#161 What’s the Point of Going Back to the Moon? Chris Hadfield -

0:00Alex O'Connor:Colonel Chris Hadfield, welcome to the show. It is my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. Your story, insofar as it regards space travel, really begins, I think, in 1969 with the first moon landing. I think you were probably, what, like eight years old or something like that at the time. And you've often cited this as a sort of pivotal moment in your decision to one day learn how to go to space yourself, something you've since done and done quite publicly and to quite a lot of acclaim. My question is that just recently we saw Artemis 2, which was a similar mission in that it went to the moon.

0:40Alex O'Connor:It sort of flung around the moon and captured a lot of the world's attention. Like a lot of people were watching, lots of people interested in the imagery that was coming out and interested in the people who were sent up there. But at the same time, I wasn't alive for the moon landing. And while it was a big moment, it felt like the kind of thing which I saw was happening on Twitter, you know, and I think that's really cool. And then I got on with my life. Whereas when I look historically at the moon landing, it kind of seems like it was this moment where the whole earth stood still and looked upwards.

1:10Alex O'Connor:Do you think that people are still as excited now about space travel as they were back then? Yeah, I think you have a misimpression. the Apollo program ran for about four or five years and there were multiple flights and most of them were completely ignored by the public just like most face flights you know it's there's a lot of stuff going on why would everybody be interested just because we launch a rocket with people on it Apollo 8 which most resembles his recent Artemis mission when around the moon came back it didn't capture very much attention real time at all but it was the first time people had taken a photograph of the entire earth and so when they got back and it was film cameras and their picture got processed and people suddenly saw the world as one beautiful little jewel hanging in an eternal blackness of the universe that caught a lot of people's attention and then apollo 11 itself Yeah, it was remarkable and unprecedented in its day.

2:18I've heard various figures, like one third of everybody on Earth was following along. But by Apollo 12, everyone had lost interest again. And by Apollo 13, they're like, why are we still launching to the moon? We already did it once, as if it was just supposed to be a PR stunt or something and not exploring the universe. So that's completely normal. I think a lot of folks confuse space exploration with space entertainment. They're not the same thing. Sometimes exploring the universe is entertaining, but most of the time it's just like any other exploration or any other scientific endeavor. Artemis II has had a resounding impact.

3:00I run into it constantly everywhere of people that had forgotten how to be inspired or people who had suddenly noticed the amazing stuff that's going on. And I think it recalibrated and refocused people well. And the Artemis crew is currently on a world tour. And the reaction they're getting is spectacular. uh i was just reading before you and i talked of uh of the the people they were speaking to in ottawa and they're be in europe soon and um and i think that's a very good barometer of public interest um so no it's uh i think it's very similar and i think it's magnificent and i think it's one of the most um inspiring things that human beings are up to anywhere in the world today

3:54Alex O'Connor:I think, as you said, it's not just about space entertainment. And you say people act as if this was some kind of PR stunt. Many people see the original moon landing as at least partly that, in that it was this effort to sort of demonstrate a national supremacy in a big space race, that sometimes people forget that there are kind of other reasons for going to space. So what, apart from just being like, this is really cool, and we get to take pictures of the far side of the moon on our iphone what's the point in a mission like this like why bother going up there at all why bother doing anything at all alex i mean that's my kind of question well but it's a realistic question um you know it's like why would we go back to the moon well why do you go back to your living room every day why why why you know it's it's a it's a specious question almost everything that exists lies beyond the earth you know we are incredibly small in an infinite expanse of other things and other places and knowledge that we don't have yet and the high ground has always been important that's why castles are on hilltops and antennas are on hilltops that was the limit of our technology for tens of thousands of years but now we can put those antennas in orbit around the world or further so for communications for understanding the world or internet being able to get internet directly linked through space for gps navigation which you and i are using right now even though we don't realize it and if you're going to go as far as the moon it's just an extrapolation of all those things but also trying to understand the history of the earth itself where did the moon come from what was the cataclysmic event that created the moon and the earth how did this all happen is it going to happen again what are the fundamental natures of planetary physics how does this all even work and that's the type of question that we why are there tides is is that we learned uh that the moon is getting further away about the same rate that your fingernails grow uh the only way we could ever measure that was by putting laser reflectors or little tiny mirrors on the moon um it is the also it is a manifestation of the great arc of human struggle it is giving ourselves an impossible task because it is pushing the edge of human imagination.

