 It looks like we're live, so welcome everyone. Thanks for tuning in again this week. We are very lucky this week to have Colonel Gregory H. Johnson join us today to continue our series of Google Hangouts. He is a former US Air Force pilot, as well as NASA astronaut. And currently, he's the executive director for the Center for the Advancement of Science and Space. He's going to talk to us today about scientific research and technology development aboard the International Space Station. And I might even mention some firsthand experience helping to construct the station, as well as living aboard the outpost for over three weeks on two separate space shuttle flights. So I think we'll have a lot of interesting conversation. And he has a ton of cool things to share with us. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to Colonel Johnson now. Well, thank you, David. It's always exciting to share the experiences of space. And I've also enjoyed how my career has progressed after being an astronaut for a little over 15 years. I guess I'd like to start off today. I know this is a systems engineering class. And I was an engineering student in undergraduate and graduate school. But then quickly started doing the flying thing originally to be a better engineer. But ultimately, I just really thought it was great, fun, and very rewarding. So I had this fighter pilot career, but eventually came back to the systems engineering front as a test pilot and then as an astronaut. So what you all are studying right now is very important not only to yourselves and to the country, but frankly, to the entire planet as we become higher tech and try to stand on the shoulders of those scientists and engineers that have achieved the levels of technology thus far. So to start things off, though, I'd like to share with you a little bit of the less academic and more show and tell part of my career, which might generate some questions about the space program. And so if we could start that first slide, I've got a slide deck that I'd like to share with you from my second shuttle flight. So tell me when you guys have that slide ready to go. Are we there? We're up. Yep. We're up. OK, so you should be seeing a slide of the STS-134 crew. Let me see if I can get this. There we go. The STS-134 crew, and this is our Star Trek pose, our Star Trek copycat pose. Mark Kelly is the guy in the center of the screen. He was the commander of STS-134. And he was a pilot twice before and a commander once before. So this was his fourth shuttle flight. It was just almost three years ago that we launched into space. And you might also recognize Mark because he is the astronaut who was married to Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot three and a half years ago, three years and two months ago, during our training for this flight. So it complicated our training. But I think in the long run, it actually brought our team closer together as we dealt with that adversity. And Mark went to Arizona to take care of his family. And we continued training and got smarter from another provisional commander, CJ Sturco, who by the way now flies for Virgin Galactic. And anyway, Mark made it back. We flew the flight. And we had a very successful final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour. Space Shuttle Endeavour flew 25 missions. And this was her final flight launching back in May of 2011. You can go back. I want to describe the crew members real quickly. You can see me. I don't have my Spock ears on. But I'm standing to, as you look at it, to Mark's right. And then next to me is Roberto Batore. He's an Italian astronaut. We call him Ricky Bobby. And then at the very end is Greg Chometop. And then starting on the other side, Drew Foistel was a Hubble Space Telescope space walker. He was our lead space walker. And then rounding out the crew, we've got Mike Fink. And Mike Fink is still active as our Drew and actually just Drew and Mike are now the only two active astronauts. But Mike has the distinction of having the most time in space. He has spent over a year of his life on the International Space Station. OK, next slide. OK, there's Space Shuttle Endeavour. You know, we're sitting in the cockpit there. We have to get in about two and a half hours prior to lift off the strap in and get ready to go. So we're on our backs. We actually strapped in during the dark hours. And then the sun rose. And then right as the sun rose, a very calm, placid morning. We transitioned from this still calmness to a crazy ride up on Endeavour. Next slide. About 7 million pounds of thrust as we blasted off into the air. You could see the sun has just risen. There were boats out on the water that were taking a video of some of the launch. And as I was looking at them, sitting on my back, it was very peaceful. And then all of a sudden we leaped off the ground like a wild animal. And the roll program, during the day, my first flight was at night, so I didn't experience the roll program on my first flight because it was completely dark, was absolutely spectacular. Next slide. The vibration is intense. It's like sensory overload. Acceleration, light, sound, vibration. It's a wild ride. And about this time, I was wondering, OK, I lived through this one time. So why did I sign up for this again? I'm joking, but seriously, those sorts of things go through your mind because you really know you're going somewhere and you're not coming back to the Cape. Next slide. There's a low cloud deck on both of my flights. My first flight was in 2008. And in this flight, we had a low cloud deck as well. Next slide. And you'll see that we blasted into the clouds at about 31 seconds on the clock. Next slide. It was interesting, though. I was an old F-15 pilot, and one of my buddies was up there patrolling the airspace above the clouds and got this spectacular shot. At this