 From the early days to the present, the Navy has been an important contributor to America's efforts in space, both unmanned and manned. In fact, more astronauts have graduated from the Naval Academy than any other higher education institution. I'm Petty Officer Brandy Wells, and here in studio with me I have midshipman second class Lucas Papadakis, an aerospace engineering major at the Academy and a hopeful future astronaut. And live from the International Space Station is Commander Chris Cassidy, a Navy SEAL, to discuss the Navy's role in space and his own experiences. Thank you for joining us today, Commander Cassidy. Hey, my pleasure. It's great to be with you today. Sir, our first question is, why is space important to the Navy? Well, you know, obviously communication is vital to anything we do, from as simple things as our own relationships to war to space. And the space environment for the Navy is critical for our communications network, tracking our ships, responding to disasters or conflicts and everything that we do on a day-to-day basis and having the ability to track and manage all of this infrastructure all around the world. It's actually really critical to our warfighting capability, I think. How has your Navy service prepared you for being an astronaut? Well, you know, that's an interesting question. I think that to be successful as an astronaut, you need to have the ability to think operationally and do things while you're communicating on the radio, while you're processing multiple things. And that's what I've learned over my time, my few months here. And that was really instilled in me from my first days of stepping on to the Naval Academy yard all the way through being groomed as a junior officer and mentored by some of the senior enlisted that I had the privilege to work with. And just really the fundamental things of what we need our Navy warfighters, our military warfighters to do, translates exactly to life in space. It's an operational environment. We're doing things that we can get us hurt or hurt the equipment that we're working with. Neither one of those are good. And it's that innate sense of how to do that, I think, is instilled in every one of us that joins the service. Are there any similarities between the SEAL and the astronaut communities? Well, I'm asked that often, actually, and I think at face value it's very similar training pattern. In the SEAL teams, much like the rest of the Navy, on a typical pre-deployment workup, you go together with some basic unit level training. And then as you get more proficient, you'll start integrating with other units until you prepare for your final exercises prior to deployment. And we have a very similar pattern here in the training for space. At the beginning of being assigned to a space mission, you train up on individual systems, just you and an instructor learning the wiring diagrams and how the system works. And then you build up to an integrated simulation environment where you're working with other crew members from other countries and on multiple systems at the same time. That culminates with some exams prior to launch and we go on our mission. We're up here for six months just like on a Navy deployment is typically six months. So that training pattern is very similar. And then the other thing is my SEAL team life was much more physical. And we do exercise quite a bit up here on space. It's essential. But I think I find myself, it's more of an academic environment in the qualification process to be assigned to a flight here at NASA. You mentioned the physical side, sir. What kind of physical training was required for the demands of living in orbit? Well, you know, it's interesting. We try to, we work out pretty regularly on Earth, but everybody has busy schedules just like everybody else when we're training up for a mission. But when we get to space, it's not just a matter of what our desire to work out. It's essential. We have to do it. If we did not exercise, our bones would think, oh, I have nothing to do. I can relax. I can atrophy. I don't have to carry a load. And our bone density would constantly fall off much like an elderly person with osteoporosis. And the only way to really combat that is resistive exercise, weightlifting type strength training on the large muscles, your legs, lower body and back. And that's what we concentrate on. We do a lot of squats and deadlifts and that sort of thing to keep our, mostly our legs and our hips healthy. That's absolutely critical. We also have a bike and a treadmill that we use as well, but that's just to maintain our cardiovascular health. The real true criticality is keeping our bones healthy. Why do you think the Naval Academy has produced more astronauts than any other higher education institution? Well, I think it's just a matter of numbers maybe. If you look at the astronaut office, about half of the astronaut office is military. The numbers are a little bit different right now. We're sort of going through a transition period. But historically, half the astronauts have been in active duty military and half civilian. And when you look at those military officers that come to the astronaut office, it's probably pretty close. I mean, we might have the exact, the lead, if you will, over the Air Force, which is a good thing because I'll be coming home in the first week in October and going to our homecoming where we beat Air Force. But that aside, the Air Force and the Navy probably have the two close, are really close in the number of astronauts we produce. The Army has some too. The Coast Guard Academy has an astronaut, but it's just a matter of the sheer volume that we have. What's next for you, sir? What's next for me? Well, what I like to say up here is the only important thing in the space station is what you're doing right at this time. Because anything else we can screw up and cause damage to the vehicle or worse to ourselves. So what's next for me is to make sure that I keep this place safe and running ship shape until it's time for me to leave. After that, when I come home in September, I will go through about a two-month rehabilitation period, get myself healthy, make sure and finish close out all the experiments that we have ongoing on ourselves, and then do a little bit of public relations things as I prepare for either my next assignment as a space flyer. But probably I will just work in the astronaut office supporting other ongoing missions and my friends that have the privilege of coming up here. Beyond that, in the five-year time horizon, it'd be great if I could come back to space, but we'll leave that up to my bosses. Thank you for your time, Commander Cassidy. We'll have more on the Navy's role in space in the coming weeks. From the Defense Media Activity Studios, thanks for joining us today.