RERELEASE: Becoming the First Woman to Travel Around the Moon with Christina Koch

24:45What are you most looking forward to when you go around the moon on the Artemis II? So many things. I'll start with the individual. I think individually I'm looking forward to the feeling of looking back at Earth and seeing the entire planet out one little window. And just the sheer awe. For a little girl that used to look up at the night sky through the trees and love that awe-inspiring feeling, that's a feeling I'm looking forward to individually. On my crew, I'm looking forward to contributing. I'm looking forward to working together every single day with the three other people that I get to share this experience with.

25:24And for the wider picture, I'm looking forward to bringing that perspective back and answering every question anyone ever has about what it's like and telling the world everything I can possibly glean about what it means for us as humans to have made that journey and to have prioritized devoting resources to exploring that far away. You are about to be the first woman to travel around the moon. I mean, that's a big deal. What does that mean to you? You know, I think what it means to me isn't about any one individual contribution. It's not about me being the first to anything. But it's about the fact that we live in a time when we have recognized how important it is to take contributions from every single person that has a dream and is willing to work hard to achieve that dream.

26:17We're more successful when we have diverse people contributing to our challenges. and the fact that we as NASA and as humanity decided that was important. We decided that was important long enough ago that we have an astronaut corps that is more representative of our country than it ever has been and that if you pluck four qualified and hardworking astronauts out of that group, it's going to be a diverse group because that's what leads us to success. That is what to me is worth celebrating. The fact that we have finally figured out that giving people opportunity to work hard at what they love makes us all better and makes us able to achieve these things.

27:04Christina, thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for your work at NASA. Artemis 2 is expected to launch in the fall of 2025. I'll definitely be following along the journey. If you want to learn more about Christina Koch and the Artemis II expedition, check out her Instagram at astro-christina. That's A-S-T-R-O underscore C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A. If you liked this episode and want to listen to others about space, check out our interviews with astronaut Shannon Walker and astrophysicist Serafina Elbadri Nance. We'll link to those episodes in the show notes.

27:47Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce-Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motula and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.

28:35I love all the beautiful scenery Earth has to offer. The rolling tides, the lush forests, even the dusty deserts. But imagine zooming out and seeing all of that at once. That's what astronaut and engineer Christina Koch gets to do. For the last 10 years, Christina's worked at NASA, and she's been part of some groundbreaking missions in outer space. In 2019, Christina left for a 328-day stay on the International Space Station, setting a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. Now Christina has a new assignment on the horizon. She was selected to join a crew that will travel around the moon.

29:15I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production brought to you by Capital One. I fully expect when I come back from having seen the Earth as a small ball against the blackness of space, how different that will feel to be back on that planet. And to me, that perspective is everything we have here is not an absolute. It's just one way of being. It's just one planet in a massive universe. And that means it's not something to be taken for granted. And it also means we're more alike than we are different. Seeing Earth from so far away has given Christina a lot of perspective on her planet and its wild places.

30:00Working at NASA requires a lot of discipline, as well as a degree and extensive experience in a technical field like engineering. Christina studied physics and electrical engineering in school, but she's also a free spirit. She surfs, rock climbs, and travels the world. Over the years, she's picked up skills from adventuring outside that have been useful for her work as an astronaut.

30:28Christina Cook, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. We're so excited to have an astronaut on the show. I mean, you epitomize adventure. Thank you. It's great to be with you. When did you know you wanted to be an astronaut? You know, I actually can't remember a time when I didn't want to be an astronaut. You know, when I was little, I realized I loved things that made me feel small. I loved looking at the night sky. I grew up near the ocean. I love the ocean. Eventually, I came to love the mountains. And I think those are things that made me ponder the size of the universe, my place in it. And I ended up here on a very unconventional path.

