiter and the solid rocket boosters, the Soyuz has the best safety record of any space rocket. They've had two fatal in-flight accidents, just like the space shuttle, but less people. Okay. Similar number of flights, but... Oh, I thought they had many more flights. Okay, I didn't know that.

13:55I'm Jasmine Wilson, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

14:12Where does this fit with you? We know we learned earlier on this voyage, You gave a marvelous talk reviewing Shackleton, the explorer to the Antarctic, and the trials and tribulations he went through. And no one died after he got stuck in the ice. And he's a bit of a hero of yours, as we all felt. And mine too. And yours too. So here's someone who's gone where no one has gone before. Oh, I've heard that. Boldly, boldly. Boldly gone where no one has gone before. Oh, sorry. He's right. And you sound so good on the track. Is that you narrating it? That was me. Boldly go. Oh, my God. That was you, though, right?

14:55That was me. That was right. With the very famous split infinitive. Boldly go. Go boldly. Yeah. And later in the later films, they said to go boldly. Well, I wrote a book called Boldly Go. Yeah. No, we loved that. When they tried to fix the grammar in a later movie, it was like, no, that's just deal with it. It doesn't work that way. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. We're talking about ships and its efficiency. I was invited to the Cape one time. We rolled out the red carpet. Cape Canaveral, Florida. Yeah. Where they would launch all our spaceships. And in the center of one of those hangars, on a platform, was the lunar excursion module, the LEM.

15:38went up the stairs and they invited me in to the LEM, which looks like whatever you call it, you know, the... Pergola? Yes, exactly. It looks, it's the simplest, and you get inside and they have a hammock to lie down. I laid down on the hammock and it's this ridiculous children's toy and it's got more instruments, more complications. and that's the result from the shuttle to the spaceship to the thing and the they've got a little garden tool thing to land on the moon, get out there, take a picture, get back in and then meet up with the whatever we call it, the thing circulating. The command module.

16:26Then they get out of the lab into the ship that's going to take them back to Earth. And this, what happens to the, oh, that's been left. No, no, what happens to it? It crashes into the moon. It crashes into the moon. Eventually, I guess. However, if memory serves, Apollo 13 realized that for their life support, they needed some of the life support that was on the limb. So that in missions subsequent to Apollo 13, didn't they keep the limb a little further in? towards Earth to make sure? Is that what happened? I don't remember. They used life support systems to save themselves. The life support systems on the land, they had to do some modifications, but they were able to use that to safely get back there.

17:15Can you imagine? And they're saying, well, what will we do? And the engineers down on Earth are saying, well, try this and try that, and you're going to die. But when you talk about exploration and the means of exploration from the, what's his name, Thor Heidel using papyrus as a raft and then getting to all shackled in a wooden boat. And here we are on this modern liner, which was being explained by you that the engines here are of particular make. And because we don't hear the engines propelling this boat as we are right now going back to Ushuaia, we don't hear the engines. Except every so often, and I didn't understand why, you hear, when we're parked, you hear a rumble.

18:11I think, what is that? Is that the anchor going down? It's not. Well, it's station keeping. It's the station keeping. Yeah, so you could drop an anchor, but if you don't need to, then why? right and now we know exactly where the boat is sweet it's not my boat all the captain knows all the means of exploration going on the variety of things that we're using to explore let me let me throw a little monkey wrench in this as usual if if you know that much about where you're going, and it can be done in the safety and comfort of a luxury ship, then is it really exploration? If the risks have been reduced to zero - No, but you mean if you're rowing in an open boat, you're more exploring than getting a - If you're going where no one has gone before, that is exploration.

19:13All right. If you're attempting tasks that have never been attempted before. Scott goes into orbit. He's a guinea pig for the doctors on Earth because he's got a twin brother. We're going to learn about no one had done that before with a twin brother. It's incredible. What an incredible thing. Your brother was not the guinea pig. You were because you're in space and you're exposed to cosmic rays. What happened to you? Well, I was exposed to the environment. He was the guinea pig on Earth that was a complete ball of... Yeah, keep telling yourself that. He's he's chilling on the safety of Earth's surface and you're not And you know, he had people following him around the country and taking all kinds of samples and having to leave stuff outside His front door and also was like the lowest stuff outside his front door We figured what that is.

