first flight. we were very pleased. and wally was already kind of looking forward to leaving nasa eventually. so his attitude kind of changed on that. he started getting more serious on-the-job. i just felt very fortunate. i do not remember ever really being frightened about flying. you fly airplanes and people get killed all the time. people that got killed all the time and rightly or wrongly, you find some reason to blame the pilot. then it wouldn't have happened to you. >> talk about fear. how you handled it. or do you have any? >> now i think i've got a little

fear from time to time and back in those days i think i was too stupid to be afraid. there is an attitudinal thing. i am not a psychologist, i read about a lot of that stuff. i think there is a difference in mentality about how people feel about these things. recognizing it, being aware of it intellectually, is an important step. i think a lot of people are afraid of things because they do not have the faintest idea what is going to go on. so they are afraid of it. and those that learn about things, they may be afraid of it because of what they know. and then there is some kind of a mental quirk that a lot of my friends and people out there today are aware of. brian, i know that he was aware of the things that could go wrong. and you have to have the kind of

self-confidence that enables you to handle that. that self-confidence comes from the way you have lived. you faced a lot of lesser things along the way. and you have been able to overcome them. i am afraid we have a society that has been moving away from that. we do not even let our kids have chances to take risks or anything like that. so they are not going to be able to handle the kind of fears going on in life. i feel very fortunate i grew up the way i did. i do not remember ever being afraid. >> the right stuff. this program partially is about putting the program, the manned program into the context of the cold war. i do not know if you guys know but apollo 7 was the first manned flight. they had sent some unmanned, and they worked perfectly. but it is a different deal with

real guys out there. so your mission was pivotal. put that in context of the cold war. >> first up, all the other manned launches were not perfect. we had a problem. >> the press told us they were perfect. >> but we had good engineers. astronauts got the glory because we were at the tip of the spear. but there were 400,000 people that worked on that program. government and civilian employees. those people, they had the guts. for example, today we do not think about it, but our management, the management at johnson space center and throughout nasa -- i was mostly familiar with jsc -- management had the nerve to make decisions and go over the results of it. today, it is all too frequently that we reduce those risks to

zero. we were fortunate to have people of all fields in those days who owned the program. many of them were much more emotional about the program than i think i was at the time. i was just doing my job. >> part of it was the urgency, right? because of the cold war, everyone believed we had to get the moon first. >> i do not know. but getting back to your question about the russians, we started off -- the russians, from the beginning -- it is a little different now. things have changed a lot. but the russians were very focused on the public relations aspect of it. they wanted -- for example, when they knew we were planning a second flight for ed white to go out and have an eda and test a maneuvering device, they did everything they could to get

alexi leonov to do it. they did it with a spacecraft that was not built for it. that was really risky. they knew they were taking risks and willing to do that just to be out in front. >> so alexi would be the first to walk in space. >> and he didn't really walk. i know alexi. he is like the buzz aldrin of the russian program. >> we get it. [laughter] >> i think it was 12 minutes. the whole effort was aimed at how to get him back in. the little port that they had there, it was a terrible event. but they beat us by more than a month. so they focused on those kinds of things. it is very dangerous, risky

things. on the upside, they have been very fortunate. they have had very few accidents. they have had terrible accidents they had survived. i have been impressed by that. but in those days, by the time we had the gemini spacecraft -- and keep in mind you are getting my personal opinion. not official statements on these things. the gemini program, that was a more capable spacecraft than i see today in the russian launches. it could maneuver. do more things. that was back 40 years ago. 50 years ago. in the meantime, the russians have converted more to what i consider more of an engineering aspect.

exploration in the future. it is a lot cheaper for them and has been over the years. we were engaged in a real fight. it was like a fight to the finish to get there. the first time we met any of the russians, it might have been after ed white and -- i can't remember his name. i think is the first time we met any of the cosmonauts. over the years, they have become very good friends. we have organizations that work together. association of space explorers. they get along very well. they're living together at the international space station. as a matter of fact, they have outmaneuvered us administratively and cost was. we are like beginners. >> after your flight, we said we

are going to send these guys around the moon because we were worried the russians would do that or us? >> there was great concern about the russians beating us to the moon. we were not exposed to a lot of military intelligence they might have had. government intelligence. so it was kind of what we knew and felt and heard. but there were people that knew what the russians were doing to push for it. they must have had some pictures. the russians were developing the m1 rocket. 10 million pounds of thrust. they were going to go to the moon. they were doing everything they could to do that. >> apollo 8 was originally not going to the moon. >> and the russians were shooting to go around the moon. they do not have any landings set for it.