point, we're going almost three times the speed of sound. Next. Well, those final missions of the Space Shuttle program were, for the most part, to assemble the International Space Station. We spent 36 flights total assembling the Space Station. And then we had a one more flight, STS-135, that completed the outfitting of the interior of the Space Station. So the last 15 years or so, the shuttle was the mainstay of that assembly. And we took pieces up, modules, of one flight at a time. Next slide. As we look out the overhead window, we can start to make out the individual modules of the International Space Station as we get closer. On the left of your screen, you could see Mark Kelly. He's navigating what we call the rendezvous, where we join up onto the Space Station and drew poistles on the right. And he's taken photographs out of the overhead window. Next slide. This is a shot that was taken from the International Space Station as we came aboard. And I'd like to point out the Space Shuttle is a lot like an 18-wheeler. The folks in the crew are all in the very front of the vehicle. And then in the back portion of the vehicle, the payload bay, we have the three final objects that we attach to the outside of the Space Station. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is on the far left. The ELC-3 is basically a logistics carrier that held a bunch of spare parts for the Space Station. And then finally, there's a long boom that's on the bottom of the shuttle, the edge of the payload bay. It's about a 50-foot boom that we attach to the Space Station to help extend the length of the robotic arm. Next slide. Well, that's where we attach to the Space Station at the top of the picture. This photograph was actually taken by a Soyuz that departed about halfway into our docked mission. But this picture clearly shows, starting from the bottom of your screen, the Russian modules that are actually there's a visiting vehicle at the very bottom. But the Russian portion is in the bottom of your screen. And this whole vertical line from the ATV all the way up to the Space Shuttle, you can float all the way into the Space Shuttle from the ATV, about 200 feet total there. And then the trusses goes horizontally. And you can't go there without a space suit. And so the trusses will hold it all together. And of course, you can see the huge solar rays and the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked at the top of your screen. Next slide. And do we have another one coming? Looks, oh, there we go. OK. Well, here, we've been in space now for a couple days. And we're greeted by the members on board the Space Station. They've been there actually four. There's six of them. Three of them have been there for a couple months. And three others, the three that departed during our docked mission. Two of the three are shown here. Paolo Nespoli is on the left. He's from Italy. And then Dmitri on the right, he's from Russia. He's a MiG-29 fighter pilot, which is kind of interesting. He was a MiG-29 fighter pilot. 20 years ago, he and I were training as enemies to shoot each other down. Now we're living and working in space, working constructively. It was really professionally rewarding for me to work with these international people that have joined in on the International Space Station. You can see Mark greeting Paolo for the very first time. Next slide. And you'll see Mark as he's floating by those guys. Next slide. Like to point out, the crew members that have been on the Space Station, they have matching shirts and pants. They look very well kept. And we're not matching. We've only been in space a couple days. It reminds me of a campsite up in Fillmont, for example, where all the camp counselors have been in the field for months. And they look great. And then the campers that have just gotten there look like a bunch of ruffians. But we did have matching shirts. You can go to the next slide and see how we cleaned up after a couple of days. And now we're doing one of those zero gravity photographs. I think the camera's upside down in this picture. I think Mark and I are supposed to be right side up. But actually, there is no right setup when you get out to zero gravity. Next slide. And here's the combined crew. The ISS crew members who have been up there for several months are on the left. And you can see Katie's hair floating in zero gravity. And then our six crew members on the right. Next slide. Well, we got to work as soon as we got to space. And we used the robotic arms. You can see here the space shuttle robotic arm is removing the ELC-3 out of the shuttle's payload bay. Next slide. And then we handed off to the robotic arm of the space station, which then installs it onto the top of the truss. Next slide. The AMS, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. I'd like to talk a little bit about that. It's probably one of the most important experiments aboard the space station. It's a particle detector to help us understand the origin of our universe, dark matter, dark energy. And we know that dark matter makes up over 90% of our universe. So it's a big unknown. And this particle detector might also help us understand naturally occurring antimatter. So there's a bunch of very interesting science projects that are generated from the data from the AMS. 50 or so billion particles a day, I think, totally. The count now is about 43 billion cosmic particles that have been collected and analyzed in CERN, in the CERN control room in Europe. Next slide. Well, we used the robotic arm to also remove AMS. Next slide. And then handed off to the space station robotic arm. Next slide, please. Where we attached it on top of the truss. And we're not progressing to the next slide. But you will see us attaching it to the top of the truss. There you go. Oh, back one, please. And so you can see the top of the truss