6:37And then a subset of us rising and changing who we are so that we now have a new set of unprecedented human capabilities. And then tackling this dangerous task, taking an enormous risk, and then failing, but also occasionally succeeding. And succeeding and returning home triumphant. That's what every great novel in history has ever been written about. And it's the fundamental nature of life itself. And that's also what it is. So to look at it through the little shallow myopic lens of, well, I already see you do that once. There's no point you ever doing that again. Why would you ever go to another football match if you'd already been to one?

7:19Why would you ever read another book if you've already read one? Why would you ever take another breath if you've already taken one? To me, it's just a silly question.

7:29Alex O'Connor:see i i understand that um because i i mean i agree i think it's worth doing for its own sake but there must be more than just that to sort of uh on like a scientific level like it must also be like it's just a moment ago you said you know um why would we people were saying so why would we go back to the moon if we've already done it as if there was sort of no science to be done as if it would just for the sake of exploration which is which is worthwhile for sure but i think people maybe underestimate the amount of important scientific discovery that is made in space. When you became the commander of the ISS, if I'm not mistaken, you were engaged in some projects which were specifically experimenting on the effects of zero gravity on biological systems, on human biology, or something to that effect.

8:18Alex O'Connor:It's stuff that you wouldn't immediately think is of prime importance when you're up there in space, but I'm sure there was actually quite a lot to learn. uh well yeah the international space station is a laboratory and uh it is an absolutely unique laboratory in all of humanity because it's a laboratory essentially without gravity and um what do you do if you take away like gravity suddenly you can study uh like this i have a cup of tea here and gravity is so influential on the fluid dynamics how the If tea is behaving in the cup, when we remove gravity, suddenly we can learn about fluid physics.

9:00Think how a fire behaves when you have convection, when heat rises, and then have a fire without gravity. And you can suddenly learn a tremendous amount about the process of combustion. Think about how your body functions. It is very much driven by gravity, your balance system, your blood pressure regulation system, how the body maintains bone density and muscle mass and all of those things how your eyes interact with your perception of the universe as soon as you take away gravity all of those things change so it gives us an absolutely unique laboratory to study some fundamental scientific processes and properties also of course once you're above the air you get a far clearer view of the universe without all the air molecules in the way.

9:51Stars don't twinkle on board a spaceship. So you get a better platform for studying the universe. And of course, it is the best platform we've ever built for studying the Earth, going around the world 16 times a day for decades to try and understand the short and long-term changes of our planet itself and the atmosphere and the oceans. And so all of that is intensely scientific. But at the same time, it's also human. and psychological and and what we're doing on the space station and now on the moon um is deciding how it is that we will settle other planets um we have already sort of gone through various patterns of settling other continents on earth you know everybody lived in africa 80 000 years ago and then our technology got good enough that we could start to leave and we slowly spread over the whole planet and got to the americas about when the ice age retreated about whatever 18 000 years ago maybe um and as we have expanded as a species as our technology has allowed us to live places now even antarctica where people even at the south pole where 100 people live we have had different ways of moving into a new continent or a new human opportunity and culturally we've done it very badly in some places and pretty well in others so the space station is a great experiment in that and how we settle the moon is the next step in that leading towards how, as our technology continues to improve, we'll eventually settle Mars.

11:39So there's that great scientific component. There's the human psychological component, but there's also a big sociological component to what's going on. All of that's happening right now, at this moment in history. And I count myself very lucky to be alive and part of it right now. Oh, yeah.

11:59Alex O'Connor:One of the other most experimental features, I suppose, of the ISS is the I part, is the international element. Your most recent novel, which is sat behind you, Final Orbit, is interesting. It's set in the 70s, around the time of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, which is a collaborative effort between the Americans and the Soviets, which is quite a significant sort of political event. And I think that it sort of signals this idea that people have that space exploration is not a national project or a national endeavor, but a global endeavor. and it seems like some progress has been made there in that we have an international space station in that Artemis 2 is a collaboration between two space agencies but you know it's Canada and it's America who have historically been like pretty good friends.

13:00Alex O'Connor:To what extent do you think and I don't mean in the sense that it maybe should be but literally practically speaking to what extent do you think that space exploration and travel is still very much a a national project rather than a global one i think space exploration is intensely global um when i was born no one had flown in space all of human space travel is younger than i am and in fact the very first uh thing to get into orbit was as recently as 1957 so you know less than a human lifetime ago. So for whatever, 300 ,000 years, we were incapable of doing it. But our technology suddenly got good enough that in the last lifetime, we were able to access space.