31:03and I just feel very fortunate that the things I love to do and the things that give me fulfillment led me here. What did you study in college? Well, in college, I studied electrical engineering and physics. But I think the unconventional part came in the things that weren't academic that I was drawn to. When I was little, I had posters of space on my walls and I had posters and maps of Antarctica. I love travel magazines. And so I decided that I wasn't going to live my life according to a checklist of what you should do to become an astronaut. For me, I spent my free time in my summers exploring the world and traveling and developing skills in other sports that gave me the same kinds of skill set and teamwork and pushing myself, learning to overcome fear with focus, things like that.

31:55So how did you travel so much while you were still in school? I think for me, it was all about when I was in school, I was all in. I gave everything. I worked really hard. I was in a lot of extracurriculars. I discovered rock climbing through the gym at my college. But I was also saving every single penny to go travel in the summers. My first trip was to Scotland. I discovered hiking in the highlands in the northern part of the country and just sort of slowly discovered more and more and just got hooked. I did do an internship, which actually ended up being at NASA. So I was moving in the direction of my dreams.

32:30But that was like my senior year in college. It did turn into a job after college. And then two years later, I quit that perfectly good engineering dream job at NASA to go work in Antarctica for a year. And a lot of people questioned that decision, too. But, of course, that is something that was completely life changing for me. and I think really set me on a path to pursuing this concept of science on the frontiers, exploring the frontiers. And I really think that that's what eventually the team here at NASA may have seen in me and why I was asked to join the team. Okay, you said a bunch of things.

33:07I hope anybody who's a student is listening. Like you studied really hard in school. You played really hard in terms of like learning to rock, climb, traveling. You saved your money. You got an internship, which I tell everybody to do. And then you're confident in your interview. And I also tell people, like, you have to have confidence. The only way you get experience is to have experience. And sometimes you got to, like, say that you can do it even when you haven't done it before. 100%. Don't be afraid to oversell. I love that. I love that you admit that. If you're a hard worker, all day. So what does it take to become an astronaut?

33:41It's a lot of weeding down the field to really select for the skills that we think are important for contributing to the human spaceflight program. Those are things like being a good teammate, being adaptable, shown success and thriving in unusual environments. Things where your problems that are in front of you aren't well defined. You get through them by grit, hard work, thinking outside the box and being a teammate. I like to tell people we talked a lot more about rock climbing in my interview than we ever talked about electrical engineering. And I think that speaks a lot to the types of folks that we're looking for.

34:16Becoming an astronaut with NASA is extremely competitive. Applications open roughly every four years, and about 10 ,000 people apply. Of those 10 ,000, only 10 get the position. That's a 0.1 % acceptance rate. In 2013, Christina applied to the Human Space Flight Program, and to her surprise, she was selected to become an astronaut. A few years later, she spent 11 months living on the space station. She ate dehydrated meals, slept strapped into a bunk so she wouldn't float around, and gave herself sponge baths because in space, well, when you turn on a faucet, water just drifts around. I read that, you know, you have the most days in space out of any woman, 328 days.

35:04What was that like to spend 328 days in space before and what were you doing? Well, I was living on board the International Space Station and a typical mission on board there is about six months. Mine was extended to almost 11 months or 328 days, which someone else counted, not me. And honestly, I was really glad that I didn't have a six-month mission. I would have been devastated if you had asked me to leave after six months. It was so awesome to be finally giving back to something that I have held in the highest regard my entire life. I've dreamed of doing my whole life. Looking down at Earth is absolutely phenomenal.

35:42Day to day, the life is very busy. We follow a schedule that is down to five-minute increments for 12 hours of every single day. So you know exactly what you're doing every single minute of every day. And living that way for 11 months is a really interesting way to live. But for someone who loves to work hard and be productive, it's phenomenal. And in your free time, looking down at Earth, in my case, seeing beautiful sights that I had dreamed of going, it was amazing. And the teamwork is phenomenal. life with a crew when you have this shared mission and you're not only working together every day but you're doing your off time together meals together your weekends is an amazing privilege of being an astronaut my crewmates are like my astro brothers and sisters so you put all that together and it was just a privilege these five minute increments I've never heard anybody talk about that I mean we live in a world with so much decision fatigue that must have been incredible.