there, the AMS, with the robotic arm. It was actually my job, and Greg Chometop. We worked together to install the AMS on top of the truss. I did not want to, I guess you can't drop it in space because it's zero gravity. But I certainly didn't want to crash it into anything else up there. So we were very careful as we installed it. We practiced that maneuver quite a bit because it was an activity that we didn't want to mess up. And in the background, you can see the solar arrays of the space station. Next slide. And during the assembly of the International Space Station, we spent over 1,000 hours total of spacewalk time putting the space station modules together by hand, really. And these guys and gals spend six to seven hours in pairs of two going outside. Next slide. And we call them spacewalks, but they're really more like space crawls because, of course, it's the zero gravity that the feet aren't any more functional than the hands are actually much more functional because you grab things with your hands. So they're crawling around the outside of the space station doing work. We had four spacewalks total. Next slide on our flight and, of course, the final four spacewalks of Space Station assembly. There you can see, I think it's Drew. He's holding on with one hand. He's waving at mom and dad. And to the left of the screen, you can see a tether. We always have tethers when we do spacewalks unlike the movie Gravity that you might have seen with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Next. This gives you a sense of scale. You can see there's an astronaut on the far right. That's Drew Poistil. And he is working a materials experiment way out on the right side of your screen. And then there's a camouflaged astronaut in the center of your screen. It's hard to see who is doing some other work supporting Drew. And, of course, the AMS is sitting there now collecting data. Next. I love this shot because it's a photo of Greg Chometoff. But if you look carefully in Greg Chometoff's advisor, you can make out Mike Fink. We call him Spanky. And Mike Fink is taking this photograph. And you can see the details of his reflection in Taz's visor. Next. This is on the mid-deck of the space shuttle. Ricky Bobby or Roberto Vittori and I, we were the butler and the maid for a lot of the, during the space walks, for example, we prepared the food. You can see the vacuum, the space vacuum cleaner on the upper left. We have those lockers there behind us where all of our equipment is inventoryed and stored. And Roberto and I are also working on an experiment in the center of the screen, upper center, that was an Italian sport experiment. Next slide. Our Russian friends, we collaborated quite a bit, although we do kind of have our own timelines. And so we're not always working together on projects. This particular night, though, was the night before we undocked. It was a very special night. And they came over to the space shuttle. We're on the space shuttle mid-deck right there. And we shared a meal. What's interesting is I see my M&Ms are being stolen in the center of the screen. And I did not realize that they had taken my M&Ms because I was focused on, next slide, another concern of mine that I had had for two missions. And that was getting a photograph of my grandparents' house. This is the actual lake in northern Michigan, near Traversea to Michigan, where my grandparents lived. And I spent many summers on that lake. And it was truly an emotional event when I finally got this shot. I spent almost a month up in space. And the cloud cover never cleared enough for me to get this shot until that final night. And so while the Russians were running off of my M&Ms, I got this picture, which was very exciting for me. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. Actually, that's not true. They were welling in my eyes because there's no gravity. Or you don't feel the effects of gravity. But anyway, I just love this shot and remembering that moment. Next slide. About a second later, I snapped another shot. So you can see how quickly we're moving. The lake is now in the bottom left of your screen. And then you can see the city, the beautiful city of Traversea to Michigan. Next slide. I believe we had the first on-orbit rock band, if that would be three members or more. Katie Coleman brought her flute with her. That guitar right there that Drew Poistil is playing is the same one that Chris Hatfield was playing, I believe. And then the keyboard on the right, I didn't even realize that thing was up there my first flight. But Katie found it the second flight. And so we played Brown Eyed Girl in zero gravity. Next. This is the planet that we live on. It's a beautiful planet. This picture is not enhanced in any way. You can see the northern lights, the beautiful reds, the beautiful greens as we look to the north. The orbit of the International Space Station is 51 degrees inclinations. So we cross over about 90% to 95% of the populated land masses of our planet. And we live on a beautiful planet. And if there's anything that I took from my two trips in space was the appreciation for how wonderful the planet is that we live on. Next slide. We're flying over Italy at night. We had two Italians on board. Paolo Nespoli was Italian on the International Space Station crew, as well as Roberto Vittori, who was on our shuttle crew. So we got a lot of shots of Italy. And this is Italy at night. And they do turn their lights on at night. I think they might even point them up instead of down. Next. But an advantage of having two Italians on board is we got an opportunity to talk to the Pope. And so the Pope spoke to us and challenged us to learn great things in space. And also thanked us for working as a team and collaboration with 16 other nations on the International Space Station. Next. That's what the Space Station looked