13:50But only a couple nations in the world had the combination of technology and purpose and funding that they could manage it. And so if almost nobody can do it, then it lives by a different set of rules. if every single person on earth could go to space in the next 10 minutes it would be entirely different than if only two nations on earth could do it and they could only do it rarely and we're somewhere in that transition right now many decades ago our technology got good enough and safe enough and therefore cheap enough that a private citizen could pay a private company to put something into orbit around the world to uh to become much more global and um and sort of common and our technology is getting good enough now that we actually can pay to fly in space it's no longer only the purview of trillionaires like the soviet union and the united states but now a successful individual can buy a ticket and fly in space sub orbitally just go up and fall down again or or even a few have paid to orbit the world and the cost is continuing continuing to drop and so that's about as international as it gets it's it's becoming essentially like international air travel no number where you're from you can buy a ticket and get on an airplane that somebody has organized commercially and travel to anywhere in the world and we're in that transitional phase with space flight right now um it we're by no means there yet, but that's what's happening.

15:30And obviously we need now to backfill the regulatory environment just as we did with air travel a century ago or car travel a century ago. You've got to build all the rules and stop signs and stoplights and driver's licenses and all the rest of it. But that's what's happening right now. It is going from impossible to barely possible to now commercial, to now becoming much more global and universal. And we're a long ways down that path.

16:03Alex O'Connor:We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, a quick question for you. When was the last time you paid attention to how much fiber you're eating? Not protein, not calories, fiber. The data on this is surprising. In the US, fewer than one in 10 adults hit their recommended daily intake. And fiber isn't just like some bonus nutrient. It's foundational to your fullness, your gut health, your energy levels, your blood sugar. And so today I want to share with you what I found to be the simplest fix. It's today's sponsor, my friends at Huel. That's H-U-E-L. Recently, I've been doing a lot of preparation for debates and events.

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17:49Alex O'Connor:You'll get 15 % off if you use the code Alex O 'Connor at Huel.com forward slash Alex O 'Connor. So thanks to Huel for supporting the show. And with that said, let's get back to it. Well, how casual can space flight be in that like, at least currently, I know it's a little bit different because people are going up to space for different reasons. But I think to myself, if I wanted to become an astronaut, I'm sort of presuming it would take an exceptionally long amount of time, lots of training. I'd need to have psychological assessments. I'd need to be physically fit. I would need to like all sorts of checks.

18:23Alex O'Connor:You sort of imagine it's this sort of grueling process, like becoming a Navy SEAL or something. And finally, you're able to go up into space. And when you do, you're so preoccupied with making sure that everything is safe and running correctly that one wonders if you even have time to enjoy the moment. Would it be as simple as that all going on, but being able to take your average Joe off the street and saying, strap in, we'll take you up there and cover that? Or do you think it's going to require a similar kind of lengthy training and preparation to take anyone into space? um you're you're confusing that primarily you're confusing the term astronaut i think how hard is it for you to become an aviator um well you you you pay i don't know uh 100 bucks and fly on ryanair and you're an aviator you have zero qualifications your entire training program is uh when you sit in your seat and they spend the 45 seconds showing you where the exits are That's your entire training program.

19:25And you are now an aviator, but no one is confusing you with being a pilot or a professional commercial pilot who can handle that airplane so that when you're climbing out of airport in New York and Canada geese go down both intakes and you have to, through incredible skill, land that airplane in the Hudson River and save every single life on board. Yeah, that's an aviator who did that, but a hugely different skill set that is needed within society. Astronauts exactly the same. You can buy a ticket and with not much more training than you do to fly on Ryanair, you can go for a suborbital flight right now.

20:08You just go up, experience weightlessness for a few minutes, see the curvature of the earth, get into the blackness of space like William Shatner from Star Trek did. And the cost of it is about the cost of a luxury car. And that's a lot of money for a short experience. But at the same time, who needs a luxury car? It's why it's called a luxury car because it's a luxury. And lots of people every year buy luxury cars. If you've made the money, that's your choice.

20:44So I think that will continue to be exactly like that. As the technology gets better so that we can trust it more, the cost will continue to come down so that more and more people will be space travelers just as you can be an air traveler. But that doesn't make you a professional pilot or a professional astronaut. And if you're going to do more than just a very simple flight, if you're going to travel the long distance from here to the moon or to live and operate a space station on board, then you need extensive training. And you're going to be away from any sort of medical care for months and months.

21:26And so you need a very detailed physical and you need to be the right psychology because it's a really unusual demanding life of service. And any single thing that can go wrong on board a space station or a vehicle going further away, often one of the very first things you lose is communications with Earth because everything's interconnected. And so no matter what fails on board, navigation, main computer system, pressurization system, getting hit by a meteorite, someone getting appendicitis, whatever, you have to have the skill set on board to be able to deal with it or people will die. And so therefore, yeah, the role of professional astronaut will continue just as the role of professional car driver or professional airplane pilot exists.

