Joe Rogan Experience #1425 — Garrett Reisman Transcript

Transcript

0:00 3, 2, 1, welcome. like, what, 95 days? longest in a row, basically. And your vestibular system is what's affected the most. It'd be like too arduous, you know? So I was about 3% low. that was kind of a first generation and the guys now that are working out on that thing I mean, that was still kind of in the early days. That's got to be so strange. Your body just wants to shrivel up when you're up there because

4:08 It's like a fish in water. Every day. It's weird. I never even thought of that. So it just kind of floats off your body. We've shot so much video. So as you walk, as you go upstairs, that load that the bones feel, the compressive load, is telling the bone, hey, make some more. That 90 days has such, It's only a problem if you want to come home. It's like being air sick or sea sick.

7:02 No, I heard it's a really good show. And they catch this terrorist guy If you went from Earth gravity to the space station if you're up there for a year and did nothing and you would also your all your muscles that There's nothing. So it's something that I never really noticed it, but I don't know how much of that is real and how much is like you're freaking out because you're in space, right?

9:21 So right now, we have a lot of blood blood pulling up in our legs and our heart, Yeah. So all the blood was just kind of pooling in your head. volume up here. So your sense of That's why we take, we cover, we have every hot sauce known to humankind up on the space station. Oh, really? Is it freeze-dried foods mostly? So you get these, But it's just like so unappetizing when you open that can up and,

12:20 They actually have a small refrigerator now. Yeah, it was that right there. that window and i'm like that's the earth you know i should have a look at that and i was super Just meh? video that you can't even see with your own eyes, like the aurora and all that. And that all these boundaries of civilizations and cultures and countries and continents are all nonsense.

15:22 It's like, really? and blast off and look at the earth So I had that strong knowledge before I went. They added a window? Wow. But don't tell them because it makes them feel better. And I wanted to do it bad. just heard about the spacewalking. And this guy, like, was not being nice. So I was kind of pissed off, And they get a crane that comes by. that big tall astronaut that laughed in my face was right

20:18 But that's it. And they did some of those things. And we started working at it, and we got better and better. Because it's got to feel insane when you're strapped to a space station The space station is moving 17,500 miles an hour, but so are you. Yeah. Yeah. and I resolved never, ever to do that again. And you're doing it in the pool too It's not me

23:56 So it's kind of like being a mechanic or a technician, the way I describe it. medieval suit of armor. It's hard. And what kind of maintenance are you doing on the outside That's fascinating. We started kind of an informal program where we were going over to other's garages and doing car repair stuff just to get more hands-on experience with that kind of thing.

26:01 But nowadays, and sometimes on space station, even when I was there, when things break, you don't have the luxury of training. It depends on exactly what you're what you're doing so we identify like the most likely and most serious things that could go wrong and you think you got it all figured out, you still get surprised when you actually get up there.

27:55 to plug it back in and get the heaters back on in a certain amount of time and so we're like okay we You know, what do we do? So we stopped. and every 45 minutes the sun is either coming up or going down. and the temperature difference if you're in the sun or in That's incredible. Wow. Maybe they did, and it just like, maybe when it got up to space and it experienced those different temperatures, it expanded differently.

31:09 not going to you know you're not going to be able to reprogram it now that feeling that you were It's like that because you forget. exploration as well yeah what have you done there i lived for two weeks uh in the bottom of the sea I thought you were going to say like miles. get bent, right? But it's not a problem if you just stay. The problem is then if you stay,

33:31 because coming up is not an option. And the only thing that was keeping the ocean out was the air pressure inside. Whoa. He gets like, like. What do you have to do? the nitrogen slowly comes out of your It's that same effect. I remember once we were doing this experiment where I had my crewmate And I dropped a giant F-bomb. I'm like, patient's fine.

37:01 but if you have to go number two you go into into the pool because you don't want a floater in your pool, right? We had a mixed gender crew, so I wore some trunks, but, you know. jesus yeah so they go there knowing that you're gonna poop as soon as you know, just a black void. and I opened my eyes in my mask in the darkness with my flashlight, I'm screaming.

39:58 Size of a cow. Okay, because that's what I was saying. Yeah, there's one. I'll tell you another quick story about down there. like internal organs, is shrimp cocktail. The next day. I think I would have been okay with that. No, regular tanks. a poo you have to do that you have to wear the tank or do you just hold your breath just hold your breath you're not going that far how far are you going yeah like 15 feet or so in total

44:09 space suit on, you got to detach the Soyuz from the space station, you got to separate from the All right. So it's like ancient technology. You could carry the Hubble Space Telescope in a trunk. But anyway, it's an incredible machine, and we'll never design anything like it, maybe ever again, certainly not anytime soon. We're spending, I think, $3 or $4 billion a year on the program.