when Mark Kelly said, Space Station assembly is complete. Next slide. Now it's time to go home. We're looking out the shuttle overhead window. And there's the Space Station, the way we left it. Next slide. You look real closely. You can see that the AMS and the ELC3 are now installed on the Space Station. Next. And now it's a process of transitioning the space shuttle from a orbiting spaceship to kind of a glider to come in for landing. Next slide. But all the time, very happy that the AMS is working. Next slide. And leaving behind one of mankind's greatest achievements, the International Space Station, working with our international partners. This is looking out the Japanese laboratory window. We can see the earth below and the beautiful heavens above that are yet to explore. Next. Shuttle coming in for landing, Endeavour's final landing. Next slide. We came in in the middle of the night. Next slide. And transitioned to 1G. Transitioning to zero gravity takes about a day, day and a half to get really comfortable with it. Sometimes we feel a little bit dizzy and nauseous at first when we get into space. And we have that same kind of process getting used to gravity when we get back on the ground. You can see the six of us, we look pretty stable. But if somebody bowled into a drew on the right side, we'd all fall down. So anyway, but that was the end of a great adventure, a 16 day flight to the International Space Station aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. And so with that, I think I will take questions. That's great, Greg. That's really great that the experience that you had on the space station, I think one thing that a lot of people have been asking, part of this course is mainly about the planning and design of missions and systems. And so what is the role of an astronaut such as yourself in mission design? Well, that's a great question. Every space mission is a test mission. And the original flights, they were very, very much more a test mission than these later flights as we understood the systems and we matured as a program. But each mission is unique. And so at least up to this point that NASA has been interested in recruiting test pilots to help contribute to the systems aboard either the Space Shuttle or the Space Station or whatever vehicle that we're designing. Right before I left NASA, and I just left NASA about seven months ago, I was involved in the trajectory design of the Dream Chaser, which is a little vehicle that Sierra Nevada is hoping that NASA will purchase. There are three competitors right now to take crew to and from the International Space Station. Right now the Russians are the only ones they can get us to and from. And so there are three different companies, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, and Boeing that are working on these vehicles. And I got involved with the approach design of the Dream Chaser is great fun. I mean, it's test pilot stuff. You're flying on a very steep trajectory and then working the software, the man-machine interface such that you can make the landing task repeatable and safe. And so as test pilots, we were always paying attention to all the different systems and how they interacted and how we could make them better. That's great. And so another question that we've gotten from a few different people so far has kind of been about your transition from your background as a pilot to your current role. So what kind of pitfalls or successes did you experience as you transition from an operator to a manager? And how did you overcome them? That's a $3 question there. I'd say as operators, as I went through almost 25 years in the Air Force, eventually became a colonel, we have different leadership positions along the way. So we do get quite a bit of experience in working with teams and understanding how to get basically all the sled dogs moving in the same direction. I also took 15 months out once I'd left the Air Force, but I was still with NASA to manage an organization of about 60 people in Cleveland, Ohio to do education and outreach, which was actually our mission up there. But management is an interesting thing. And there were, I had an idea of what to expect coming to CASIS, the Center for the Advancement of Science and Space. But I was very obviously surprised by the complexity and the relationships of our mission, which is to manage about 50% of the US portion of the US National Lab, which is 50% of the US portion of the International Space Station, a daunting task and on a very limited budget. So I'd say the challenges that I encountered first were communication, because communication is always difficult. It doesn't matter if you're communicating from the very bottom of an organization or top of an organization outside to other organizations. Communication has all kinds of opportunity to break down. And so one of the things we've been working on since I've been here with CASIS is getting that message efficient and accurate. Secondly, I'd say probably it would be trying to keep myself out of the weeds. Because as an operator, I'm always interested in how things work and getting the job done. And as an operator, your job is to get the job done. And so as a manager and executive, I obviously have to stay high level out of the weeds and yet be close enough to the weeds to understand what's going on. So that's been a balance for me as I've been learning what we're doing in CASIS. But I think we're getting to a stride now where we're accomplishing really significant projects on the space station. And I'm doing a lot more of the up and out where I'm speaking on the hill in DC with stakeholders and with higher level players in the different companies that run our projects. I'd say our successes are that we're a startup. I mean, we were created less than three years ago. And NASA threw a small chunk of money at us