22:17But we're just in a transition phase. And astronaut used to be almost a sacrosanct term. But, you know, it's sort of, in my mind, astronaut, aviator. I think if you use the term space traveler, air traveler, it's probably a little clearer what that means in people's minds.

22:32Alex O'Connor:but you know they're just words yeah tell me about the the psychology of not so much being in space but being so detached from planet earth i mean i've heard you say before that one of the biggest sort of misconceptions about being in space is the idea of loneliness it's this sort of you know like archetypal archetypal image of the the lonely traveler completely detached unable to to reach anybody else uh anybody else in in the world and you've said before that that's not quite accurate but also i'm just interested in what are the kind of psychological challenges that people would face going to the iss yeah i want to dispel that myth right now space flight is joyful spectacular amazing uh like a gift that continues to unwrap itself for the entire time that you are in space.

23:29I think the Artemis 2 crew did a wonderful job of helping people see that, of our technology is good enough now that we had really clear visuals and extended communication with that crew on their way to the moon, around the moon, and on the way back. And people got to see just how great this is. These are superb human beings, extremely smart and competent, deeply trained after lifetimes of service, and yet reveling and celebrating together and all the highs and lows of human emotion right there for everyone else to share in. That's what space flight is like. But then if you watch Ad Astra or First Man or something, everything's just so grim and Everybody's so grumpy and sad and everything's horrible.

24:21And Sean Penn's TV series, I didn't make it. What was it called? I don't know. The first, I think the first crew going to Mars. It's because they got it completely wrong. They just sort of made a preconception of how they pictured it and then built an entire false narrative around that. it is one of the greatest of human experiences to be able to see our world and to leave it and come back and learn new things on behalf of everyone else and be working with a group of amazing people doing new and complex and dangerous things successfully together so it's a great triumphal arc of a life um but but you have to choose the right people um you don't want to be claustrophobic you know it's a tiny little place um you need to be competent so you're not always just afraid because you don't know what you're doing uh you have to be willing to live a life of service now it's become common in the last little while if you meet someone who serves in the military or the police forces or or maybe a firefighter to thank them for their service which i think is a lovely sentiment but i'm not sure that most people as the words come out of their mouth fully appreciate what they're saying when they say thank you for your service what they're actually saying is thank you for being willing to die on my behalf even though we've never met that's what a life of service is as i was a military fighter pilot in combat i was a test pilot making sure that new airplanes work properly and then i was an explorer as an astronaut for 21 years and uh all of those things were intensely dangerous but they're part of our society and some people sign up to do them and i think it's important to recognize that we need people who devote the majority of their lives to service in order for our society to function and and so i think very carefully when i thank someone for their service

26:27Alex O'Connor:this idea of choosing the right people um i i also heard you say when talking about misconceptions about space flight the people kind of assume that astronauts are like thrill seekers who kind of want this surge of adrenaline who want to sort of get like really pumped up on going out into space when realistically it's probably not quite what you want in a in like an astronaut or a space traveler, right? Here's a question for you. If you were going in for open heart surgery, would you want your surgeon to be doing it for the adrenaline rush? Would you want your surgeon the whole time she was operating inside your chest cavity to be just thrilled and at the edge of her excitement level?

27:13Absolutely not. You want someone who knows everything there is to know about that particular topic, who is ready for everything that can go wrong to react the right way, and who conducts themselves professionally and supremely competently and pridefully. I mean, a thoracic surgeon is rightfully prideful in what they can do. It's a really complex skill. And it's the same for astronauts. We're not there like we're bungee jumping or something. You know, that's silly. In fact, the last thing you want to have happen is to have adrenaline in your veins. Adrenaline is an ancient evolutionary trait that allows you to run faster than the wild animal that's trying to eat you.

28:05That's why you have adrenaline. so that you have a sudden, at great physical harm, you get a sudden burst of extra capability. That's not how you operate spaceships. They aren't wild animals you're running away from. It's a cerebral job, and it takes incredible depths of preparation, very few of which are physical. Most of it's mental. And so, yeah, I think it's fun in the movies to have everybody yelling yee-haw and getting up and applauding and beating their chest regularly. But that's movies. That's X-Men and Marvel and stuff, which is fun. I like it. It's fun to watch, but it sure isn't real life.