36:42You know, this is such a great point to bring up because someone like me that had been labeled a free spirit for many years, you know, living this life, bouncing all over the world in different science bases, I valued my personal freedom more than almost anything. And one of the challenges for someone like us to come to NASA is letting all that go and giving over 100 % control of your life to other people. When I launched to space, I had absolutely zero things of my own with me. I was suited up by other people down to the skin level. And I hoped that when I got out of that, when I opened the hatch on the other side, I was actually in space and everything would be taken care of for me.

37:22And that starts right away at NASA when you first start your spacewalk training. You just have to give up control, including control over your day. You have to let go, trust the system, and trust that every five minutes that they have planned for you, you're going to be just fine if you do it like that. The challenge for me also became maintaining my authenticity and individuality in that environment because I did come from a really unconventional path. And remembering what got me there and that I shouldn't 100 % assimilate was a big challenge that actually took me years to figure out.

38:00Christina hits on an important point here, the element of surrender. When we're doing wild adventures, we have to prepare, stay confident, and use our training to the best of our abilities. But ultimately, there's a lot we can't control. In the wild, or in Christina's case, in outer space. One of the most incredible things that happened during Christina's 11 months on the International Space Station is that she and one of her crewmates went on the first ever all-female spacewalk. If you're not really sure what happens on a spacewalk, you're not alone. Spacewalks happen for a variety of reasons.

38:38To do experiments, to upgrade equipment, or to make repairs. On Christina's spacewalk, she and her colleague Jessica Muir spent more than seven hours replacing a power controller, a crucial part of the solar power system on the space station.

38:58one of the stories that I'll sometimes tell it's but it's more a little bit of a behind the scenes insight so when I was up there I was really fortunate that myself and my crewmate Jessica Meir we got to do the first spacewalk that was ever completed by two women and it got a fair amount of attention. But what people don't know about that day wasn't just that it was the first time two women had done a spacewalk together. It was actually an unplanned spacewalk. It was a contingency spacewalk, which means the thing that broke out there, no one knew how to fix. And we actually planned that spacewalk in one week, she and I, with the teams on the ground.

39:41Normal spacewalks are in planning for years. They are practiced in our giant pool that has a one-to-one mock-up of the space station. They're made perfect. We did a spacewalk, which involved me riding on the robotic arm, us pulling this massive box that had broke out that had never been repaired before, figuring out how we were going to do that in the space of a week and executing it together. That was the coolest thing I got to do. So were you just spending like all day, I mean, just planning that? We did. We actually got into the airlock where the suits are mounted on the walls. We got all the tools out that we were going to use for the spacewalk.

40:16And we like mimed the entire thing, talking about our body positioning so that we could hand this like 300 pound thing to each other. Things don't weigh anything in space and microgravity, but they do have inertia and they're still difficult to handle when you're in this big bulky space suit. We talked through every detail of it. We would suggest different tools that we would bring out, different choreography. But the coolest thing also about it was we knew we didn't have everything figured out. We knew we were going to talk through some things out there that it wasn't going to be as pretty and as scripted as a regular spacewalk, but that she and I would figure it out together.

40:49And it was a really cool experience.

40:54After being part of that historic moment and spending 11 months in orbit, Christina came back to Earth in early 2020. One of the first things she did was go to the ocean. What was the thing you missed the most, like that you wanted to do first when you got home? Smell the water. I realized maybe eight months into my mission that I hadn't felt wind, that I hadn't smelled nature. So I honestly didn't miss much, except we had a little garden in the space station where we would experiment with growing plants and microgravity. And sometimes I would just lift the little greenhouse around it and just smell.

41:44Now, after four years down on Earth, Christina is heading back to space for another groundbreaking voyage. When we come back, she talks about the Artemis II mission she'll be going on in 2025 and how she's preparing to become the first woman to travel around the moon.