and said, hey, go do this challenging mission. And it took a while for us to get going. And now I think we have the right people. We have the right connections, the right communications. I think we're getting credibility as an organization. And we just recently put science up on the space station. So we're really excited. That's great. So I guess kind of then going, sorry, I'm jumping over to the place here, but going back then to you touched on your transition from the Air Force to NASA. So can you kind of explain the different pathways to becoming an astronaut? I mean, you obviously took the military route, but what about civil scientists? What are the options? What is one better than the other? Just elaborate on that if you can. Well, certainly there's not one cookbook way to become an astronaut. I think one of the biggest ingredients is getting lucky because there are so many qualified astronaut hopefuls as I was going through the process. I was actually really surprised that I was one of the lucky guys that got picked. But yeah, traditionally we've had two different kinds of astronauts. You have the pilots and the mission specialists. The pilots very often have come from almost always actually from military and mostly test pilot scenarios. And they have been the operators traditionally of the ship, for example, the space shuttle. Mission specialists also take part in the operation. And many of the mission specialists also were pilots, maybe not test pilots. Maybe they were helicopter pilots or helicopter test pilots or other operational jobs, submarines, for example. But they also came from civilian life because they bring other skills to the table. In the space program, we need geologists. We need medical doctors. But we also have individuals from, we have a veterinarian, for example. We have teachers, school teachers, that have become astronauts. So we bring lots of different skill sets. And one of the challenges of the astronaut office is to gather the right teams with the right skill set to do whatever that particular mission is that we have. So that being said, to become an astronaut, I think it's important to realize that you should do what you love because that's what you're going to do the best in. And so as a whether you're a writer or whether you are a scientist or whatever really excites you that you can get passionate about, that's what you should go do because any one of those walks in life could become an astronaut. I mean, eventually we're hoping to colonize the moon and Mars and we're hoping to move a substantial presence off of this planet, partly for survival. And so all of those critical capabilities and skills will be used in these future colonies of space explorers. But certainly right now science and math are probably areas where we tap the most of our astronauts from, but doing very well in those projects and not assuming that you're going to become an astronaut. I mean, I loved being a pilot. I loved being a test pilot. And if I was never selected to be an astronaut, I would have loved my career in the Air Force as a pilot. You had mentioned kind of the future of space exploration briefly in that answer. And so another question that we've been getting a lot is obviously just your opinion from your experience, your expertise, but where do you see the future of space travel? Is it going to continue to be progressed by commercial space industries or do you believe this is more of just an interim fix to drive technology advances and we'll eventually go back to government military driven? Well, I mean, it's a mixture of both actually. If you think of any transportation system, how it evolved, if you think about the chariot, the stagecoach, the train, the plane, you know, it starts out as a science project, if you will. I mean, when cars first came out, only the very rich added, they were on novelty. Airplanes were the same way. And then as we learned how to develop better and faster and cheaper airplanes, for example, then the airline industry was born. And but even then, only the very rich were able to fly on airplanes. And now, regular Americans with normal jobs routinely fly on airplanes every year. So I think the space program will evolve in the same way. I think it's going to, right now it's expensive. Depending on estimates, six to 10,000 pounds, I'm sorry, dollars for each pound that we get into orbit, that's very, very expensive. And so we're hoping to, for technologies to grow, to enable us to cut that by 90%, hopefully, by an order of magnitude. And maybe even after that, an order of magnitude so that we can get to the moon or Mars much more cheaply. So as it's expensive and there's a lot of risk, there's gonna be government involvement. But as soon as commercial companies start learning how to design those new innovative technologies and find creative ways to make a profit, you'll see more of that. Right now we're seeing space tourism. Virgin Galactic is getting started up this year. They've got their first space tourists. You've got Bigelow, Jeff Bezos, you've got Elon Musk with SpaceX, you've got Orbital Sciences Corporation, Sierra Nevada, they're all getting involved in the commercialization of space. This is a new emerging market, a commercial market. And I believe over time, there will be commercial players in space. That's great, thanks. So another question that we've just got is about the ISS specifically. People are wondering, while it's up there, I mean, these things seem so delicate, right? I mean, these intricate mechanics and solar panels and people are wondering, do meteors hit the ISS frequently? And what kind of protection is there for these things to stop this kind of really expensive technology from just collapsing up there? Yeah, that's a great question. Where did that one come from, by the way? Her name is Victoria Walsh. Thank you, Victoria, great