28:50Alex O'Connor:It kind of makes me think that the best kind of astronaut might be a little bit emotionless in that regard then, because emotions can get in the way and can make it difficult or can be distracting. and at the same time i wonder if even if that is just a result of sort of of training of trying to to put yourself in a situation where you stay completely in the zone and don't get distracted whether that kind of dampens the ability to enjoy your time up there to experience the or to sort of recognize what's going on i i don't know if you've ever seen the the television series the crown about the about the british monarchy but there's an episode where uh it must be prince philip meets the apollo crew who landed on the moon and he's you know the prince is like obsessed with with learning how to fly and he he wants to experience the freedom and he's just i think he's going through like a midlife crisis or something and he just really wants to sort of explore and he loves all that kind of stuff and he he meets these three guys and he's totally thrilled to meet them he's got all these questions he's like tell me what what what was it like when you when you looked out and saw the earth and they're just there like well uh you know there wasn't wasn't really that much time to to look we were kind of kind of busy and it's like supremely disappointing because it turns out that the whole time they were up there like these characters i don't think this is historical exactly but for the narrative of this story they're portrayed as these emotionless soldiers.

30:22Alex O'Connor:Do you think there's any truth in that? Are astronauts, because of this, unable to enjoy it in the way that if I was strapped in and taken up, I'd spend my whole time just staring out the window? I would like to point out that The Crown is fictional. It's a television show. Therefore, it's in a perfect position to perpetuate stereotypes inaccurately because that's what people want to hear people want to have their expectations fulfilled they don't want to find out that in fact things are different than the way that they picture the world and uh in uh in contact i think with what's her name jody foster is that her name the actress she says something like we should have sent a poet which which is the same sort of thought um yeah so uh i'm a musician and i've been a performing musician my entire life i'm an author i've written six best-selling books fiction and non-fiction i speak publicly um i spoke yesterday and many people are crying in the audience because of the way that i'm sharing ideas and and um i perform with symphonies and I write music.

31:36And yet, when I'm operating a spaceship or commanding a space station or flying an F-18, that's not a time for histrionics. It's not a time for emotional outbursts. And I think there's this weird misperception that if you have self-control, you're unemotional.

32:04Alex O'Connor:Yeah. That's wrong. It means you have self-control. It doesn't mean you don't have emotions. And I think anybody who thinks the Apollo 11 crew is unemotional should read a Mike Collins book, Carrying the Fire. It's fascinating and philosophically revealing and insightful and funny and witty. And it's a really good book. And it's a little bit of insight into Mike Collins, one of the three people who went to the moon on Apollo 11. And I've worked with all the astronauts in the world. I was president of the Association of Space Explorers, which is sort of our professional society. And we're just a bunch of people of all different types, just like anywhere.

32:47And I could easily say that, how come podcast hosts are just so boring and two-dimensional? And why are they not more excitable and more interesting? And I'm now inaccurately generalizing podcasts. um and so i i just i find it kind of i don't know understandable i guess but um there is a really complex set of skills that will allow you to be trusted to command a spaceship and one of them real strong ones is self-control um and uh but at the same time you'd be a very incomplete astronaut if you weren't deep in heart and deep in soul at the same time because then you would miss the magnificence of the human experience that's going on around you

33:40Alex O'Connor:well i'm glad that we can dispel at least one of the stereotypes that you've just listed today the other one remains to be seen um but i i know what you mean it must be it must be incredibly frustrating to hear that because what you're experiencing is one of the most profound things i was going to say one of the most profound moments it's like one of the most profound moments of humankind of like the human story and you even you've got a guitar i mean like most people know that you went super viral for for literally recording a music video in space i saw one of the comments saying that technically speaking that must be the most expensive music video ever produced no the cheapest there was no money spent on it none actually i think we had to pay a licensing fee so it was somewhere in the order of 50 pounds i think yeah so i mean yeah that idea should be put to bed immediately but also like having said that i mean as you say like fiction can be really annoying when it comes to space travel not just for like the the the sort of the nerds like me who sit there and think well why why is there noise when it's in space and stuff like that but also just because of the sort of ideas around what space travel is like but you took what some people not not knowing your history as as somebody who was always interested in in literature might have seen as quite surprising.

35:00Alex O'Connor:Astronaut turned novelist. You sort of got this opportunity to rectify some of this by writing fiction from the perspective of someone who's really been there and done that. What is it that fiction allows you to do when telling the story of spacecraft and spaceflight that nonfiction doesn't? Or is it just a desire to communicate a cool story that motivated you to turn to fiction? This summer, Prime Video takes you back before Legally Blonde, before law school, and into the world of Elle Woods in high school. Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is, until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle.