 Thank you. My name is Bill Gibson. I'm from the Economics Department at UVM. And I was very fortunate, along with my wife, Diane Flaherty, in the back to attend the launch of the Soyuz that took Katie to the International Space Station in 2010. This picture was snapped at Roscosmos just right outside of Moscow. This is mission control for the Russian Space Agency. And there we have, there we have Katie's son, Jamie. Now I come from the Economics Department, and there we consider self-interest to be one of the most powerful forces shaping human destiny. Progress and well-being. Of course, it has to be constrained by the mechanisms of competition, and that might require some additional remarks, maybe even a degree in economics from this institution would help. But sometimes self-interest is graciously set aside. And here you see Jamie wishing Katie well on her journey to the International Space Station. That doesn't always happen. On the right-hand side is Vladimir Kondratyev. Vlad is the son of Dmitry Kondratyev, whom you just heard about in the video. He's speaking next to his father, Dmitry, on the International Space Station minutes after the video concluded. Just as a, well I see there's a bit of a depressurization taking about three hours. And after Vlad spoke, inconveniently in Russia, and I have to say, mission control burst into gales of laughter, the entire building just laughing. A few minutes later, the mission director, Kirk Sharman, explained that what Vlad had said in Russian was that he knew his father was going on a trip and wanted to remind him, as always, bring me a toy. Well, Katie spent six months on the ISS accumulating a total of 180 days and four hours in space, including two Space Shuttle missions, STS-73 and 95 and STS-99 in 1999. The last mission on the Space Station was to, Space Shuttle, excuse me, was to deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its inertial upper stage. This was out of the Shuttle's cargo bay. This is a very large instrument, X-ray telescope. She has done, she did a lot of things for NASA on those three missions. She led the astronaut team for tile repair after Columbia had exploded and crashed. On the Space Station, she integrated supply ship operations with commercial suppliers, including SpaceX, and has served as an advisor to Orbital ATK, which was recently purchased by North Grumman, Sierra Nevada, and not the least, Sandra Bullock, who starred in Alfonso Cuarón's gravity. She's an avid skier, sometimes rower, and an all-around athlete. She was chief of robotics for the astronaut office, including training astronauts to use the cannon arm to attach supply ships to the International Space Station. She served as the aquanaut, I didn't actually know this, during the NEMO-7 mission aboard the Aquarius underwater laboratory, living and working underwater for 11 days, presumably she had air support. She's part of the band Bandella, which includes fellow astronaut Steven Robinson at UC Davis, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield of Space Audity fame, maybe you've seen that on the internet, Mickey Pettit, whose Don Pettit's wife, astronaut Don Pettit's wife, Katie is a flute player and has taken several flutes with her to the ISS, including flutes from Patty Maloney and Matt Malloy of the Chieftains, as well as Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull. On April the 12th, 2011, she played live through a video link for an audience of Jethro Tull's show in Russia in honor of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, first manned space flight celebrated. She played the duet from orbit while Anderson played on the ground in Russia. After studying chemistry at MIT, she received a PhD in polymer science from UMass Amherst and then served in the Air Force rising to the rank of colonel. She's drawn to organic chemistry, which I don't know if you know this, was so named because of the presumed force Vitaal in the 19th century and now contributes to the Virtual Institute of Synthetic Biology, a NASA bioengineering program to ensure stable food sources for long term space exploration. She's now retired from NASA and has recently accepted a position in the Department of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU, Arizona State University in Tempe. So for the first time, since I've known her for many, many years, I get to say, welcome Professor Coleman. How's that? Can you hear me? Okay. I'm going to put this one over here. There's nothing like having good friends introduce you. I think they're more likely to make things up, although in this case, what Dr. Gibson said, I think was all true. And you know, it takes, I have a pretty wonderful job and I really loved doing it. It killed me to retire two years ago, but it was the right time to do that. But to do that job, you really need a village. And Dr. Gibson and his wife, Dr. Flaherty, Bill and Diane, are just the major part of that village for myself and my family. And one of the reasons that this picture looks so together, I mean, I love to see this picture. It actually ended up in the New York Times, actually, and my son was 10 at the time that I went to space. My husband on the left, and then Dimitri's wife and son Vlad on the right there. And I think part of the reason that they had such a nice time, and it was such a, it could have been a pretty traumatic experience and a tough one for them. But I think they felt so supported by the presence of our best friends that it was a great way to start an amazing journey for me. So I'm going to go through and just to show you, let's see, aha, okay. There we go. Getting there. There we go, okay. I'm going to go through and show you just really some stories from the space station, from the space shuttle, and try to describe what life is like getting to live up in space, which I consider to be a place that we already live. We just haven't, most people just haven't been there yet. I'm here to tell you that you should go, okay? It's really, it's pretty amazing place. This picture here was taken by Don Pettit, whose wife is in our band, and Don is our sound guy. He's the most physics savvy guy I've ever met, and so to have him as a sound guy is actually pretty extraordinary. And he has a different way of looking at our universe, and these are pictures that were taken with a camera just from the space station from the window, but with time lapses that Don understood where to look and what to see. And so the yellow lines on the bottom are the lights of cities on earth, and then the blue and white lines up on the top are the lights of the stars. So I'd like to just briefly touch on my career as a space shuttle astronaut. My first mission was a 16-day experiment mission. I'm originally a polymer chemist, plastics chemist, out of UMass at Amherst and MIT. And this is our launch for, at the time, what was the longest mission to space, and that was almost 17 days with about 30 different science experiments to do. I'm a chemist, but a lot of those experiments were physics, and so I had a lot to learn about fluid physics and things like that, and really that mission was a way for us to experiment with how are we going to put experiments on that space station anyway? How are we going to have scientists on the ground, experiments up there, astronauts doing those experiments, and everybody still speaking to each other at the end, especially we didn't want those scientists to be fighting over bandwidth of who got to see who's data and when. And all of you here in academia, you know what I'm talking about. You do it. I know you would. Well, but everyone is passionate, I think, about what they do and what they study. The space station or microgravity or almost zero gravity, it's a really interesting place to study the way the world works. So that was my first mission kind of practice for the space station, even though the space station didn't exist yet. And my second one, as Bill talked about, was to deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It was a very famous mission for two reasons. One is the woman in the middle there, and actually in this picture you can see her a little bit better on the right. Colonel Eileen Collins was the first woman to command the space shuttle. And then our crew, five of us, a fellow astronomer, a Navy captain, a French fighter pilot, and myself. And I was in charge of the telescope itself and deploying that. It had a big rocket on its rear end, an inertial upper stage. And I tell people the Chandra telescope is part of the family of telescopes that NASA has, where they each look at different kinds of light. And Hubble, which many are familiar with, looks at visible in some infrared light. Chandra looks at X-rays. And X-rays are the things that are given out when, like, stars explode. Those are called supernovas. When galaxies collide and when black holes are sucking things in, they're also spewing things out. And that's a really exciting kind of high-temperature, high-energy event. And that's when X-rays are given off. So this Chandra telescope measures things like that. And it launched in 1999, or I launched it in 1999 with my crew. And it was expected or guaranteed, so to speak, to work for five years. The Chandra telescope is still working. And it's an amazing machine that has led to so many unexpected discoveries. It's meant a lot to me to be part of a mission that you do your job right then, which is back in 1999. And now when discoveries come out, when I read something in the science news about what Chandra has discovered or seen, especially about black holes, because literally all of our knowledge now about black holes comes from the Chandra telescope, I'm just happy to have been a part of that and to know that it's a living story. I mean, it's hard to buy an astronomy textbook these days. Because the stories are changing so very quickly. And that's what we have astronomers for, is to tell us those stories. But on to the space station, this is the Soyuz rocket. So this is launching from Baikonur. Baikonur is basically a small place in the middle of Kazakhstan that Russia rents. So it's the Russian space agency, but they rent space in Kazakhstan to use Yuri Gagarin's old launch pad, or launch pads there, and launch people and supplies into space. And this is our capsule here. This is actually in three parts. And each of those parts is like the size of a small, tiny smart car. So the capsule that we are in is quite small, where the three of us are. We're sitting really just that close. And then there's also sort of a little living room that we can hang out in once we get to orbit. In my particular case, we got to orbit the Earth for about two days. So Bill and Diana, my husband and my son, got to see the launch in Kazakhstan and then fly back to Moscow and go to Mission Control. And two days after the launch, they saw the docking to the space station. And that's the sort of strange-sounding voices in the black screen that you saw with lots of data on there. That's actually our Soyuz approaching the space station and docking, something I had just been living for really, I think, my whole life. And as many times as we simulated, it was so, so beautiful to actually see the space station right there in the middle of space. It's like suddenly finding a city in a place where you expected to find nothing and even more amazing to realize that your name was on the mailbox. So I really loved being there. The space station, people often feel bad for us that we're in such tiny quarters. And the Soyuz on the way up and the way down in the shuttle are actually quite small. But the space station itself is quite big. This is the station sort of laid out on a football field. And you can see that across the football field, you see those solar arrays. There's sort of white panels in the middle, silver ones. Those are our radiators to reflect heat away. So that's like the business part of the space station that is producing power and getting rid of our heat and storing equipment. And when we do space walks, we're out there somewhere between those goal posts from one end of the field to the other. But the place that we live is actually on the 50-yard line. There's a whole series of, we call them modules. And they're strung together in a row. And they're each the size of some sort of school bus. So some of them are the size of a small school bus. Some of them are the size of a large school bus. But it's the size of those buses without the seats in them. So it's really quite large inside. I think I've forgotten the square footage. Bill probably knows the square footage. I think it's like the size of a 747 inside. I mean, it's really big. So it's a pretty neat place to be. And I really loved going, this is the day before my launch. I am cutting my birthday cake from my 50th birthday. And so launching to space was really just about the best present that a girl could get from her sweetie. Although, he's had really kind of a hard time ever since catching up and giving me something that was better than this. I told him he's done for birthday presents, really. So this is just showing a little, it's about a two minute film. It just shows launch. And so we're inside that rocket. And it's interesting to me the different perspectives. What Bill showed you was what they're seeing down in Mission Control. Whereas we're in the top of this little rocket. As we use all the fuel, we get rid of those places. And now here's the Soyuz coming in for a docking. And then the magic begins. We're flying from place to place, doing experiments. You might have seen my son's little tiger there. Doing physics experiments. Look at our table. It doesn't have to be horizontal to keep everything on it. I did get to do a bunch of music there, which I really loved. I'm not the most amazing musician. I'm decent. And I love to play. But it was really wonderful to be very human up there and show that people can live their lives. And play music. This is the view out the window. This is Aurora Australis over Madagascar. So it's the northern lights. It doesn't look like this all the time. I probably saw this about a dozen times. Always different looking. And then the cities at night are just really, really exquisite. And that same Don Pettit actually reprogrammed our drill, the Makita drill that we had on board just to drill things and fix things and things like that. And he reprogrammed it to rotate at the same rate that we went across the ground to be able to take the first really wonderful cities at night. So on to what we do up there and why. Let's see if this is going to play. Sometimes it doesn't want to play. Let me go back one and see if it's going to do that. There we go. I show this because I think it really shows you the joy of living in space. Is there gummy bears? Mind you, I'm a scientist, so how was I supposed to know whether gummy bears would be the best? I did not. And so you get to bring a snack with you to space. And it sort of allows you to bring food that you might actually like a lot with you on your person. This is on the space shuttle that film was taken. And so I had my neighbor. I was in quarantine. I couldn't go. She went and she bought gummy bears, gummy worms. Let's see, Swedish fish and the gummy bears were actually no question the best in space. Whoops, there we are. But this is really what it's all about, is the magic and the wonder of having everything float around and the horror of having everything float around. I mean, I am somebody who could lose the remote to a mart TV twice in one night without a problem, and certainly the car keys. And so having pockets is good. Having things actually velcroed to your person is good until they get knocked off. But you have to figure out that you only have two hands, a couple of armpits, and maybe a few things in between various parts of you. But you really can't hold on to very much. And that same atmosphere or the way that is really reflects itself in what we're allowed to be able to study up there. We get to see what do liquids really want to do. And it's really quite valuable information down here on the ground. Down on the ground, we're trying to understand processes that involve flow through a pipe, capillary flow on medical devices when you're trying to make some very tiny measurements. Even for example, if you're trying to do oil recovery and clean soil or clean something, everything where the pathways are small and have to do with liquids, we don't know enough about it. Partly because surface tension is a really small, tiny force. And it's hard to see it when it's masked by gravity. It's still a tiny force up in space, but we are able to understand it better because it's the only game in town. We've taken away gravity. And so if you look at what do liquids really want to do in certain shaped containers, it gives us a lot of information about liquids up in space. And this is a very simple, cool experiment that just involves different shaped cavities and colored fluids and videotape going up and down. It's the same idea for combustion. On the left is an earth candle flame that you're kind of used to. And on the right is a sort of rounded muted flame there. And what's happening on the left here on earth is that we're burning something at the flame. The lighter gases are rising. And then new fuel can flow in. And it's a really very dynamic situation. And there's measurements that we have to make in milliseconds. So just really, really fast. Whereas up in space, we can make those same measurements over 30 or 40 seconds. So because we don't have the lighter gases rising, the new stuff rushing in, things burn in a different way. But it allows us to measure things that are hard to measure down here on the ground. It allows us to understand the production of soot, how pollution is produced, and how gases burn. Some of my little videos are just being a little tiny bit problematic there. This is growing plants. Another thing that we do, we'd like to have food on the way to Mars. And we're going to have to grow it. We can't really have ships that are big enough. And so learning how to grow food in places where it's hard to do that was part of my job on some of these missions. And especially up on the space station. And I really like the fact that things that are really important for exploration, growing food in places that it's hard to grow them, recirculating all our air and all of our water, those are things that are really important for exploring Mars and getting to Mars. And at the same time, they're very, very good for Earth as well, understanding how we can make things grow more efficiently so that we can feed more of our population. Some other other research that I'm really proud of is basically bone research. You don't really have to read this, but basically we lose bone up there because we don't walk around on our hands and our feet. And so we don't really walk around. It doesn't send this message to our brain, hey, she needs all these muscles and bones. So let's keep them strong. Instead, I'm flying everywhere. And so my brain doesn't get those messages. And my brain says, you know, maybe she doesn't need all that. And so it turns out we lose bone 10 times faster than a woman who is 70 years old and has osteoporosis. So what she loses in a year, I lose in a month. And so it's really a very fast process. That's the bad news, but the good news is because it's so fast, and because as astronauts in general, we're, it's not that we're so healthy, but we are healthy and we have fairly, fairly sort of clean medical histories. It makes it easier to study us versus a woman who has osteoporosis and maybe is taking some medication for that. And so we're able to study, do a lot of studies up there. And it leads to really phenomenal research right back here down on the ground. I'm hoping, I'm like 58 by this time, so I'm hoping that they're gonna catch up soon so that I won't have to worry. I will, I did a number of different kinds of medical experiments up there. I'm very proud to have done that. I think it does a lot of good, even though we don't have that many astronauts up in space at one time. We're still able to learn a lot of things that we can't learn even about circulation and cardio and people's hearts we're able to learn. I won't do too much about some of the other more sort of normal space activities. In space walks, I was really proud to be one of the smallest people, or actually probably the smallest person to have their space suit on the space station, ready to go out and do that space walk to save the space station. And then nothing broke, which was extreme. I mean, you're not really allowed to hope for something dangerous to break, but you could hope for something expensive to break, right? So nothing broke, but I was very proud of having, basically made the way for myself and many other small people, and especially women in that community. So how do we do these things that are hard? That's really what I'd like to talk to you about today. Here's our crew of three that went up to space together in the very small capsule. And when we got there, there were three other people. And when we, and so this is myself, in the middle is Dmitry Kondratiev, and on the right is Paola Nespoli. And this is one of my favorite pictures because it shows all of us getting our crew portrait taken excited about going to space. You're allowed to laugh. I smile in all pictures, right? But you know what? For a traditional Russian person, smiling in photos is not actually what a traditional Russian person does. And in fact, what I had to learn was that for my crewmate Dmitry, this was actually a picture of Dmitry excited about going to space. And so I had to learn that when I'm explaining to Dmitry, hey, here's my idea. I think we should do this. And the fact that he looks at me without much expression on his face doesn't mean I hate that idea. It's stupid. I have to kind of give myself some coaching to go, you know, inside he's thinking about this. And as he was the commander of the station at the time, and as the commander, he's evaluating it, and I trust him to evaluate. Paola Nespoli is on the right there from Italy. And Paola and I kind of had a sort of a system. Dmitry wasn't really used to working with women very much. And so Paola kind of helped to translate some of the things that I might have asked Dmitry and he might not have been able to hear. And Paola could ask him those questions. We got the answers. And it really, it's interesting how you build these working relationships. This is a picture of Paola and myself in the cupola where we have most of the robotics happening. And we're about to capture the second ever supply ship coming to the International Space Station. This one was Japanese. And it was the precursor to the ships from SpaceX and Orbital Sciences coming up there. And it was a really new thing and a not as well understood thing as we would have liked. And that's why we were doing it and doing it so carefully. You may recall back in the shuttle days when they do something like go out to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. They've got an airplane-sized space shuttle and a kind of truck-sized telescope. And they can go and reach out with the robotic arm and grab it. And if something goes wrong, they can fly away from each other. But the space station is the size of a factory with a bus or a truck pulling up to deliver. And you can't move the factory fast enough if something goes wrong. So it makes it a really critical operation. And that's a successful capture there that's Paola's and my work. And we really, we had to learn to get to know each other in order to really work effectively together when something like this is happening. And I tell people there's sort of this saying that we have that objects in the mirror may be larger than they appear. And this is what I tell other crews is that we practice, that we practice, and we practice on the ground simulations. And when you really see that giant thing out the window, it does something to you. Your heart is different, your brain is different. And you have to try to find a way to get ready for that when you are practicing. And so we're always building these relationships as a team. When our crew of three got to the space station, there were already three people up there. And so now we're a crew of six. A couple minutes later, or a couple minutes, a couple months later, three of those people land. The guy on the right there is Scott Kelly. He's an American. He spent a year on the space station. This was his first mission, so not the year-long mission. And then his two crewmates, Russian crewmates on the left there, they left after about four months. And then a new crew of three comes. And so Paolo and Dimitri and I are the grown-ups. And now new people come. And we get to get them really trained up so that they know how to operate the station. And it's interesting to me. I feel very lucky as an astronaut that when we look around the space station, we don't see anybody else. We, I mean, you look and there are only five other people. You may or may not like them. The idea that NASA or the Russian space agency would be thinking about who might work better with who is a myth. Absolutely. I mean, it really just, it just is because given the constraints that we have, where you have to have a certain skill mix of spacewalkers and robotic people and scientists and pilots and all those things on the space station, and then you add in the international dimension of whose turn is it to send someone from their country to space, there's just not room for that kind of care and feeding. And we're all expected to really just do our jobs. And I think they hire professionals who know how to put things aside and realize that the mission is more important than how we feel about each other. And so that's, I think, a luxury because we literally have no choice except to get the best out of