question. Micromedium rides are flying around all the time up there. It's a literal minefield up in low Earth orbit. We're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes and we're about 250 nautical miles up. When I was aboard the space shuttle, docked to the space station, actually we had just done docked on my first flight. We took a micrometeorated hit, the commander's left window, made a big divot in it, actually had all the rookies really concerned. So there's a lot of stuff flying out there. The shell of the US side has a, basically a protective layer that will take a micrometeorated and pulverize it into a bunch of little pieces so that they won't penetrate the outer hull of the pressurized modules. So that protects astronauts on the inside and our particular modules with that micrometeorated layer, protective layer. The solar cells, on the other hand, they don't have protection, but there's just zillions of solar cells up there. So the micrometeorites do routinely take out those solar cells, but the good news is we have so many of them up there. We have virtually unlimited power on the International Space Station. That is certainly one of the commodities that they're not short of. In fact, when we joined on the International Space Station with the space shuttle, we robbed their electrical power because they had so much power. And let's see, other micrometeorites, I mean they could hit astronauts, right? So that's a big danger if you're doing a spacewalk and a micrometeorated hits you. So we have contingency plans to get spacewalkers inside if they do get hit by a micrometeorated. I think the odds of a catastrophic hit are possible, but not strongly likely in the duration of the expected life of the International Space Station. But it is a danger and so we do have the capability to make repairs if one of those larger micrometeorites penetrated the outer shell of the modules. So I guess along those same lines, say one of these meteoroids did hit the space station and it took out communication. If communication was lost between ground control and the space crew, do you typically keep the communication up from your end in the space crew side, assuming that it'll come back on or without the assurance that they're even hearing you down on ground control, how does that typically work? That's a great question. Yes, when we lose communication, we still assume that we have one-way communication so we make calls in the blind. And so that's part of the training and we make calls in the blind to let the mission control know what we're doing, what we're thinking, and where we're going. But we do have procedures that are in place that do not require direction from the ground. So when we have catastrophic events, depressurization, atmosphere poisoning, for example, like toxic atmosphere or a fire, we have specific procedures that we follow in order to get in a safe configuration. Great, thanks. So another thing that people are wondering about is, I mean, obviously, the career as a fighter pilot, piloting a space shuttle, two amazing things. What are the, are there any similarities between those two? Is one more challenging than the other? Just any kind of compare and contrast between those two different types of piloting? It'd be like comparing maybe riding a motorcycle and maybe a huge Mercedes or something. They're both very special, they're both very interesting. I have to say the same feeling that I had prior to my first combat mission in a fighter where I didn't know what to expect and what was on the other side. I was well-trained, I was very confident, but I didn't know what to expect. I had that same feeling before my first space shuttle launch. When I was sitting on my back and I was thinking about all the years of training that had led up to that point, but not knowing what it would really feel like. And so there are similarities. When you're operating an airplane, obviously, there's one, a fighter jet, there's one or two of you, and so you're more self-reliant, you're more autonomous. When you're on a space shuttle, for example, you have a larger crew, you're working with the team on the ground, and so it's more of a team environment, but there are a lot of similarities between the two. This is a question that we have about CASIS, their current work. So how do you guys prioritize the investigations that get to fly on the ISS? Is there a definite high-level pathway mapped out for the next 10 years? Indeed, you have, I guess I'll just stop the question there. I'll let you answer that. Yes, and you did point out, we do have 10 years of runway now instead of six years. We just recently, the White House set a policy change to extend the life of the space station to 2024. So that's 10 years from now. We're actually hoping to get another four years and get 14 years of capability on the International Space Station. At CASIS, we have a portfolio evaluation process, and so when we get project ideas that come in, we first look at them operationally, and some projects just are not gonna work on the space station. If they have toxic materials, for example, we won't take the risk to put them on the space station. Then we look at them economically and scientifically, and if they make economic sense and they make scientific sense, we draw the line and we do have a score that they get, and an ultimate score helps us prioritize those projects. We certainly, because we, in this fiscal environment, we're resource limited, we don't have a lot of funds to put up toward projects. So if projects come specifically, or especially commercial projects that bring their own money because they have a project that might generate a product that they could sell, those projects are very important to us because if we can commercialize the space station and then all benefit from the jobs and the products that are created, then we could fund additional projects. So commercial projects are important. We also have a STEM mission, a science technology engineering and math program, and so if there are projects that will stimulate our young space, future space explorers out there, or help them understand the wow of space, that is also part of our mission. But of course we want to cure cancer, we have stem cell research projects, we can build huge protein crystals up in space without the gravity vector, all scientific processes fundamentally change. That's great. So earlier you had mentioned colonizing the moon and perhaps even colonizing Mars, you mentioned your time on the hill. And so another question that we got is from your experience, your time on the hill, do you think there's currently enough support to continue throughout the years to support sending humans to colonize Mars? Is that still something that you believe people are passionate enough about to keep us pursuing? Well, there are a lot of steps between where we are now and colonizing Mars, but I really do believe that it's in our spirit as humans to do that. And I do believe it may not be in my lifetime, it may not even be two or three generations from now is lifetime, but I think ultimately we will learn how to get out to those far spaces in our solar system and maybe even outside of our solar system. So I think Mars is certainly a great candidate and I could be pretty sure that within 100 years, 200 years, we're gonna figure out how to have an outpost on the moon and on Mars and maybe somewhere further away. Mars is a planet that's closest to the characteristics of Earth, so it's a good, and it's also relatively close, it's only 60 to 150 million miles away. And I'm joking, but we've noticed with Kepler, there's Earth-like planets that are light years away, but right now Mars is the closest habitable kind of planet. It does have some difficulties that we would have to overcome, but it has some better characteristics than for example the moon. So I think within, I mean, I'd be totally guessing, but I'd say certainly within a couple hundred years we should have something fairly permanent on Mars, I'd say. That would be really interesting. I guess kind of keeping with this Mars theme. So one of the projects for this course that all the students are working through is this Mars sample return report that they're putting together. And they kind of analyze and go through the process of doing research and doing scoping and concept of operation tests to kind of see the detailed technical step-by-step how that would work, sending a craft to Mars, collecting samples, bringing it back. And so one question that a number of students have asked is has there been any talk or just the general idea, what do you think about, instead of collecting these samples in Mars, bringing them all the way back to Earth to analyze, is there any kind of geology lab on the ISS that we could bring samples to from Mars and kind of analyze them there? Well, I think that's a great thought. Curiosity, for example, on the Earth, on the Martian surface does have the capability to analyze some of the materials on the Martian surface and send them back to Earth. But the notion of going to the International Space Station to do that wouldn't make much sense because the space station is really close to the Earth. It's only 250 miles up. And so the space station, if the Earth were an orange, the space station would be on the orange peel. I mean, it's right there. And Mars is millions of miles away, so it'd be more challenging probably to bring those samples to the space station than it would be just back to planet Earth. But if there were an orbiting laboratory around Mars, then that might be a real sensible way to go. And so just like we have a space station around the Earth, you could have a space station around Mars, and that space station might be an interesting place to process materials if, for example, there weren't a way to do it on the Martian surface, or if you needed zero gravity, because sometimes when you take the gravity vector out of the equation, we'll learn new things. And so who knows what they could learn on a space station that orbited Mars? That's great. So another question is about the ISS again. And so cases is doing a lot of stuff with ISS, obviously, right now, like that you've mentioned. Is there, do you see, I guess, kind of a tipping point or an inflection point? How will we know if ISS has reached the end of its life cycle? Couple of weeks ago, one of the lessons that we're going through in this course was the project life cycle, and they went through all the way from implementation or design implementation, and then it comes back down to Earth, and it kind of gets retired. And so do you see an end for ISS or do you see it lasting much longer into the future, and how will we know when it's time? That's a great question. I think there's been a lot of studies done to understand where we could extend the life of the space station to for minimum extra effort. And I think that line has been drawn at 2028. And so without serious re-engineering or redesigned of modules or replacement of modules, I understand that 2028 is kind of a line in the sand that we could achieve with very little additional risk or monetary outlight. That being said, I personally believe, probably if we wanted to when we put our heads together, we could figure out how to get it further than that. It might mean replacing some modules. That would be difficult. We'd need a vehicle to get the modules up there or a way to get them up there. So I'd be speculating how far we could go past 2028. But certainly we can get the space station, I believe, through 2028. And so I'm very hopeful when I speak to the congressmen, the decision makers in DC, that they understand that the space station, the engineers believe that space station could be extended to 2028, and the time to do that is now. So we have the most time to get those meaningful projects up on the space station. Now that being said, I think your question was twofold. It wasn't just about the structure itself, but it was also the useful life from a scientific perspective. I don't think that we're ever gonna run out of science to put on the space station. I think as we learn new things, then new problems will surface. We have this very interesting project right now in medicine, where we're studying, when you take the gravity vector out of the equation and zero gravity, cells interact differently. And biologists are learning about this, and also genes express differently. And so by understanding certain genes that turn on and off in zero gravity, how these, how zero gravity affects live animals, like rodents and humans, we can better understand medicine. We can map better drugs in some cases by understanding the larger protein crystals that we can grow in space. And I think medicine will be revolutionized within five to 10 years. I think we're gonna have some great strides in medicine from our studies in zero gravity. Thanks. So I'll give you a softball question up here. So someone asked what was more fun for you? Flying the Space Shuttle or doing aircraft testing with Air Force? Oh, I'll tell you. Those two are pretty different. I mean, what I really enjoyed about flying, test flying in the Air Force is I got to fly lots of different airplanes. I think it totaled about 45 different aircraft. The A-10 is the neatest airplane I got a flight in that. It's just a story that I'll tell to my grandkids about the A-10, that some foreign airplanes that I got to fly, the other fighters, and heavy aircraft as well. The C-141, the B-52, flying all airplanes is great. And then making milestones is a lot of fun as well. I had the opportunity to fly in the active program at NASA Dryden where they had a highly modified F-15 and we were testing thrust vectoring on that airplane. It had canards on the front. It was fly by wire, it was a fabulous airplane and we were doing some initial testing on this axisymmetric thrust vectoring project that I think the technology from that test program is gonna be on the Joint Strike Fighter. So being a test pilot was awesome. But I have to say not one of those flights compares to one space shuttle flight. And a space shuttle is a wonderful vehicle. It was, words can't describe the power that it had. My second launch, there were no malfunctions from lift off all the way to main engine cutoff. Just an amazing vehicle that could have gone on for many, many more years. I know there are a lot of trade-offs, political and fiscal trade-offs for retiring space shuttle but it was a very, very good vehicle and I think at the end of the program it was the safest that it had ever been. So I love flying the space shuttle and those are great memories that I'll take with me forever. Yeah, it seems like it'd be pretty hard to beat that, I would imagine. So I guess kind of to wrap this all up, we're close to the hour now. So from your, your entire career as a fighter pilot to piloting the space shuttle and to even now as the director at CASIS, how do you, what is your interaction with space systems engineering? How does your past relate to engineers? Do you work with engineers now? I guess just kind of relating your experience to this course. Well, engineers make things and scientists investigate and so our involvement in CASIS with engineers is we need to use hardware and actually put it on the space station. We have to get it there and so the engineers help us design the hardware, the modules, the cubes, whatever configuration the experiment's gonna be to get it onto the space station, to give it power, to get the data from it, to analyze it in zero gravity and then bring that data back to Earth. So the engineers have, and also of course the engineers are involved in the design of the vehicles that actually get us to and from the space station, for example, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation. The scientists are the ones who are actually running investigations to learn scientific principles. So two very different disciplines that are working together. So how does systems engineering work together? Well, every spaceship and every experiment for that matter has different subsystems that have to interact and interrelate and so as an operator, as I said before, it's very important for us as human machine interfaces to help those systems work together. If you're an avionics engineer, you're gonna have a set of requirements that you have that might be very different from the propulsion engineer. The propulsion engineer doesn't wanna have all that heavy and expensive gear that needs cooling and everything else. The propulsion engineer just wants to fly a brick up there, this very simple, right? And so these different disciplines of engineering work together and the system engineer is the one who kind of puts it all together. So all the things that we do on the international space station and in the space shuttle and all space vehicles and airplanes have system engineers. That's great, thanks Greg. So yeah, unfortunately I think that is all the time that we have today. Greg, I wanna thank you again so much for joining us today. I think it's been great to get a different perspective, someone from a different background. We've heard from engineers and scientists throughout this course, but having an astronaut pilot and now someone who kind of works from an outside organization but still in conjunction with NASA I think is great. So thank you so much for volunteering your time. But otherwise I think that wraps it up and we will see you all next week. Thank you all for tuning in. All right, thank you all, see you all later. Bye.