19:59Yeah for people to pick up lowest lowest paid government Employee at the time because they had to pay him so he was making minimum wage because he was no longer a NASA astronaut So I really have to hand it to him to do that. Whereas I was like getting all the glory by being in space. But also, like you mentioned, the radiation. Yeah, but your heart is smaller than it was when you went in there. Yeah, stuff happened to you. It grew back. It did? But as my wife Amiko says, it's a good thing I started with a big heart. Oh. That's great. I just want to understand this. So even though the exploration was not in the realm of place, it was in the realm of physiology.

20:38It's exploratory physiology. I agree. I agree. I agree. So what did we learn by exploring what happens to your body in orbit for how many days? On that mission, 340. 340. They couldn't stay an extra 25 days and call it a year? I wanted to, but the Russians had a certain schedule they had to meet, so we had to come back. Because you came back on the Soyuz. Yeah. Let me remind people, the Soyuz does not land in water. They just land on land. They crash land on the car. Yeah. It's really not a landing. Well, it's your landage if you walk away. It's a landing. It's the ultimate e-ticket ride when that parachute opens.

21:26And if I hated being in space every minute for that entire 340 days, I'd do it all over again for that last 20 minutes. Really? Just the thrill? 20 minutes of coming back to Earth? What was that like? Well, when the parachute opens, you just tumble and are thrown around like crazy. And there have been, I know one of one particular person, I'm sure other people have felt this way, who was an experienced test pilot. I'm not going to say the person's name because I don't want to embarrass him. But he was apparently not briefed on how dynamic the landing is. And he started screaming because he thought he was going to die.

22:04High pitch or low and guttural? I wasn't there. Because there's flames coming out of the tile, right? It's like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but while you're on fire. And as soon as you realize... So, I mean, the flames are coming up through the windows. You're on fire. That's while you're slowing down on... Yeah, but... The shoot opens a little bit later. The shoot opens later than that. Oh, I understand that. But in that moment when I was screaming, flames are coming up. You're burning up. And you don't know whether the tiles are glued down and up. They may be flipping out. The tiles may be.

22:47They lost some tiles. There's a lot of things you don't know that's going on behind the scenes. From the inside, you don't see what it's got on the outside. You might not want to know. What was it like to have three of you in the ship, right? Yeah. And one guy's going, ah! What's that like? I wasn't there on that one, but it was only, you know, reported afterwards that this particular person... Was he... Did they say, you can't do that? I don't know. A lot going on, then. You might not... I'm an astronaut, and I explore space. I'm going to Mars. But when I came down, I saw flames! but i still want to get to the bottom of the advancing a space frontier by learning what's happening to your physiology so oh yeah okay let me get back to that yeah heart shrunk 25 percent changes to my telomeres 25 percent yeah telomeres that's like the end of your dna or something yeah really an indication of your physical age as you get older they get shorter more afraid Initially NASA thought that was due to the controlled diet and exercise.

23:57Later, you know, we learned that there were some worms that the Japanese were doing telomere experiments on too. And their telomeres got better while they were on the space station. Never once saw them working out on the treadmill or doing any kind of exercise. So it turns out it was actually the radiation. Most important result that I always want everyone to understand and point out is after spending a year in space, Like you mentioned earlier, I am now not only smarter, but more handsome than my brother Mark. Would he agree to that? Probably not. Okay. This idea of pushing the limits of not only what a machine can do, but what human physiology can do, this is exploration.

24:40And who, you, sir, now the oldest person to ascend above the carbon line. Oh, do we go there again? I am not. My telomeres are very long. Okay. But let me ask you this. When I saw you go up the ladder to go into the Blue Origin capsule. Yes. You know, and I said, this man is 89 years old. How old were you for that flight? I don't know. 32, something like that. No. Times three. Wait a minute. I'm walking up the stairs to go and they're venting. Something's venting. Out of a pipe. Out of the side of the ship. The side of the ship. What's that? Hydrogen. Hydrogen. The, the. Fuel. Zeppelin. The Hindenburg.