each other. And so when I see this picture here from the movie Hidden Figures, it's interesting to me because this is, I think, when we're on a team, this is how all of us feel in one aspect of ourselves or another. I mean, this movie is called Hidden Figures. This is Katherine Johnson, famous, famous, famous mathematician and who was instrumental in designing the trajectories both up to space and back home again for the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo and shuttle astronauts. I mean, she was amazing. And yet her work was not really known or celebrated until like the 1990s. And so they call this movie Hidden Figures. But look at this picture. She's a woman of color. She's wearing a dress of color in almost every scene in the movie. There's actually nothing hidden about her, but she wasn't seen. And I think that when you look at a space crew or a crew in your office or in your home or wherever you work, whether it's part time or full time, I think that all of us feel like there's something about me that people don't know. And boy, they would wish they did if they knew because I could be really contributing to this team, but they don't ask me. And so I wanted to show you a few slides about techniques that I personally use to try to be a better crew member and how to really see the people on my team. One thing is connections. I think you need to learn to connect to every member of your team. And some people it's easier with. This is Paolo. And I don't know what this picture says to you, but to me he looks really like inviting and welcoming like, hey, what are we doing? Do you need some help? And he's like that. Although I have to say that Paolo is from Italy. And it took me a little while to learn that if I really wanted to understand how Paolo was doing, I had to eat lunch. Because I mean, to him it was unfathomable to drive around the space center in your car with granola bars and a case of water. He's like, what? Lunch. We'll eat lunch. And so we had to learn to find a way to connect. This is my friend Nicole, who was the first person to capture a supply ship with the robotic arm. And she and I have kids the same age. We have a lot in common. Again, kind of easy to connect. Here's Scott Kelly on my crew. And in this picture, I like to tell people that the robot is the one on the left. And candidly, when I went up to space, I wasn't really expecting to really love being there was Scott. I didn't think I'd mind it. But I didn't think I'd love being there with him. And I really did, actually. I think we all surprise ourselves when we let the mission come first. And for Scott, who's a person of few words here on the ground and sometimes few expressions, he was the king of non-judgmental feedback up there. And I found that to be really fascinating. And so somewhere inside that person that you live with or you work with are multiple people. And I think our job is to always strive to see who else can we see inside the people on our team. Another example is Al Drew. He and I had some pretty tricky robotics to do together. And not much time to really develop that relationship. And so it made the risk a little bit higher. And we really had to focus in and really be honest with each other about what we needed and what we felt good about and what we were worried about. And when he came in from his space walk, to me, it's my favorite picture of all time, actually. Because I think it shows you exactly what crew camaraderie is supposed to be about, where we're just so happy that they went out, they did their space walk, and everything was so successful. And I was a part of that. And Al was a part of that. And Mike in the background was a part of that. And it was a really, really spontaneous moment that I just really, really love. So there's just all sorts of people that contribute to the space mission. I'm showing a range of them. This is my friend Pam Melroy, who was the commander of the space shuttle, while Peggy Whitson was the commander of the space station. Kind of cool to have two women commanders up there. And the more sort of different people that we bring to such an amazing and wonderful place, and they're so visible up there, I think the more we are able to learn about each other. Just a little bit about living in space, because I like this. And especially for the girls in the front row, I think this is going to be your favorite video. This shows us on the treadmill. And now my friend Mike is going to wash his hair. It's kind of cool. I'm going to see if I can make my texting thing stop. Oh, well, we won't worry about it. That's how we sleep in our sleeping bags. We kind of slither in like snakes. Kind of cool. And really delicious. It's delicious to sleep in space. Some people miss having a pillow, and they actually strap a pillow to their heads so they feel like they have a pillow on their head. And then here's Mike and his crew. This is Mike in the up in the, uh-oh. Mike in the, thanks, do you want to do that for me? Excuse me, Mike in the cupola. And then this is a funny, cute thing where it looks like these guys are going backwards. But think of it differently. Think about that they're straight and the space station is going forward, because it's one of the times that we speed them up. Now this is really why I show you this film. And it's because I'm a sports fan, and so is Satoshi. Satoshi wanted to play baseball. Everybody is busy doing experiments. No, no, no, he's mine. And so he has to be the whole team. He has to be the whole entire team. Isn't that fun? I really love that. Hey, then notice, okay, you kids and you physics people, notice that you can't really sort of dive off the diving board here and expect it to happen. Like as soon as you launch yourself kind of forward, that's where you're going to go until you pull yourself around. It takes a little practice. It takes a little practice. Thank you a lot. So I think that there's the idea of connecting. There's the idea of literally having to say, hi, this is me. And maybe finding a way to connect over different kinds of things. You saw me playing music and Bill did a wonderful job describing what I did. This is a duet that I played with Ian Anderson. Rock music. I wanted to honor him by bringing his flute up to space. And it turns out that I was up in space in 2011. It's the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight. So on the 50th anniversary on that day, he was playing a concert in Russia and I was on the space station. And that's the first time that we did this. Thanks, Colonel Catherine Coleman in the International Space Station. We should remember that today's cosmonauts, scientists and astronauts are still every bit the rocket heroes they were 50 years ago. So from the cultural city of Perm in Russia, let's salute Katie, Deema and Paolo up there in orbit. And of course, the legendary Yuri Gagarin. Go safely. So I think doing something like this, like playing music, I mean, I'm not the most amazing musician. I'm good and I really love to play and I play in a band in Houston and folks I really love to play with. We get paid sometimes. But mostly we just really love to play together, but it's about sharing. It's about, I think, being brave and being open. I mean, I was brave enough to say, hey, so what if we figure out something to do? You, Mr. Amazing, flute player and me, Ms. Average, flute player. And at the same time, so many people have learned about the space station because they saw this on YouTube. And so there's just ways to sort of show people that the space station world is their world. This is our band made up of mostly astronauts there. And there's something magical about when we get together and play. So music is really important to me. But the last thing I would talk to you about, I mean, it's not so much music, but it's about using the things about you that are different and being brave enough to bring them to everybody's attention. But the last sort of perspective or thing I would talk about is the perspective by seeing the earth that we get from being up there. I mean, here, this is the shuttle looking down on the space station, looking down at the earth. And it's a certain perspective. We're not actually as far away as when this picture was taken on Christmas Eve or the 20th. Anyways, in December of 1968. So this photo is called Earthrise and a person took a picture of our earth over the landscape of the moon. And by seeing that, by seeing our earth from far away, it makes it pretty clear that it's a place that all of us live and the little borders between our countries are not the things that are important. And so we get a pretty wonderful view from up there on the space station through this module called the cupola, which no engineer in their right mind would put on a space station. Because I mean, it just complicates life immensely. There's windows, there's layers, there's seals, but humans need to see where they are and where they're going. And I think this is a really marvelous picture that shows you the whole coast of New England. There you see Boston down there, Cape Cod. I went to space the first time with a guy who was from, he was from Massachusetts and we both saw Massachusetts for the first time together. And he looks down and we see that very distinctive geography and he goes, oh my gosh, it's just like the map. It's true. You know, and everybody loves to see home. This is one of Paolo's favorite Italy pictures. We can see amazing things, we can see hurricanes. This is the Japanese tsunami and you could tell from, I mean, using our pictures, they were able to tell how much power was left in Japan after the tsunami and what some of the extent of the flooding was. Here's the Sinai Peninsula, San Francisco. More northern lights. More around, this is in Australia. I mean, when you're driving around on the ground, you don't necessarily realize that there's a whole world if you could just get a few steps up to see it. There's a whole world that looks different. And so we can tell so much about the world. This is Adele Island, sorry. Alpha of Australia. You can tell so much about the world, about the health of coral reefs, about the health of the water, the health of the land. And it looks beautiful too. These are, I think, beautiful pictures from Australia when you kind of focus in on a really small place. And so that perspective of looking at things a certain way. When you look at a picture like this, this is a certain perspective. We see some people, there's six of us on the space station. And I think you can see me there, right? Because I'm the one with the big hair, right? But isn't it easier to see me here? Like, and it's because we're used to looking at things right side up. And so what if I go back for a minute? And everybody kind of turns their head sort of upside down. Now it looks familiar, and back right side up. Well, it looks kind of different, but I'm getting used to it. So the idea of really trying to work to look at things from a new perspective, ask yourself new questions, ask the people on your team new questions, and you will discover different perspectives that you didn't have before. And I think that's how we, as a crew, really developed our ability to be an amazing crew, actually, that accomplished. We had, we really did quite well up on orbit. And we had a number of different supply ships. We had a lot of different things happen. And despite the fact that we're all very different people, things went really quite well. But we worked at that. And I think having been up there, this is coming home for a landing. You know, I feel compelled to come home and use some of that experience for the power of good, so to speak. This is the landing. It looks pretty wild there, doesn't it? But it turns out that when we're getting close to the ground, we're coming, coming, coming, and our little capsule we're gonna land in a parachute on the ground, coming down, coming down, coming down. And when we get close enough, we have instruments on board that are going, how far away are we? Are we close yet? Are we close yet? And then when we're really close, the capsule fires jets to kind of slow us down. They call them the soft landing jets. I call them the softer landing jets, because it's still a pretty big landing. And you can see here, physics in action for the folks here that are in engineering, you know, the fact that there's enough of an ablative material on our capsule. You can actually tell the angle with which it came through the atmosphere there. Do you see the diagonal, dark line across there? The dark part is the part that was like burning up and, you know, flying away from the spacecraft. But we have basically enough of protective coating on there to burn up, but still leave enough to protect us, but not so much coating that it's too heavy and we come in at the wrong angle. So it all comes down to math. It's a really good idea. I'm glad we have a bunch of engineers in this room. And it comes down to people too. This is me, a person so happy to have been up there almost six months. And I love the view up there, but I love to be home as well. There's nothing like being sort of part of the view. This is where I live down in Western Mass in Shelburne, not Shelburne, Vermont, but Shelburne, Mass. And my son was still, was 10 when I left and 10 when I came home. And it was really hard to leave him on the launch pad there, excuse me. And when his dad sent me that picture, I cried. But it was nice to know that he had his trusty cat with him and his dad, so it wasn't gonna be problematic. He insists that I show a picture of him a little more grown up. He's now 18. And going off to the American University next year, he's very excited about that. And he's a neat kid who I think is grown up with a different idea than many of what sort of normal is when he was a little kid, we saw a picture of somebody in a space suit. And he said, mommy, is that you? And I said, oh, I don't think so, sweetie. And he goes, well, if it's not you, then who's mommy is it? So I think that's pretty neat. But it does take a village. This is part of my village, my husband. Josh is a really wonderful glass artist. And I do think that artists and actors and people who write songs and books and people who create pictures in our heads, they are part of the mission as well because if you can't create a vision of what you're trying to do, you can't gather the right crew members. These folks, these women are my girlfriends in Houston, some of them astronauts, some of them medical, some of them, but they're part of my village. You just can't do these things by yourself. There's my husband and I. And here he is doing his work. He makes these glass objects called planets. And people give us a hard time because I'd like to go to them. And he likes to make them. But he made them a dozen years before we ever, ever met. But when you think about it, somebody who just thinks, oh, I wonder what that would look like. Let me create a place for my imagination and share it with you. Well, I think he understands why a person like me might want to go. And so I really love the vision of these planets. And I got to bring a few up to space. I had to get really, I did this like the very last day that I left because you had to be good enough at putting them in place and not having them run away. And actually the space shuttle had come up to do some work. And so I had a friend that could both film and keep an eye out to make sure that none of these sort of scattered away because it's important to always think about those things. But I just loved the idea of the fact that here we had these planet-like things and there I was in a space station. And that's something that's really stuck with me since I got home. I retired about two years ago. And I do a bunch of public speaking and consulting. And a lot of that is the, I feel compelled that as a person who's had this background, these experiences, people will answer my call. People will work with me. They'll ask me things. They're willing to help me. And a certain part of that doesn't really belong to me that I should use it for the power of good, so to speak. I had a really nice time here today talking to students and faculty. And really neat folks that I met all day. And it gives me a lot of hope to realize that they are part of the future. And you have some grad students, scholars, that are here through the space grant program. And they're working on fascinating, fascinating things. And I am pleased to come and share some of the things that I've done in the hopes that it helps them with their education. So I've gotten to do that in a lot of neat places. I got to speak at the UN for World Ocean Day. It was really pretty amazing. I got to spend the night on the White House lawn with 50 Girl Scouts in the Obama administration. And that was really amazing. And no Boy Scouts have ever done it. Only Girl Scouts. And that was really fun. And this is an example of I'm almost finished here and then we're gonna have time for some questions. This is an example of taking the opportunities that you have and trying to figure out how to multiply them. I didn't think about becoming an astronaut until I met Dr. Sally Ride. She's the first American woman astronaut. She came and spoke when I was in college. And I just thought, wow, maybe I could have that job if I really work at it. But up till that time, when I see pictures of the Mercury 7, you know, it's a bunch of guys that don't look like me. And it's hard for me to see myself in those roles. And so when I was asked by Volvo and CNN to be part of showing the eclipse as it crossed the country on CNN's webpage, I said, well, it's really nice that you have two men and two women doing these things. The guy who wrote the Martian and an Egyptologist and myself and the head of the Explorers Club. And we're each sort of narrating as the eclipse goes across the country. I said, but even better would be if myself and five girls that don't look like me narrated that eclipse. And if I'd understood what I was asking, it was unbelievably hard actually. They said yes. And here's the eclipse. And here's actually what the eclipse looks like from space. That's some pretty cool perspective, isn't it? Do you see the dark spot in the back there? Yep, it's pretty neat. And so it was really unbelievably hard. What we did, it was 90 something degrees. It was hot. We were filming in 360, so there's no one but myself and the girls and my family. And having to practice and pretend in that heat that you're going to pretend to do something and actually observing safety at the same time and these girls were amazing. And I really credit the crew that said that they would make this happen because they actually did know how hard it was. But they thought that the payoff was worthwhile as well. And so I would urge each of you to think about what are the ways that you can make a difference in helping all the people that we know understand what their possibilities are. And I know as a place of education that's already happening in a big way here at UVM. And I really thank you for it. I'll just share quickly a really cool education activity that I did just yesterday with the space station. So at MIT, they hold this contest. You see those spheres that we are holding. Well, those spheres are programmed to do these really intricate sort of rendezvous experiments where they're meeting each other and doing things. And it's a really sophisticated rendezvous experiment. But it's also a cool education experiment where kids all over the world, there's middle school, high school, and college separate contests. This was the high school contest. They've all designed stuff. And then the actual finals take place, not in a simulator, but on the space station. So this picture shows one of the teams explaining their philosophy of how they program the spheres. And in the background, you see that's live video back there of Anne McLean up on the space station showing, you know, actually conducting the competition. And I was really pleased, they had to form coalitions. So they had to form groups of three teams. And one of those coalitions, one of the ones that came in at the very top, had a group of girls on there called the Gucci girls. And it turns out that they not only do they have a lot of fun together, but they're really smart at the way they do algorithms. So that was kind of cool. So it's just really need to be a part of something so sort of big. This is me taking a selfie just yesterday with the team from Italy as part of the coalition for the team from the US down here on the bottom. And so I just think that what we do in space has so very many possibilities. And I think it gives us a way to think about leadership, a way to think about teamwork, and a way to think about how to make sure that we grow every human to their capabilities, to their potential, so that we can take care of our planet. And with that, I will end. This is my friend Tracy Caldwell and a self-portrait up in space. And to me, it's just the most amazing picture of a human and their relationship with our Earth. So with that, I will take questions. Any questions? Yes. And I know a lot of people have five o'clock things and the weather is not so great out and all that. So don't worry if you have to go. I totally understand that. And really, it's amazing that you came, so many. So thank you. How long do we have to get to know each other? We had all been backups together for a previous flight. And so we really had about two and a half years to get to know each other. And so when I see the not-so-smiling face up on orbit, I already understand that. I already understand what it's like to work every day together and that we're really just different and he's probably not going to change. And one of the things that I'm really proud of is that even though it was a little hard for us working together sometimes, we're still friends. And we did a really wonderful job together, I think. Somebody else? Do you girls have any questions, things you want to know? You can think about it. And when you know, you just let me know and we'll ask it, OK? Yes? You mentioned the longevity of the Chander telescope. Why is the lifespan of the Chander telescope extended so far beyond, I mean really what, 15 years? It was supposed to be done in 2004, so 14 years. I think the five-year prediction comes from, in some ways, some bureaucratic kind of things. What dates, parts are certified to, and that if you have this instrument and some part of it is only certified to 2004, then that is considered the life of the telescope. And so they're hoping to get more than that. But it's hard with programs, and that's what's really so exciting about the commercial space companies that are doing things now, is that it's hard for NASA to take risks. And it's hard for NASA to say, we're going to build a telescope that's going to last 14 years. But I mean, because it's better to build it for five and have it go longer than, this is my personal opinion. But it also, I think, was really well-managed in terms of people, I mean, hard things have happened. It's lost different things. They have to make decisions about how it's going. And so real people making hard decisions together when they don't have a lot in common, it's a really interesting process. But yet when the end game is so important, I think that they have a better chance of doing that. Any questions? Sure. Oh, cool. What kind of foods do people eat in space? Very good question. Half of our food is freeze-dried, kind of like camping food, and we add water. But it's in packages, so we use a needle. Our faucet is really like a needle that water comes out of, and we put the package on there, and we put hot water in it if it's scrambled eggs, or, I don't know, beef stroganoff, something like that. And then we put it in, it looks like a little suitcase, but it has hot walls. And so it warms up our dinner. We also have envelopes of food that are the same thing as soldiers eat. And so we have different kinds of food. For a lot of, I don't know, just a different, it's kind of ordinary food. I would say that nobody really goes to space because the food is so cool. And so it's more that, and actually it takes kind of a long time to eat food. You only need your scissors to open the package and your spoon to eat it. But if you want, I used to do things like I'd have rice and Thai food, Thai curry, and then I would kind of make like a sort of transfer, and it's sort of something to do and do together. And I would, you know, I would make sort of like curry, rice stuff, but it takes a while. And after a while, I just decided to use less time. And you kind of go back to comfort foods. I ate a lot of, I don't know, beef stew and beef stroganoff and macaroni and cheese. And the vegetables are actually pretty good. So those kinds of things. Yeah. There's a microphone. Oh, god. I forgot what I was going to say. Go good. Do you work with the global goals? I saw on the, when you were with the United Nations, you had a huge poster of the global goals on it. So I'm so glad you know about those, the sustainability goals. That's really, that's really awesome. We do, NASA works with those. I don't work there anymore at NASA, but I think that those are human goals. They're very important. And that happened to be World Ocean Week, when we were celebrating the importance of the ocean. And so it was great to be able to show people some video and some photos of our world. And the fact that, you know, as a scientist, I really like the fact that we can measure so many things. And there's a lot of data to be able to understand the planet better. And I think people are, I think that that's really exciting to learn more and more. I like the idea of sort of perspective, whether it's a drone or an airplane or a spaceship or a satellite, that we're able to gain different kinds of information and solve problems because we have more information. How many gravities are you able to withstand? Oh, how many Gs? Uh-huh. You know, that depends on the conditions. I mean, I don't know if anybody read my bio, but I did volunteer for the centrifuge program in the Air Force. And it was really, it was fun to do, but I also wanted to, I wanted NASA to understand that I knew what it was like to be a medical test subject. And I also wanted to see myself if it was, you know, if that would, was okay with me. And so I did these tests and it's hard to say whether women who would volunteer for this were maybe just a little bit like, you know, more motivated than your average person. But in general, the women did better than the men on this panel. And we had this one particular test where they basically went from like three and a half Gs up to seven, back and forth, like every 30 seconds, you know, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And you play a video game at the same time so they can see how you're doing. And the object was to do that while wearing different kinds of G suits that protect you to understand whether they were helping you or not. And so I did this, and it's never the idea to pass out, but I, you know, I did this for a long time and I said, okay, I'm done. And I came out and they all kind of looked at me. I said, well, it just was time to stop, but maybe next time it could be better. And it turns out that everybody had been doing like six minutes or so, six and a half, and then I did 18. And after that, the guys did more, but never the same. Not that I'm competitive, you know? Just a little. Over here, Katie? Yes? How many days are you up in space? How many days are we up in space? It depends on the mission, but usually about six months on the space station, there'll be one that is like a little bit shy of that. I was actually up there for five months and 20 days. And then there'll be one that's like a little more than that, because we kind of change places at different times. But almost six months. So I launched right in December and I came home when school was out. And I would have stayed another six months in a minute if I could. It's a magical place up there. And there's so many things to discover. I mean, I think I'm a scientist because I'm curious. And I like to understand how things work and to be able to be in such a different environment really made me think about how things work. Can we do some more? We'll get there. If you could go to space again, which launch vehicle would you choose to ride up in? The first one leave in the planet. Well, seriously, you know, to me it's just the way up. And I felt this way even in the shuttle days. I flew a 16-day mission. And I just thought that it was just so soon to come home after 16 days. I flew a five-day mission with the Chandra. It was the biggest thing we'd ever brought to space. And so we didn't have a lot of extra room for fuel or people or whatever. And so we had a five-day mission, which I thought was criminal. So I really loved being up there. And I mean, I know the ride up is really amazing and the ride down is really amazing. But to me, the part that was most significant was really living up there. I felt like a colonist and I was able to discover for other people on the ground some of the things that we can do up there. So what do you like to look at more? Like, do you like when the Earth is day or night? Oh, awesome question. Which one looks more pretty? So I will say that now that I'm used to it, I like it during the day. Once you learn your way around, I bought books like Don't Know Much About Geography, right? But you wanted to be stories. You wanted to really make sense to you. But when we were first up on the space station, we wouldn't even look around during the day because it all kind of looks the same in some ways until you really begin to learn your way around. But the cities look different. And you can really tell, like as you're going up the East Coast, you can see Washington and New York and Boston and Montreal and you can go over to Europe. You can see London and Paris. And so you sort of know your way around because it's like the stars. Sometimes it's easier to see the stars when there's not quite so many of them, but a few bright ones you can still figure out. Were there any experiments you did that the results were completely unexpected from those on the ground and what you were also expecting? There's two that I can think of. And I'm sure that there's more than this. But in the very beginning, my first mission, we had a very simple experiment just basically adding more and more things dissolved in a tube, like 20% things dissolved, 30% on up, and then they're gonna be sort of still and get a little cold and they're gonna form crystals, just like they're looking like salt crystals or something. And they were hoping that would happen. And so when I looked at the tubes, I said, so number four has crystals. And they said, how big? I said, well, how big are the tubes? Oh, eight millimeters. Well, so they're two millimeters. I said, they can't be like two millimeters. And it turns out that they were thinking they would be like 0.2 millimeters. Turns out that these were crystals that had been growing in a sort of face centered cubic kind of thing. But it turns out that really the process was that they grew like snowflakes and then the arms would fall off on the ground. And so up in space, the snowflakes were big and broad. So that was really unexpected and interesting. And then there was a fluid physics experiment where we just did what we're told, okay, shake this, okay, do this, open this out. And remember I was saying, we get to learn what liquids really want to do. It turns out that we had done an experiment like the week before and somehow whatever was seen was so unusual and amazing in fluid physics that this guy gathered a bunch of scientists to be able to actually show them in person the experiment again. And so we're just like doing the experiment and we're kind of wondering, gee, do we mess it up the first time? And it turns out on the ground, there's just like whooping and hollering and all that kind of stuff. And I told them, I said, you know, you should tell us that. You know, we don't know. Anyways. What do you think the first man mission to Mars will look like? In terms of what? Any and all of it. Do you think it will be internationally run? Do you think it will be a governmental agency? Do you think it will be private? What size craft do you think will undertake something like that? I think that the amazing part about today is that we really don't know. You know, I mean, Elon put his car on top of the rocket and we all know it. You know, the government would never have done that. They would have put some piece of cement, right? And it would have been news for that week. But I mean, but there's a car up there. And so different people are moving the needle forward in different ways. It's very exciting with the new companies. They can take bigger risks with hardware than the government can. And so by taking those risks with hardware and understanding things better, it moves everybody ahead. So I don't know what it'll look like. I hope that it'll be international because it's almost like a non sequitur to think about exploring space as one country. It just belongs to all of us, I think. And I'm pretty sure they'll need to get a lot of things done so they'll be women aboard, you know? Not sure where questions are. Uh-huh. In the green? Do you ever get sick in space? Oh, good question. Sometimes we do. I have gotten sick in space like twice. Like about 75% of the astronauts do. It depends on the mission and how you're doing it. My first mission, we were the night shift. My job was to get up there and go to bed. And in fact, I just told last Friday night, I told the Spheres students, the zero robotics kids, we're all there on Friday night for this big reception. I said, OK, now you're going to be real space astronauts. I'll tell you, my first job was to go to bed. And you have a big day tomorrow and you need to go to bed, you know? And so I think sleeping and being well rested actually helps a lot. We weren't sick. My second mission, it was a really, we had a lot to do in the first, we launched the telescope in the first seven hours. And we really had a lot to do, so you move around a lot, your head gets all confused. And I was definitely sick. And then it's just like here, you get sick. And then you make sure everything's cleaned up. We have ways to make sure we do that. And then you feel better. And then a little while later, do I feel like that? Oh, I do. And then you feel better. But you just got to do your job. And we all help each other. We help each other clean up, all those kinds of things. And it happens to some people. Many people sick on the way home, or not the way home, but when you land, I definitely was. But we have some medicine that can help with that and better living through chemistry. How cold is it in space? How cold is it in space? I like to say that the temperature inside the space station is just what the commander wants it to be. And so inside the space shuttle, it's the same thing. So I was very happy to fly with Eileen Collins so we could have a reasonably warm space shuttle. But really, for the outside, it's different. It can be really cold in the dark and really hot in the sun. But inside the station, it's very complicated to regulate the temperature. And in fact, it has to do with how much we sweat and our running clothes and things from running on the treadmill. We hang them out to dry. We actually collect all that water. And if it's too hot, then some of it evaporates differently. And so it's very complicated to set the temperature. So we call the ground. And they set the temperature. Do you ever get lightheaded? Not really. Not really. It's really pretty wonderful up there to fly around though. That's what I really love a lot. You can't stand up with that. Well, you know, it's actually interesting. Some people have a response that when they stand up, basically your head doesn't have enough blood and it's because there's different reasons. Is it because your brain doesn't send a command to tighten up those blood vessels and help you up? Or is it because the command gets sent, but then they can't do it? Or what's the reason? And we've done a lot of experiments about that from coming back to space. And I myself have done a bunch of them. And it is actually quite interesting to do them. Yeah. Hi, do you encounter, do you have to pay attention to space debris? How prevalent is that when you're up there? I don't know if prevalent is the right word, but it's definitely there. And mission control is taking care of that. Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado is actually tracking everything bigger than about two centimeters. Thanks so much for coming. They're tracking everything bigger than a couple centimeters. And so they'll see an object that's out there. And they'll go, hmm, how does that look? And if it looks like it's going to be within a certain area, they'll start analyzing that more closely. And if it looks like it really might hit, we'll actually maneuver the space station. And if it looks like it might hit, but it's suddenly come up suddenly, then they'll actually have us go and get in our rescue ship and close the hatch so that we're ready to go if something happens once. Did you ever have times when you were floating in the station and had nothing you could reach? Definitely times that you'd get a little bit out in the middle and then there you are. But eventually, there's fans that move everything in the station. There's a lot of air circulation. And so if you just make yourself quiet, eventually you're going to end up moving. And it's kind of interesting, if you're going to replace something like a small refrigerator size thing, you'd take it out. And usually, you would strap it down somewhere. But if you're just going to grab something and put it right back in, you might just leave it there. And then it takes a few more minutes to do things than you were planning. And then when you look over and you see the little refrigerator kind of doing this, it looks like it has a life of its own. And because of that air circulation, it sort of saves us from losing things. There's some places just airflow-wise that we can find things on the space station. And in fact, I was actually having a conference with my band and playing the flute. And then we had an alarm ring on the space station where you just drop everything. Everybody flies to the central computer. We decide what's going on. And we were just about at the end of our conference anyway. So I wasn't expecting to then go back with my band. And so we get to have little fun things every month or so. They put something fun like that together. Anyway, so I just went back to work. And then it got to be bedtime. And I usually play before I go to bed. And all of a sudden I thought, where's my flute? What did I do with that? And there it was on the ear of it. Somebody else? I think back there. Did you ever have to look out for space radiation were there times that you had to shelter or practice sheltering? We did not. We didn't have any increased solar activity during our particular mission, which means we have less aurora, just kind of a bummer. And some of the crew quarters, we were experimenting with different ways to actually put water bricks or really high density polyethylene in there that can be cosmic radiation traps. But we didn't have any times that we had to shelter in the more protected ways. And there's also the batteries. There's places where there's a lot of batteries in the Russian segment that you can shelter there. It's probably a little too late for me. But for people that might be interested in this as a career path, how do you become an astronaut? So first, you figure out what you really love to study. And it doesn't have to be your whole life. Just figure out what works like now, what you're passionate about, and study that, and be the best you can be at that. And NASA has selections every few years. The qualifications are to have a bachelor's degree plus three years experience, to have a master's degree plus two years experience, or a doctorate plus none. And I would encourage you to, when they have a selection, they say, does anybody want to do this? To raise your hand and fill out that application as soon as you're minimally qualified. Don't wait till you think you're fantastically qualified. Because first of all, it takes a lot to fill out the application. I mean, it's not, it's a regular application for federal service, as if you wanted to be an administrative assistant or the head of education for NASA. I mean, it's the same application. But you want to use that as a sort of launching pad to tell people about yourself. And I talked to one of the classes earlier today about, and I see a lot of students here, I think it's really important to think hard about how you fill out applications. You have to realize that people who are reading applications want to hire you. You have to make it easy for them to hire you, or tell you that you have a certain internship, or decide that they want you to be in the group of astronauts that they're going to check the references for. And you have to make it easier for them, if you want to go, by telling them who you are. You know, and there's a spectrum of people who are really shy about their accomplishments, and then people who will tell you everything mostly true. And it may be obnoxious, but somewhere in between is a place you need to be, and probably you need to be in a place where you're bragging a little bit more than you're comfortable with. And nobody, like, fill this out, fill it out, like, just go, you know, I'm going to fill this out in the biggest, boldest way I can, and put it aside, and read it the next day, and go, well, that is actually kind of true. I mean, it's just like when somebody introduces me, I'm always like, oh, I don't, you know. But, well, it's actually true. I mean, you need to tell people that. They want to know, and they want to know about different experiences that you have that make it so you would be a good person on their team. When I read applications for the Astronaut Corps, when somebody told me that they did a summer camp with a couple hundred, like 200 kids, a couple years in a row, I'm like, oh, that person knows how to cope, okay? I mean, they know kids, they know safety, they know procedures, they know parent relations. I mean, that's a really good start. And so don't think that, you know, if you, I mean, not everybody can go do some exciting thing that's easy to put on a resume. Think about the things you do. Eileen Collins and I used to joke around, we do national outdoor leadership training as astronauts. And Eileen said, what about national indoor leadership training, which is what I do every day in my home? Because all of us do, you know, parents do. And so just don't forget to put those things on your applications, because it's really, it's important to people, they want to pick the best people that they know the most about. And so tell them those things. Did I answer your question? Yeah. Okay, well, I'd like to say just three quick things first.