46:41 But the good news is, and the great timing about this conversation right now, is that gap ends this year. That's a great name. Yeah. It's not. Like what? Not something you want to do for fun. How far up are they when they punch up? But in that case, I don't know the exact altitude. the parachutes come out and uh and from that point on it's kind of like a normal landing

49:39 You get the so distraught feeling going. Just like we did with Apollo and Gemini. you actually, if you don't need it, You mean if it's blowing up? Crew Dragon. Wow. Not that we blew it up, but once it separated, the rocket started tumbling out of control and it made a giant fireball. And the booster went kaboom. Yeah. way you can go due east, which is generally what you want to do when you launch. Or you can even turn a little bit north or

53:20 with the big red button. Oh, Jesus. and meet those guys, the the junk has to fall in the ocean yeah well now the russians and the chinese don't necessarily And the reason that you usually want to launch to the east And that's why you also want to be as close to the equator as you can. had that problem because we always had the ability to blow it up.

55:20 and one cool thing was probably the most famous booster that landed in the bottom of the ocean was Apollo 11, the Saturn V. It's like, yeah. Powerful Jeff Bezos. That's madness. It is very quick. Not only that but that's hypergolic fuel Big red cloud Look at that falling from the sky. their drinking water uh-huh i mean the quantities of that are probably not going to be like

58:36 and i i grew up in parsip my two yeah i heard about that yeah parsipany i know where that is And there's also a technical conference. And then there's a memorial for the first Israeli So I also go out and I do a lot of public appearances and do motivational speaking kind of stuff. She was like, I told her once I wanted to join the Air Force in a public restaurant.

1:00:51 desk and it was like that was my like that was the beacon you know that was the goal and I kept I mean, how many are there? So I left NASA in 2011, and I went down and met with Elon, and I said, hey, I really like what you're doing here. And meeting all of NASA's requirements and helping to provide input to the guys designing the displays and the suits and the controls and the seats and all the stuff you need for people.

1:02:45 Yeah, because, first of all, it's not quite that black and white. It was built here by, like, McDonnell Douglas and North American Rockwell built, if I remember here's our top level requirements. We want you to get four people up and down to the space station. And in fact, we'll give you a profit as a percentage of the cost. But now it's kind of been abused.

1:05:24 We're going to take Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, two friends of mine, we're going to look back at 2020 all that kind of stuff that we grew up the timeline is totally wrong but i think that the overall direction is right in a lot of this stuff, and we'll get there. really want to elon keeps saying that i think he's right i mean it's it's not a question of

1:08:13 I mean, it's like it was pretty – but I think that that's not a panacea. But it's not going to solve this problem. There's actually a company in Israel that is teaming with NASA that's going to fly these like vests to try to shield the people. You're no longer protected by that. Those are ions up to iron, so heavy ions. SP, solar proton events. They're even worse.

1:11:29 thing going 48 minutes from now it's coming yeah and you're just like hunkering down there probably of defending from it when we did Apollo. and and and and i think you know for like right now we can send you to mars and bring you back And the thing about it, there's two things about it. There's also the other thing that we don't know. yeah it's acceptable what if people come back smarter what if it's like some fucking x-men

1:13:55 I think from The Watchmen, I think he became who he is them i didn't know it's one day the two-year-old girl was concentrating on her blocks and one of You're a goddamn astronaut. re-entry tiles. And we always had some foam shedding off the thing. the space shuttle. And in the beginning, we tried really hard to do something about it. And we Like when I flew, we had a lot of things in place to try to fix that.

1:17:33 So at least we would know. made out of silica so it's it's similar to the the tiles but um the uh the the material that's in the Will they give us a tour? So that white stuff at the top on the capsule itself, that's kind of like the same material as the tiles. to take people to Mars, to take people, and reusable, right? And we're getting there. And the next vehicle is going to be the real,

1:20:29 This is one of the tests. That is not CGI. The bottom is a Raptor engine. I need to see that again. Did you? My God, that's amazing. For people who want to see this, Jamie, what is the name of the video? 2,898,000. The rocket will land on its tail, and then the thing, after it goes off to the moon or even Mars, it'll come back and also land on its tail, and then we'll get both pieces.

1:23:31 more efficient thrust engines. And probably one of the most promising ones in the near term is So that's one possible way to go. flowing over the reactor instead of having liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen then you just all you So you need the oxygen and the fuel and the spark. And it's actually not as efficient quite. Oh, so that was the big knock on going to Mars for the longest time

1:26:23 And with the carbon dioxide that's in the Martian atmosphere and the water that's in the ice that's on the surface of Mars, And the nice thing about, people ask me, like, what's the biggest difference between working at SpaceX and working at NASA? things was prohibitively costly. And they built a capsule to go on top of that called the Starliner. Or it used to be called the CST-100.

1:29:11 It doesn't bounce because that's not good for people. Sorry, Bob and Doug. I mean, how well do you have to have the system he wants to die on Mars, just not on But he's not going until we have. Well, he's going to wait. you see in science fiction things where ships land on planets and people live inside the ships You know, it's not like anybody's really sitting around drawing up plans for that.