42:12Every year, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard program proudly donate$2 million to the REI Cooperative Action Fund. The fund supports hundreds of nonprofit partners that are creating a more equitable outdoors for everyone. You've even heard some of their stories on the podcast. In addition to supporting the REI Cooperative Action Fund, Capital One and REI have partnered on the REI Co-op MasterCard, bringing card members excellent card benefits that inspire more outdoor adventures. Find out if you're pre-approved for the REI Co-op MasterCard with no risk to your credit score. Go to rei.com slash mastercard dash podcast to learn more.

42:54That's rei.com slash mastercard dash podcast. Terms apply.

43:07The North Face gear shows up everywhere, from once-in-a-lifetime expeditions to the trail you sneak in before work. Right now, I'm loving their Universal collection, designed to make getting outside easier for everyone. With thoughtful, inclusive design and smart, accessible innovations, their gear makes life outside better, no matter who you are or how you adventure. The North Face has always stood for exploration. Everything they make is athlete tested, expedition proven, and made to perform when it matters. Check out the North Face at your local REI or at REI.com. See you on the trail.

43:50My morning routine these days looks like this. A cup or two of coffee with my AeroPress, then out to the ocean to catch some waves before an interview. And as much as I love being in the ocean, what I genuinely look forward to is using my AeroPress again the next day. It's that good. If you've never tried AeroPress coffee, you're in for a treat. It's a French press, a pour-over, and espresso machine all in one. It uses a completely unique brew method, which means you get a cup of coffee that's rich, smooth, and genuinely different from anything else. And it's fast. It only takes about two minutes to brew your coffee and clean up.

44:29Lately, I've been using the Aeropress Go Plus. It's a complete travel coffee system I can take to the beach or out on the trail. Everything packs into a double-wall insulated stainless steel tumbler for storage and travel. It's compact, durable, easy to use, easy to clean, and it makes great coffee no matter where you are. I just unpack it, brew, and pack it back up. To ensure you never have bad coffee wherever you are, visit your local REI or head to REI.com to grab your AeroPress. That's A-E-R-O-P-R-E-S-S. It's time to ditch the drive-through, toss the French press, and say yes to better mornings fueled by better coffee.

45:28In April of 2023, astronaut and adventurer Christina Koch was selected to go on a new mission called Artemis II. She and three other astronauts will travel around the moon for the first time in 50 years. Christina will be the first woman to make this historic voyage.

45:51So how did you get selected to be on this mission? What was that process like? Honestly, the process of flight assignments is something that I see as just a long-term leadership decision that starts in some ways the day you show up here. We don't have tryouts. We don't have any kind of competition, but we do see that crews are put together to complement each other's skill sets. So is it like most jobs where if you want to get promoted, you just have to be really cool to work with. You have to be really good at your job and you got to be a good teammate. Well, in a lot of ways, that's the epitome of that.

46:33And so I hope that I do that. But when we talk about the types of skills that make a good astronaut, one of the things you'll hear people say is you got to be someone that other people don't mind living in a tin can with for half a year, up to a year in my case. And in the case of the Artemis mission, it's about a 10-day mission, but we're in a tiny capsule the entire time. So you want to be the type of person that has keeping in mind the team, self-care, team care, communication, group living, all of those skills. And trust. Trust is a big thing in our field. You have to be able to own up when you make a mistake and you have to trust your crew.

47:11Yeah. I mean, I can only imagine what trusting your partners in space is like. Can you give me an example of what kind of mistake you could make? Like, is it dropping a tool or is it? Yeah, that happens on spacewalks. You know, there's so many instances of that and they range from style points and just not doing things the best way and not looking good. versus life-threatening things that you could mess up. In space, there was a day where I cost the ground hours and hours of work because I plugged something in to the wrong connection because I wasn't careful enough when I was reading the instructions.

47:48There were days when I overslept on a day that I was supposed to drive the robotic arm to capture one of our visiting stowage vehicles. I was mortified. And I didn't do a great job of getting over that one, But that was a good lesson in why it's so important to forgive yourself and move on. How did you oversleep? I don't. It was literally the only day I overslept in my entire time in space. And again, I go back to this. Well, I was there for 11 months. So everything that happens in life on Earth in 11 months is going to happen in space. You're going to oversleep probably one day in a year. And I did.

48:23And it was on the day that I was supposed to be the person driving the robotic arm to capture this basically a supply ship. and I was woken up by a call from the ground that the ship was within a thousand meters. And my crewmates said that they thought I was just in my little crew quarters, kind of preparing, kind of getting my mind right. And nope, nope, I was sleeping away.

48:51So often we think of astronauts as almost robot-like, ultra-intelligent, perfect people. But Christina reminds us that we are all human. And in fact, her humanity is a huge advantage on the job. On the mission, she'll be living and working in very tight quarters with her teammates. It's a 10-day mission, but by the time they launch, they'll have been preparing for two years.

49:21What does the prep look like from the team perspective and then individually, how are you training and preparing? We do a lot of things as a team. So we're sort of in an academic phase right now where we're learning a lot about the Orion vehicle, a lot of task simulations. And we do a lot of that as a crew. Individually, I think that one of my jobs is to keep myself focused on the mission to make sure that all of the kind of bigger picture things don't overshadow what we're actually coming here to do, which is to execute this mission safely. And like I said earlier, to keep my head in a space where there's an authenticity to everything that I do, that I know that I'm bringing my best self every single day, sometimes that means I'm going surfing before work and might be a little disheveled when I walk in the door.

50:08But that's the right answer for me that day. And, you know, remembering that by keeping up those hobbies that I love, I'm honing those skills, like turning fear into focus, like relying on your team. Those skills are the skills that I want to keep fresh every day on an individual level. Okay, talk to me about that. How do you maintain that balance of focusing so intensely on the mission, but also taking care of yourself and doing the things that you love? I think expectation management and prioritization is one of the biggest challenges of this job. And that's why I say it's very easy to lose your individuality if you only prioritize the work and the challenges there because they are super important.

50:53The things you're learning could save your friends' lives on a space mission, and you have to make sure that you're proficient and that you've done that part of it. But when I'm tired, I haven't connected with nature lately, I haven't pushed myself in a challenging situation that wasn't work-related in a while, I start to see my ability to absorb and to be optimal at those things starts to suffer. We have very early mornings here and sometimes it just doesn't work. And I have to then turn to, hey, all the things I love are still out there. The ocean's not going anywhere. I'll be able to do it one day.

51:28It's going to be all right. I'm really curious how you train your body as well. I mean, I know you surf, do you run, you rock climb. I am a huge fan of fitness. Everything from trail running, mountain races, to something I got into being in Texas, where there are a lot of triathlons. So I've gotten into triathlons recently. I definitely go to climb when I can, and surfing is a big one. CrossFit, weightlifting, yoga. I try to do a little bit of everything, and it really pays off. As an astronaut, I was really fortunate to do six spacewalks during my mission, And they are extremely mentally and physically taxing the amount of fortitude you have to have to be in a suit for 12 hours straight to be working hard in that suit for about seven hours straight outside in the vacuum of space.

52:20That's what really inspired me to kind of step up my physical fitness. What is that like walking in a space suit at space? Is that like being up at Everest? Well, is it like being at altitude is totally different because it's obviously space. Right. In some ways it is because actually you have to do a lot of pre-breathing because you're in a very low pressure. So the reason it's so hard to work in the suit is it's pressurized because you have to put some kind of pressure around your body to be able to breathe and to have our bodies surrounded by pressure. Just the same reason why when you get in an airplane, they pressurize the cabin.

52:57And that pressurization means that it's hard to physically move the suit. Every time you move your hand, it's like squeezing a tennis ball. And you do this for like seven hours straight. And so it's just like climbing where your forearms are completely pumped afterwards. It's the same thing. They say it's the metabolic equivalent of running a marathon just to do our spacewalk training on the Earth. I think that an actual spacewalk in space is even more. But you spend a few hours in the suit pre-breathing oxygen so you don't get the bends like DCS sickness because of the low pressure that you have to go to.