25:31The Hindenburg. Burned. And hydrogen was what was burning. Yeah. And I'm looking at this thing. There was some coating of aluminum powder on the surface to make it highly reflective. Exactly. On the standing electricity up the road. Had you been in Russia? Not only would the thing be venting the fuel, there'd be people smoking cigarettes right at the bottom of the lunch bed. Let us be candid with ourselves that part of the risk of exploring on some level is even the risk of even starting the trip. If you're exploring, you're ready to die because you're going, at some level, you gotta be ready to die.

26:09Here you go. What probability of death would you have accepted What's the highest probability of death you would have accepted to do that mission? To launch on the space shuttle? Yes. Well, I launched on the space shuttle. I was STS-103. And so we had approximately 103 prior missions. And there was one fatal accident. So that's a 1 % chance of dying. Yes. What would I have accepted? Certainly not 50%. 10 %? Maybe. Maybe 10%. It would depend on what we were doing. Well, that's an interesting question. Yes. Because death is so permanent, you lose the bet. It's 10 to 1. You don't just pay up, oh, here's the 100 I owe you.

27:02It's your life. 1 % is not acceptable. Nothing is acceptable. I'm going up. I'm a test pilot. I've tested this plane. I've tested this thing. I know it works. I'm not going up to die. I'm going to explore. Oh, that has to be your attitude. That has to be your attitude. And that's what you come to terms with. Like, I would think about it leading up to my first flight with, you know, you kind of rationalize, hey, for one, I want to do this. I think it's important. I want to serve my country. It's my job. I'm a test pilot. There is risk. My brother and I used to exchange those like death letters for our families.

27:43Like if the thing blows up, give this to my wife and children. And we would do the same, fortunately. Never had to use those. But it's, you know, everything has risk. Is that a thing in NASA? Is that a thing? Death letters? Maybe. I don't know. It was the thing with my brother and I. You're a test pilot. So you've run that. It's a new airplane. And you're testing the airplane. So you run that airplane along the runway, the front. Now you're a foot up the ground. You make a circle. And get you 10 feet, 20 feet, 30. Then you're 50 feet. By that time, you know the plane works. You go up to Mars. No, you know it worked.

28:19It might not continue to work as you extend out the envelope. Now you press a button, you eject. I mean, the chances of living. Now, let's go to Mars, guys. Okay? Sup, flames, scream, ah, flames. And then finally, you're into orbit and you're going towards Mars. You're going to die. Meteorites. radiation, landing on Mars. This is why we have engineers. You may die. What? You're not definitely going to die. You may die. It's why we have engineers. No, no. To figure this out. You're going to die. The chances of you surviving a meteorite hit or lasting six months on Mars with all that radiation and then getting back in and saying, oh, more flames, you've got to get lift off, get out of orbit of, I mean, and land on Earth.

29:09You're going to die. Okay, none of us want to hear you say that, who uttered the words to boldly go. You're going to die. Boldly go. Boldly go to your death. And if you don't die, we'll congratulate you and we'll tell you your telomeres are lengthening. Take this back to Antarctica. They're on the open seas. There could be monsters in the ocean. There could be weather patterns they've never thought of or predicted. They don't know how much food they'll actually need. They don't even know if there will be food there. Devin coined the word katabatic or adabatic. What does that mean? 100 mile an hour winds coming downwind or 100 mile an hour is going up.

29:52100 mile an hour winds. You got to hear in a rowboat for crying out loud. You got a sail. A sail. A sail's good for 15 knots. Hey, 20 knots, you're going to blow your sails out. 30 knots, your masks are crashing. You're going to die. So what I have come to learn, being a member of the species that we call homo sapiens, not all of us fear the risk of death at the same level. Wait a minute. Well, hang on. No, very simple. There are people who ascend Mount Everest knowing there's a real chance they're going to die. They got oxygen. They've got parkas. they're going to slide down on their ass down the glacier to get back to camp.

30:40They've got Sherpas who go up without oxygen and run up and run back. If you need some help, sir, I'll help you, says a Sherpa. They probably give, you know, all those National Geographic specials where they show someone ascending the mountain for the first time, but there's a camera already there when they get up to the top. Who got the camera? The camera got there first. The Sherpa. The Sherpa and the camera got there first. Exactly. But what I'm saying is there are people who jump out of airplanes willingly. People who rock climb. But they have a parachute. They're not going. This thing's going to open.