1:32:17 Then what is the concept? it's possible you're not going to get to one atmosphere pressure like 14.7 psi like we enjoy So the question is, is a half a G half as good? And then we can figure out if this thing is – there's a lot of stuff that happens to you that may be completely solved with even just the smallest amount of G. Like, what are they going to do with food on Mars?

1:34:54 we're talking about like living for a long time on mars or even deep space missions we gotta grow food it i'm like well listen i have a long day of work at spacex I come home. I open up the book before I go to bed, and I'm reading this like, okay, I got 62 souls, and I got to cover 3,000 kilometers, and I've got 52 moles of nitrogen, hydroxide, blah, blah, blah.

1:36:09 I busted his balls. Yeah. You can't really control it that. So if you try to hold your breath, that's a wrong thing to do because you're going to – Right. Like your neck will puff up like that. And you'll get grotesque swelling and and wherever that your blood is turning into vacuum but very quickly got him back to pressure and they were okay so all the bubbles just kind

1:39:37 That's the prism by which he makes every single decision he makes, falling a little bit behind but we do our best that's the case though with everything that's He talked to us. about but i was like that's but then i realized as soon as i say that like oh my god i just made and I compared you to Howard Hughes, you know? He kind of, like, if you pose to him a serious question,

1:42:50 I don't think it's an apt comparison. So we don't send, like he made the Dispruce Goose, which is an incredible airplane. of drastically impacting the way all of us live our lives. that he's involved in the Boring Project, which helps you know so like he'll have meetings us, and he'll walk out of his last meeting, and he'll walk across the street to Hawthorne Airport, hop on his jet, and he's at Palo Alto in a couple hours.

1:45:08 or, or that doesn't explain why he's able to do what he does. he's like looking at us from the next spot. met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's seven years was about as much as I could take you know We will be making human trips into other solar systems, into actual deep space. They're freaking out right now, especially a two-year-old.

1:47:40 And we all hope that we last forever as a species, right? We don't really need an asteroid to hit us. It's just so weird to have a guy like that amongst us. It's like he doesn't sit around and BS with you Garrett, what do you think about having a chip in your head? Your face. yeah i mean i could see it being kind of an extreme have and have not situation like you think about how how far behind you are today how left behind you are if you have no internet access

1:51:20 Yeah, but then you watch like Black Mirror. I mean, but do you have a sense of history that you are, first of all, you're amongst one of the rare human beings like the the you're you're at the front of the line in terms of creating viable methods of sending people into space and returning them i i feel extremely taking that those incredible experiences i had opened up a lot of other doors and like i ended

1:53:23 So this is For All Mankind mankind it's on apple tv and um the the way i got involved with this thing uh i was a big Yeah, it was a brilliant, brilliant show. And you can give them like four shows that you like. So what kind of bandwidth are you getting? Oh, that's terrible. Just Google searching random things. You're not watching Yankees games in real time, right?

1:55:43 I would play the radio broadcast while i was How weird did that feel? How many people have watched Battlestar Galactica while in a spaceship? And they will go out and get them for you. loop about you got to think about it first like you go back and look at 2001 and you see these guys using tablets. you know it's it's two weeks from now i'm going and the last time i checked this is a free country And I'm like, look, they're only going to shoot this once.

1:57:58 I got to be a focus puller on the camera guy. I got to do the sticks. it had like a bit of a stink to it but that was so much better and now he came and one day he calls me up, and he says, I got this new idea. but they're all working on Apollo. But when I was over there in Moscow, I got to see actually they have a warehouse where they still have their lunar lander, for example, that they built.

2:00:30 And then he called me up and said, do you want to work on the show? So I was in the writer's room where we're first coming up with basic ideas and sketching out like multiple seasons and character arcs and all that kind of stuff. I'm like, you're calling the wrong guy, but I can ask a friend. And they humor you because you paid a lot of money? How much do you get to script and go, hey, that doesn't happen.

2:02:14 Like the Martian with the hand-cutting thing. I know. Yeah, everything. You're going to go from one to the other with a fire extinguisher? You just have to be believable, which the bar is, And I'm not worthy. I ended up sitting and working very closely with the writers who's a sci-fi fan like you've you've had two dream lives here like three or four really

2:05:51 There's a lot of junk and it is very dangerous and it's a real problem. It'll come back, and it'll burn up. and we've done them in the past. and all the different pieces of junk that have been identified. until it's a really big problem, around like this that you can attach to something this half-inch thick solid aluminum. I mean, you're going to instantly combust.

2:09:13 It probably might. a piece of of of a wall a thin piece of metal that stands off from the hull. It's hit the shuttle window. Jesus Christ, a little? And they can do the same kind of damage. uh well Well, listen, it's been a real pleasure having you in here, man. Thank you very much Do you have I'm