53:30And then you're just working hard on tasks all day. I haven't been to Everest, so I don't know. But the pressure changes and the physiological things that you're thinking about are very similar. How do you deal with like fear and nerves? Do you guys go through psychological training? Like, tell me a little bit about your process. You know, I wouldn't say that we go through specific targeted psychological training that is independent, but everything we do leads us to that. We fly a T-38 high performance jet often. I have no idea what this kind of jet is. It's like a super fast jet. It's super fast.

54:08It is a supersonic jet. We don't go supersonic all the time, but we can. And I just like saying that word. It's a jet that the Air Force has used for many, many years to train their jet pilots. It's a cockpit aircraft where there's a front seater and a backseater that sits right behind them. You are on oxygen masks the whole time because the actual cockpits aren't pressurized. So there's a lot of environmental factors there that kind of take those stakes up higher. And so that puts us in these high stakes situations, moving quickly in a jet where real life things can go wrong that your life depends on.

54:46And moving through that experience on a regular basis and being comfortable in that zone, really leads to that psychological toughness. It also leads to resilience and learning how to forgive yourself when you make a mistake. It sounds so badass. It's a lot of fun. And scary and fun. Yeah. Is there a mantra you say to yourself when you get nervous or you have a little bit of fear that comes up? I use a phrase turning fear into focus. I think I first learned that doing trad rock climbing when again, you're on a long, potentially dangerous area on a rock and making your world small, bringing it into exactly what's in front of you and what you need to focus on and finding that flow, that familiarity with getting into that zone is something I learned from rock climbing.

55:33And you just do a lot of training like this where you're in scary situations. So eventually scary becomes a little bit more normal. It does. And I think that that can be applied to anyone. I think moving towards things that make you nervous and that make you scared, it's a skill that can be practiced. I think that it actually kind of has the ability to make you your best self because usually things that scare you, scare you because you think they're out of your reach. And when you achieve that thing that you think that you couldn't, you're teaching yourself how much you can do.

56:09Christina's training for the Artemis II mission is intense. Aside from flying supersonic jets, she has to be extremely physically fit. Without oxygen and gravity, being in space is physically arduous. But for Christine and her teammates, it's beyond worth it.

56:30What are you most looking forward to when you go around the moon on the Artemis II? So many things. I'll start with the individual. I think individually I'm looking forward to the feeling of looking back at Earth and seeing the entire planet out one little window. And just the sheer awe for a little girl that used to look up at the night sky through the trees and love that awe-inspiring feeling. That's a feeling I'm looking forward to individually. On my crew, I'm looking forward to contributing. I'm looking forward to working together every single day with the three other people that I get to share this experience with.

57:08And for the wider picture, I'm looking forward to bringing that perspective back and answering every question anyone ever has about what it's like and telling the world everything I can possibly glean about what it means for us as humans to have made that journey and to have prioritized devoting resources to exploring that far away. You are about to be the first woman to travel around the moon. I mean, that's a big deal. What does that mean to you? You know, I think what it means to me isn't about any one individual contribution. It's not about me being the first anything, but it's about the fact that we live in a time when we have recognized how important it is to take contributions from every single person that has a dream and is willing to work hard to achieve that dream.

58:02We're more successful when we have diverse people contributing to our challenges. and the fact that we as NASA and as humanity decided that was important. We decided that was important long enough ago that we have an astronaut corps that is more representative of our country than it ever has been and that if you pluck four qualified and hardworking astronauts out of that group, it's going to be a diverse group because that's what leads us to success. That is what to me is worth celebrating. The fact that we have finally figured out that giving people opportunity to work hard at what they love makes us all better and makes us able to achieve these things.

58:49Christina, thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for your work at NASA. Artemis 2 is expected to launch in the fall of 2025. I'll definitely be following along the journey. If you want to learn more about Christina Koch and the Artemis II expedition, check out her Instagram at astro-christina. That's A-S-T-R-O underscore C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A. If you liked this episode and want to listen to others about space, check out our interviews with astronaut Shannon Walker and astrophysicist Serafina Elbadri Nance. We'll link to those episodes in the show notes.

59:31Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce-Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motula and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.