but before apollo 7, probably a month or so before apollo 7 flew, they started talking, the administration people at nasa, about apollo 8 going around the moon. that was a brand-new thing. we had five giant steps to go to the moon. you are going to test the spacecraft in earth orbit. that is what we did. then we have to test the lunar module. didn't follow instructions. [laughter] >> houston, we have a problem. >> and then, we test the lunar module in earth orbit. then fly close to or around the moon. vendor the simulation and the

landing. well, administrators did this. they said, instead of finding a high orbit, we could send it around the moon. they considered everything. it was based on the success of apollo 7. they decided if seven was successful, they would have eight oh around the moon. it turns out that apollo 7 is the longest, most ambitious, most successful engineering test flight of any new machine ever. the reason it was so loaded was because we had lost 21 months after the apollo 1 fire. a year and a half, maybe a little less. to go to the moon. and we had to do it supposedly

by the end of the decade. you're trying to make up for all that. when we went up for an 11 day mission, none of us thought we were going to go 11 days. you could not do that on the first mission. so we were surprised, a little irritated towards the end. >> i want a shower. get me back. >> so that was critical. because it was successful, apollo 8 went around the moon. that is what everybody thinks. >> well, we have to find out from you. all the astronauts talk about it. tell us in your own words, when you first got that view from space. what was it like? >> i do not have a lot of useful things to say about that. >> you are an astronaut, and you are tough. >> it makes me think i was totally insensitive to those

kinds of things. because we knew that, after one orbit, and we had never been around the world for. i knew a guy that went around the world 163 times before i went to europe. [laughter] >> so, we knew we were going to have to separate. and come back and simulate a docking with the s4b stage. the laughing we wanted to do was screw up anything. on the second time around, we had separated. wally was flying. i was taking pictures from the right side. i was taking pictures of the s4b.

i was just snapping these pictures. all across the southern united states, in this picture. later, only later, did i realize it was taken over where we live. it was taken over the space center down there. to this day, that is my favorite picture that i took in orbit. at the time, i was not even looking at it. i was looking at the s4b. that's how we were focused on doing things. first time i started getting a thrill -- after that, we separated and went into different orbits. to see how that would work out.

most of the time, people do not realize how difficult it is to see anything on the ground. did i mention this? >> no, keep going. >> because you look at the international space station, digital film, fabulous pictures. in those days, we drifted. and you drifted because you did not want to use your fuel and your thrusters. because then you really would have come home early. we were just drifting. you think about it, we had five windows. about 150 degrees. they cover about 150 degrees.

the biggest was in the hatch. round window, 10 inches in diameter. two panes. best glass you could get separated by a tiny gap. so in the window broke, you can still keep rusher in the spacecraft. unless a window was pointing at the ground and you are drifting, and you see a tiny little bit out there. it is pointing out the ground and you have a camera and are not involved in some other thing, you might be able to take a picture. if you're looking at the ground keep in mind that, every 45 minutes, you're going into darkness. than 45 minutes daylight. the camera people did not want you to take pictures within five minutes of sunrise or sunset because, in those days, we had kodachrome film. you could not take photos like you do today. we had a limited amount of film on board.

so it had to be pointed down. if you pointed down, 55% of the earth's services covered by clouds all the time. the part that is in the clear, that is usually the desert. saudi arabia. never saw a cloud over saudi arabia. [laughter] >> you can take a picture and never even see a city down there in the desert. there was a lot of things like this. he did not want to take it more than 30 degrees off the vertical. it was hard to get pictures. >> we are going to ask some questions of the iss astronauts. one of your questions is, do we think that we should have a fighter pilot training or trading like that for today's astronauts?

most of you guys were fighter pilots, right? >> if you were not a fighter pilot, you did not apply. there is a lot of changes that has gone on in the space program. today, you do not have to be a pilot. one of the reasons you do not have to be a pilot is because, in the space shuttle, the greatest flying machine ever built and operated by man -- may be a minority opinion, but i feel strongly about that -- you always had a couple of pilots. and they did a fantastic job in my opinion. because of what went on 40 and 50 years ago, we were able to build hardware and a program where you could carry passengers up. you did not have to be a pilot. now, even with the new capsules coming up, going to be able to take people that are pilots. that in the days when they did

not know what it was going to take, nasa decided to get the people that have the best chance of succeeding. the russians had taken a different attitude. their people in the spacecraft did virtually nothing. they were strapped in. they operated the spacecraft. it has always been operated remotely. even today, it operates remotely. it is not a satisfying thing for an aviator. we did not do that. they made their best guess of what they thought was. and they took from the pilot field, all military. our group was the first group where you do not have to have been a test pilot. half of our group was test pilots. you had to have fighter pilot

experiences. i have always felt that the advantage that gave us, every one of those people, myself included, we had spent at least 10 or 12 years, sometimes more than that, flying fighter aircraft. you develop the kind of self-confidence it takes. you think you are the best whether you are the best or not. you have to have that kind of an attitude out there. plus we have flown with these people in all kinds of things. mine was at the end of the korean war. anybody here remember the korean war? what that does is give you the sense that you can depend on the other guy in the other airplane. in the spacecraft, the same way. we knew that we could bet our life on our associates. and that worked out very well. today, they are focused able lot more on the right kind of diversity in who they select.

they just selected another group of astronauts. and the headline in houston was they had selected eight new astronauts. the big headline was that half women, half men. that was an accomplishment for somebody, someplace, some particular drive. i, frankly, would not care if they were all women if that was the best get to do the job. but today, they are focusing on a different thing. it is the numbers of it. you have to have the right number of minorities caucasians, all that other stuff. i think it is nonsense, but i am an old guy. >> but they do not have to have the kind of skills you guys have. >> everything in the world is going that way. [laughter] i'm the only guy in his room that does not own a cell phone. [laughter] buzz aldrin has three or four of

them. but that is because i do not want to be trapped with that kind of stuff. but today, it drives all things. some things it is improving. a lot of techniques and different things. but frankly, i have been fortunate enough -- not 10 years ago, i got to fly an f16 and f18, but i had to tell the guy i was flying with i did not want to mess around with the computer screen to pick out what i was seeing. i like the old fashion way of flying. >> this guy is old-school. i like it. his cell phone is not going off. we rely on russia to take us to the space station. what do you think about the decision to abandon the shuttle before we had a replacement? >> it is kind of interesting because my attitude, and my

contemporaries -- our attitude about the space shuttle is probably different and a lot of people i have talked to involved in the shuttle. keep in mind it is a small group of people in the shuttle. the pilots that flew it. they were maybe 25 or 30%. i think they have 500 people now or something like that. you take all kinds of folks with you. but i always but i always bet on having these guys on that shuttle. that is my personal opinion. the space shuttle is the greatest flying machine ever built by man. i personally think the greatest

mistake nasa made was canceling that space shuttle without something better. not just something else, something better. look what we are doing at nasa. we're going to outside contractors to develop capsules. some of them look like the apollo command module. just slightly bigger. 30% bigger or something like that. doing the reentries. it took good aviators. a great airplane. i think the missions were absolutely fabulous. they lost two shuttles along the way due to management decisions that were made.

the crew at the time, their particular position on the columbia and the challenger report was we probably ought to put this off. and management went ahead and lost the crews. >> i will open it up to the audience, but i know you have -- you must have a view about mars. was the best way to go there? do we go to the moon first? do we fly directly like buzz wants? >> i am not a technologist anymore. i read about these things. other people's opinions. it has evolved. i was in a committee in 1971. we were talking about space shuttle development and mars.

it was the extreme. another seven years after that like 1991, that would be more likely. i doubt if there was an astronaut in the office that would not have bet we would have been to mars by 2000. 30 years from now, will we be on mars? i have no idea. i have been in favor of going to mars not because i think we will find life there, but we might. so what? there are others who want to go back to the moon. there is a ridiculous idea we're going to the moon and take pieces off.

the japanese landed something on a meteorite to years ago and brought back a specimen from it. so we have to focus on mars. the reason why we have to focus on mars is because society moves ahead by pushing the next frontier. i mentioned it at m.i.t. a couple of days ago. when magellan set out to go around the world 500 years ago that was 1519 or something like that. they were going to find the next frontier. sailing around the world for the first time. you have five ships, 270 crewmen. when they came back, one ship made it back.

17 of the 270 still alive. but they were willing to push the frontier. but what happened in the western world because they went out and did this. sending was happening in the 1960's. in the 1960's, the next frontier was space. the moon was representative of getting away from the earth's gravitational field. escaping from it and getting to the moon. the frontier today is mars. during apollo, people were willing to accept the risk. we lost people in the apollo program to do it. and look what it is now. because of pushing a frontier, which is not an economic return, to go out and explore, the economic return comes from all

of the things you have to develop to make that possible. we have been benefiting now -- you are all benefiting things that were spawned because technology got pushed in. some of that was political. >> the cell phones they all have. >> i was up at m.i.t. i want to get back to this because of going to mars. by the way, i never graduated from m.i.t. i study there in 1964 and 1965 because they had a computer we used in the command module. it was very important. it was hardwired. i want you to know this. we had 48 kilobytes of memory in the computer. kilobytes. anybody remember a kilobyte? [laughter] that kind of development.

you push the next frontier for different reasons. i do not believe you are going to make money going out and doing this. the people doing this, they will be able to make money because of it. the next frontier is mars. i used to think, let's go to mars and land on it and return. we had the concepts and all that. printing we had to overcome was radiation. and then i finally came around to agree with people that we had something to gain if we went back to the moon. that is setting up a site where you learn how to actually live

when there is no other way of surviving out there. it will take a lot of work. now, like you mentioned, buzz is making a big push that we make a one-way trip to mars. the more i think about it, the more i think that makes a lot of sense. here is why. the technology and the cost of developing a system you are going to take out there, fly land, pickup, launch again, and stay alive to come back to the earth. and then you come back, terribly expensive. you hear these idiots talking about $5 billion to go to the moon and mars. it is outlandish. it cost us $25 billion in the old days to do the whole apollo program. today, if you like that, they'll be like $125 billion. going to mars is a lot tougher than going to the moon.

if we can go there and send a couple things up first that might help people survive, you go out and you land, they are probably going to die. i understand that. big deal. but what i'm getting at is you send stuff out there, try to let them live. and then try to resupply. you do the things you can't, but you have to be willing to push the boundaries. we no longer have that. we are risk averse. >> very well said. with that, i will open it up to the audience. can someone tell me what time it is? ok. >> i want to add one thought to that before i do that. that is because, when we talk about apollo 11, the first thing you think of is one small step for man.

a story i like to tell is that they left on the surface of the moon a microfilm message from the leaders of the free nations of the world. microfilm used to be small. that was how we had things. i got a chance to look at those some weeks afterwards. and i carried it in my pocket for 10 years, a message that the prime minister of australia left. i cannot remember his name now. >> his wife is reminding him. gordon. >> prime minister gordon. he had a couple sentences of platitudes. and this is what i think is what we need to be focusing on today, especially here at the explorers club. it says, made a high courage and technical genius which made this achievement possible be so

useful in the future that mankind will live in a world in which peace, self-expression and the chance of dangerous adventure are available to all. we need to get back to that kind of thing. >> i would not disagree. anybody want to ask a question? this gentleman here. you're going to have to talk into the mic. >> can you share who one of your personal heroes is and why? >> my personal -- i grew up admiring i always wanted to be a pilot. occasionally, i would get to go to a movie on saturday. they always had some fighter pilot that was the hero. my boyhood hero was charles lindbergh. at a very early age, he was

willing to do that. stick his neck out. he also understood what i was just saying about prime minister gordon's statement. i do not remember the exact quote right now, but he said if he could live 10 more years before dying, that he would rather do that than not fly. >> ok. yes. les guffman? >> i like to hear more about apollo 7. i assume the 32 kilobytes of memory do not put you on cruise control. did you have technical problems? tell us about the mission itself. >> in 7, we had very few technical problems.

i remember the alarm going off twice in 11 days. we could not believe it. we were prepared for anything that could go wrong. and also in those days, we did not sleep at the same time. i remember wally and i were on the same sleeping pattern. don was awake when we were asleep. i remember i was on one of the couches. i remember waking up. i heard an alarm go off. don was up there. but he was asleep. i bet it didn't take 10 seconds for us to reconfigure things. believe me, that spacecraft, after apollo 1 being a disaster, apollo csm101 was an amazingly good spacecraft. i remember that has flight when nothing really went wrong. >> any other questions? ok.

wait a minute. who is this in the back? >> mr. cunningham, a pleasure to meet you. you were selected as a pilot because of your ability to handle stress. i would assume most pilots have a natural ability to handle stress. can you remark on any training protocols that nasa, whether they be psychological, medical or nutritional, that would enhance your ability to deal with stress under difficult conditions? >> that is another thing that is a big difference today. maybe it is because of the attitudes of the guys at that time. we did not allow nasa to really turn you into a specimen often. i still get my annual physical

at nasa every year. because they're keeping a history of people that have gone into space. and i like it because i get to do my physical. but today, astronauts are a whole lot more specimens in the scientific field. then they used to be. heart of that is the reaction to what happened in those days with .us ancient astronauts. i was not as obnoxious and outspoken as some of them could be. but i do know this. after the pilot program was over, management began to try to find ways to reduce astronaut influence on these things. back in those days, we could go to any of the meetings. involved in all the reviews, those kinds of things.

but people and operations, mission control, those folks they try to push the leverage of astronauts down. secondly, nasa is a government agency. as it has grown older, it has become more bureaucratic, very much like any government agency. you leave them alone enough, they get more money. it is one of the reasons that so-called commercial space industry is able to do these things today. because nasa has become very expensive. for example, i was at spacex. everything is in one hangar. they do not have to worry about nine centers open around the

country so they can keep the congressman putting the money out to do it. it is a real change. >> that is it for now. i want to thank you guys. let's have a hand for walt cunningham. [applause] >> gregory olsen flew to the international space station in 2005. in october, the entrepreneur and physics professor spoke to the explorers club about his training in russia, his trip to outer space, and what it was like aboard the international space station, including eating, drinking, sleeping, and dealing with an oxygen leak. this is about 25 minutes. >> ok. so for our next presenter today, it is going to be a straight up talk. i want to introduce greg olsen to you. he was the third paying person to fly to the international space station. greg went up in a rocket in 2005

or 2006. 2005. he reportedly paid $20 million or more or less, more than my virgin galactic flight. but he did some real experiments. he started something called centers unlimited. made a ton of money. but this guy's a real science geek as well as a businessman. i do want to say he is a ham radio operator. he has contacted earth from the space station himself. we are going to do the opposite of in about 40 minutes in the trophy room. i just want to say, greg is a nice guy. his capsule, that came back from space, the tiny capsule is in the intrepid museum on the west

side. if you want to see how small it was. greg olsen. [applause] >> thank you. i realize i stand between you and lunch. so i'm going to try to blow through the presentation and do any questions. then we will get to eat. people ask me where i get the idea to go into space. i am not a professional astronaut. i'm not even a military pilot. i am a scientist engineer and had a lot of training in that area. about 11 years ago, i was sitting in a starbucks in princeton, new jersey. i read this story about how the russian space agency would take

private people into space. it was just one of these “wow” moments. you are not a big planner or thinker. you want to do something, you go and do it. that is what got me to go into space. as you know, the original idea of the shuttle was to take the average person up and let them experience space. because of the accidents, that was cut out. the only way a private person like me could go up is via the russian space agency. though i am not a trained astronaut, you cannot hop on a rocket and go up. there's a lot of training required. i spent six months in russia outside of moscow, training for my mission. here are some of the things. it was a full-time deal. it was like being a college student again. i was in star city, russia, the version of johnson space center training grounds. the hardest part was trying to learn russian. when you are 60 years old,

trying to learn a foreign language, not easy. can we -- all right. good. ok. some of the training, you do not have to be an olympic athlete, but you have to be in reasonable shape. this is me in the middle of the astronauts. and the russian astronaut commander. we train a lot, got to know each other. we were talking about psychological stuff. we had to go out to jsc for a week and a half as part of our training. nasa gave us these rorschach tests. the sort of things where you go in and say, how can i get out of here with a right answer? [laughter] >> russians did not do any of that. i do not think they paid attention to psychology. but i found out after my training is that, every week they would get together with instructors and psychological people and say, what about this guy olsen? how does he behave under stress?

does he get along with people? it may have been a better system, i do not know. but anyway, as you say, fair amount of physical training. what else do we have here? testing my spacesuit. i do not know how nasa does it but in russia, they stick you in a bathtub and fill it up with foam. when that hardens, they pull you out with an overhead crane. so it is kind of a custom fit like a bride at a wedding. this is just to make sure it does not leak. world war i gas mask. another russian thing. but very effective in case of fire or toxic leaks. the bottom absorbs carbon dioxide and gives you 45 minutes of protection. also, survival training.

there's is designed to land by parachute, much like the apollo capsule. they land in the desert of kazakhstan. 70% of the earth's surface is water, so we practiced surviving in water. one of the fun parts, which you can do for $5,000, is called zero gravity training. there was a company in florida zero g, that does this. we did it during our training. you go out in a plane in freefall for about 30 seconds in a parabola. get to experience weightlessness. just gives you the feeling. i guess they check out if you are going to get ill. we mentioned fear earlier, and that is a question i get asked

about. fear. the worry i had from the beginning is i was going to be afraid. before i got up to the solution 76, i wonder, am i going to do ok in this? am i going to get sick in this plane? but i actually got to do it. it was all right. just when i was climbing up the soyuz rocket, we were about to launch. i feel ok now, but what if i get up there and freak out? fortunately, i did not. my fear was always before the actual event. not during the event. i will let you read this about the iss. i think most of the people in this room know this stuff. the space station is roughly 240 miles above the earth. it varies a bit. you orbit every 90 minutes.

you get to see 16 sunrises and sunsets every day. this is what the soyuz looks like being pulled to the launchpad. i had friends and family come over. you can see they are a little less formal about the whole deal then nasa would be. they let people get up and touch the rocket while it is being towed out. being my age, can you imagine saluting a russian general? that is growing up in the 1950's and 1960's. heresy, but there i am. with tokorev and macarthur. russians are very ceremonial. a lot of traditions they employ. this is what it looks like inside soyuz. we had to sit there for 2.5 hours. i was stupid to have two cups of tea before the launch.

[laughter] we all wore diapers, and we all got to use them. because there ain't no facility. here is the actual launch. october 1, 2005. we are sitting up at the top. it takes less than 10 minutes to get into orbit. you go from zero to over 17,000

miles an hour in less than 10 minutes. we had about 3.5 times the force of gravity to get up there. the launch went pretty smooth. as others have described, you feel like you are being pushed back. you can hardly lift your arm. and you since this freedom where everything is floating. that's when you know you are in orbit. it only took us 10 minutes to get into orbit but you can't smash into the space station. sneaking up to get the same exact out to to to and velocity. nowadays, i think they do four or six orbits. once we are in orbit and everything checks out, we can open up the visor.

bill angles -- eglngles, who is here, he took some of the photos that you see here. i had a little pocket camera i was able to slip into my spacesuit which is a whole long story that you need to tell over a beer. the first 50 miles or so, we have a shroud surrounding it. i hear this explosion. they see this big blue sphere receding. that was my ah-ha moment. this is my docking at the space station. remember, we are doing over 17,000 miles an hour at this time.

so use -- soyuz is highly automated. they don't leave much for the commander to do. you pretty much set in your seat and watch things happen. people ask, what was the best part of being in space? other than magic, that is it. just floating back and forth. it was such a great feeling. i got to experience the souz and on the iss for ten days. it's a great feeling. a big blue sphere is what i

remember. >> [inaudible] >> now we are going to do some ham radio afterwards. i was a ham operator in high school. i think there's enough gray hair in the audience that remembers. i did a presentation at my high school yesterday. it there were 300 kids in the audience. how many have ever heard of ham radio? three hands went up. at ridgefield park, they did have an amateur radio club and i got to do a ham session.

princeton high school where i live and in brooklyn where i was born. how do you drink water in space? this is how we did it on the iss. [laughter] you can understand why there are no showers and no sinks on iss> . the russians tried to use a shower on mir.

they had a plexiglas cylinder and it did not work all that well. let white -- we used wet wipes. how do you eat in space? canned goods or dehydrated foods. it has improved a lot since walter was in space. this is sergei, a russian cosmonaut. he spent 803 days of his life in space. i think that's still a record. [laughter]

astronaut john phillips in the background. he brought up slim jim's as snacks. that was his special food. >> [inaudible] >> even astronauts can't use video cameras. >> zoom in on the slim jim. >> we have been trying without success to sell this to slim jim foreign ad -- for an ad. almost everybody has some medical issue in space. i had some small copd issues.

even though i can run and do all the other stuff. i was required to take medication during my flight. this is just showing how you use an inhaler. i bring stuff like this to school to show kids just because you have a certain handicap or disability it doesn't necessarily limit you. nor should you let it. this is for demo purposes. here is some e-mailing.

sure. took me about three takes to do this. because you keep bumping into the sides. and news law of inertia. a body in motion tends to stay in motion. -- newton's law of inertia. a body in motion tends to stay in motion. notice there are no shoes. when you're weightless, you don't need shoes. the space toilets that everybody talks about. here is astronaut john phillips in the flower shirt.

he is about to leave so he gets to show bill macarthur who just arrives, how to do the install. john did not like my comments. you see this hose with the funnel. that is what both male and female astronauts used to collect urine. it's basically a vacuum cleaner

hose. you turn on motor m op open valve v, use apparatus. i'm not going to get too graphic about the space toilet but i will point out two things. the diameter is smaller than you are used to. you have to think about centering yourself. when you are bouncing around weightless, it's not so easy. gravity is not helping you out here. you want to slam that lid shut ass soon as you're finished up. it's something you can't train for on earth. there is a little curtain and all i heard was snickering outside. sleeping, sleep anywhere you want. i had a sleeping bag. because manatt commanders had their own little booth.

it doesn't matter how you sleep. the important thing is how to find yourself. i tied myself to the wall so that i wouldn't bounce around while sleeping or hit my head. the company "sensors unlimited" made cameras, night vision to for the military. i i had a company, sensors unlimited, that made near-infared cameras. this was a video link so all of the engineers could get the cameras. here are some of the chips that we make at sensors unlimited. i took up -- i made cufflinks out of these for all of the engineers who built the camera.

and i am sure many of you know who that guy is. yuri deguerin -- gagarin, the first human to orbit the earth. a little more physics. this demonstrates moment of inertia, which is kind of the resistance to rotation. you see a book -- you can do this at home yourself. it does not like to rotate at this axis. it tries to go back and rotate about the other two. this is the smallest moment of intertia. and that is the intermediate one, the one it does not like.

it wants to go about the largest or the smallest moment of inertia. these next photos i got from nasa. this is what the iss looked like in 2005. it is a lot different now. but this is the sole use -- sl oyuz tma-7 i launched him. -- in. this will stay there with a crew for six months. i came down in a different soyuz, tma-6. the first thing i had to do when we docked was take my seat and move it to the soyuz here. that was going to be my means of egress in case of emergency. so, we slowly back away and we do about an orbit and a half. remember, this is a vacuum. we are traveling over 17,000 miles an hour. when we get down to that 100 or 60 mile layer we talked about earlier you will encounter

, friction. what we do is, we jettison the engine, and also that habitat module, the spherical section. that is loaded with garbage we want to throw away. then, another module which as a heat module on top. as we enter the atmosphere things will heat up to thousands of degrees. anything without the heat shield will burn up. in order for us to land in kazakhstan we have to enter the , atmosphere somewhere over argentina. once you are in, you have very little control, once you start getting into the atmosphere. we had a little tumbling. we had an air leak where we lost 30% of our air. i did not think it was a big deal at the time, because this is the sort of thing you rehearse. during training, they turn the radio off, and you have to figure out whether it is a

transmitter, receiver, air supply. they show your air supply is going down. what are you supposed to do? it was like training. all i was supposed to do was keep my mouth shut and my hands off until the commander said "oxygen." at that time, i opened the emergency oxygen valve. and, typical russian thing -- they have a lot of spring force so you do not accidentally open this. to hold this open for two minutes a space glove was excruciating. i kept telling myself you cannot , let go. you cannot let go. fortunately, the leak stabilized and we did ok. in answer to an astronaut's prayer, the thing i remember is when we landed in kazakhstan, i just said, thank god i did not screw up. that is how i felt about the thing. we come down by parachute. once you get below a thousand

miles an hour -- you can see i do not know if this is one of yours, bill, but there is a big indentation in the ground where soyuz lands. that is why you have the chair. i do not remember our landing being that rough. i went to the landing of macarthur, and they had a rough landing. the difference is they had wind. they had a side wind, which we did not have much of. we were on the ground for about 10 minutes until the search and rescue team game and got us. when you have been weightless for in my case 10 days, in their case six months, you are pretty dizzy when you come back down to earth. they treat you like a medical patient. even though i could walk, maybe six hours later after the landing in kazakhstan, i was back in my dormitory in star city. every 15 minutes, someone would

come in and jab a needle or give me a cup to fill. that is how i spent the next three days. but my mission went well. as jim mentioned my capsule is now on display in the intrepid, along with the shuttle. you can see some good stuff there. with my capsule is the shuttle and concorde, the sr-71. that is back when we were taking some risks. i feel, most of you -- it is unfortunate we are not taking those kind of risks to advance not just space, but aviation in general. to go on a place like intrepid it reminds you of how bold and innovative we once were. a couple of comments. would i do it again? in a heartbeat. i loved it. and if you want to read any

more, i have a book on the internet called, "by any means neccessary." i think you can download it for mostly free. thanks very much. i will do questions, or you can eat. [applause] >> in 2011, a nasa astronaut performed a flute duet with ian anderson, founder of jethro tull, as a salute to 50 years of human spaceflight. he discussed his interest in the space race, and then introduced nasa's most senior astronaut also at the explorers club in new york city. >> who knew that ian anderson, front man for the seminal rock group jethro tull, is a space aficionado? the icon, who grew up in the cold war was impacted as much by , events in the america-russia space race has his fellow baby

boomers. over the years, he has wrote space references to his tunes. welcome to space stories at the explorers club. ian, we were honored and wish you were here in person. we understand you're performing in pennsylvania today. >> that is correct, yes. i am needed elsewhere. otherwise i would love to be there. >> well, we got a lot of astronauts in the audience and space people, so i think the first question people want to know is, what got you interested in space in the first place? >> well, it was, as you rightly said, going up at a time when we had just come out of a fairly meaningful world war and us young kids growing up in the 50's were aware of, first of all, the incredible cultural significance of america's presence in the world at that time. its obvious aid to britain coming into the war, without whom i don't think we would have won.

we first of all have that sense of indebtedness to the u.s.a., but it led to fascination of what was going on as things developed over those next few years, the impact of american culture, of tv's and movies and then, of course, the rise of the cold war tensions, the development of rocket science and where that took us. i suppose by the time that i was 10 years old, i was devouring anything to do with rocket ships and the earliest forms of science fiction, which were becoming -- largely, again, as a result of american science fiction writers, available in the u.k. so into my teens, i suppose i got to know a lot of fanciful notions about rocketry and interplanetary travel. i knew it was intrinsically a little overly optimistic during my lifetime. and so i suppose i concentrated a bit more on the evolution of what was really happening out there in the momentous words of

your ex-president jfk when he said we choose to go to the moon and do these other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, which became a bit of a motto in my life. i took great notice of that. it resonated with me as a school boy, and along with a motto of my old school in latin, which means let us follow better things. so the optimism about those two mottos have sort of guided me through those years. by the time i got to visit america for the first time in 1969, of course, that was the year of neil, buzz, and michael's expedition and the big excitement the world felt on

that momentous day. and i think for once, the world gathered and congratulated america, as probably close as america has ever come as having universal approval, and everybody buying into that little sense of ownership of "we." homosapiens got there, we homosapiens did it, whether we were americans, brits, or ruskies. we all shared in that moment. >> you were so interested in that moment that you wrote a song on the benefit album? >> that's correct, yeah. we just touched upon that, i suppose the lonely man in the command module michael collins who tends to be rather forgotten, but, of course, it was more or less drawing up straws as to who got to put the boot prints on the lunar surface. the guy who probably had in some ways had the most unenviable job was michael collins. of course, we know that

contingency plans had to be there for what happened if the other two guys hadn't had made it back. he would have to return home alone to planet earth. it made him in the hours he was alone in the command module, certainly the loneliest man in the known universe, facing that possibility that he might have to leave his buddies. >> given all of your interest in space, do you have any interest in spending some money with the russians to fly up to the space station? >> no, i mean -- if you asked me to climb up some step ladders to get something from the top shelf, i'm probably going to try to find a willing alternative volunteer, because i have no head for heights. i think even getting me to the top of the soyuz rocket, i would already be suffering from so much vertigo, i wouldn't be going anywhere. so, no, i'm not made of the right stuff. i am pretty much, i'm 98% a rock star. [laughter] >> well, your flute has

certainly been up to space, and you and your astronaut friend, cady coleman, did a flute duet on eureka gary and -- yuri gagarin's 50th anniversary of flight in 2001. could you tell us a little bit about that experience and then do the honor of introducing cady to our audience of explorers and astronauts today? >> i certainly will. i think someone on the radio world in texas who knew a friend or got to know a friend of a friend of cady's, had a relationship, passed the word to me that she was a keen amateur flute player. maybe i want to get in touch with her, which i did and it was arranged that she would take not only my flute, but her flute because i pointed in the right direction to spend her entire annual astronaut salary of

buying a shiny new flute to take into the iss mission with her. so she has my flute, her flute she also had, i believe, a flute from one of the chieftains, an irish folk band and another member of the chieftains. she went heavily armed with weapons of mass destruction in a very, very small allowance of personal baggage. >> tonight, ian anderson and i would like to honor yuri for his brave journey 50 years ago, and we would like to celebrate the role that humans play in the expiration of our universe, past present, and future, by sharing some music between earth and space.

♪ ♪

>> ladies and gentlemen of planet earth, give a warm welcome to that space rock chick of the flute, cuddly cady on the outside but a steely hard-nosed professional underneath, look out, hide your t-38, here comes colonel catherine coleman. [applause] >> i think the other explorers were taller than me. i could not see you guys from back there. that was pretty wonderful for me to see ian, and the way he comes across is just the way he is. and every interaction i've had he has a respect and knowledge

about the space program. and i think on this journey that we take, and you are hearing from several astronauts to do it -- you feel privileged to do it and at the same time it is fun to have someone to talk about with and he was one of my favorite people to do that with. the friend of mine in houston had found him for me -- he mentioned how little we get to take to space. and these days, in the soyuz, we get to take three pounds of things. it is not very much. when i was on my way up, the space shuttle program delayed just enough to know that there would still be a shuttle coming up there while i was there and what that meant was whatever i took would have a way home. it's not so much about getting it up there but getting it home . so i had about two weeks to find someone and find some things and bring them.

and so my friend wrote to his manager and said, cady needs one person and not several people, it has to be very efficient and someone who will be reliable and make this happen within a week. he wrote this note to me by e-mail and said, i have been known to be reliable, i take showers and i am quite clean and neat most days. this whole long note. we have been friends ever since. if you brought his flute to space, you would get to play it too . i am pretty sure that is true. so, today i wanted to share a little bit what it has been like for me. i have been an astronaut since 1992. i don't know if it makes me sound old but i am the most senior active astronaut still in line to go back to the space station. having said that, the line is

pretty long, but it is wonderful to be in it. it is an amazing program to i be part of. i have flown twice on the shuttle and once on the station and it is a very special place -- some of the things you have seen today, they are all incremental steps and all of us here who have an interest in exploring, we are all part of these journeys. i thought i would show a series of photographs from the space station part of things, so we can understand more what it was like to go. this is the irish flute i took for the chieftains, matt malloy and paddy maloney. we have talked about fear here several times and i will show you what i do in my job and i am trained and there is every reason to be confident that you can do what you need to do. but playing on stage with these people -- that is scary. totally scary. [laughter]

but it is pretty wonderful to have the instruments up there. but before you do this or this there is a lot of things to learn. and i tried to think about what people in the explorers club might be most interested in hearing about. before you go and live in a place like this, that looks small but -- is this my laser? on the top of it -- working on it. >> houston we have a problem. >> there we go. we live in this piece right here which is about 10 train cars put together, but some of them are up, and down, and sideways. it is quite a large and wonderful place. some of the lessons we need are lessons in how to get along with people and to make the most of the experience. this is my favorite picture of going to and art deco, as part

of the antarctic search for meteorites. this was my neighborhood, this is the ice in antarctica and this little dot is our camp and i was not a camping girl -- seriously not. to be living in a scott tent amazing they are still the way to go, the double walled tents for six weeks collecting , meteorites. altogether we collected about 1000 meteorites. it was really an amazing place. i had already been to space at the time i went to antarctica for a couple months. and i learned a lot about myself and being in a small group. there were a team of 12, but eight people were in one place in antarctica, and four of us were about 250 miles from the south pole, living in tents for six weeks. it taught me about getting along with people. you don't have to be best friends with everyone, you have to figure out that you need to get what you want out of things -- not by yourself, but you need

to be content within yourself. and within your tent. i brought the picture of our -- my, at the time, two-year-old. and my husband in the back of , the room there. i was a last-minute replacement for this expedition and i got a phone call from someone that said, "you were a volunteer for that antarctica thing in three weeks, are you still a volunteer?" i said, absolutely, i will go tomorrow. do i have to wait three weeks? i will discuss this with my family and will make a family decision and i would call you in five minutes, but you can think in that yes kind of way while i am gone. i'll be right back. my husband was very supportive and i finally looked at him and said, do you realize i am not taking the baby with me? [laughter] >> is your husband here?

>> he is, in the back. [applause] and, you know everyone who goes , on adventures here, part of your team is probably not with you on the mountain or in the place where you go. there are all sorts of folks and our friend john levine is here. we have a big support team in terms of people who make me feel like i can go away and do these things and be doing the right things by my family. it was an amazing place and i learned a lot about myself and i did get to live 11 days underwater by myself in a habitat. it was wonderful, almost like space. i don't know about the rest of you, but when i was up there i did not meet anybody new. under the sea you have neighbors, you see the food chain in action. this was a habitat and six of us stayed there, my dad was the supervisor diving salvage for the navy and was into exploring

under the ocean, and living in the ocean was something that was real and sort of normal in our family. and so to get to actually wear this diving suit and do my own diving expedition was very meaningful. and a lot of the folks that supported this were people that knew my dad. this is the bottom of our habitat and the place we stayed, a small space, few people and you need every ounce of everybody on your team. our mission at that point was to understand and exercise telerobotic surgery. i was worried it would be on each other but it turns out it is on these dummies, and it was pretty interesting to learn how to do that, i can take out a mean gallbladder if any of you

want to stand in line. but learning that this kind of robot, which is common in hospitals, we could not get the second and third robot arms with us. part of the reason we have studies is to understand what will keep us from having telerobotic surgery at the edge of the battlefield where surgeons cannot be so close or on the way to mars and places where things are isolated. we want to understand how to take three people like this and bring them to a place we have not been. and bring them home again as well. this is my expedition crew. we are sitting in front, for -- in front of our very own soyu z. for that journey i wanted to share a little bit of what it was like to do and expedition as a family. this is my husband josh and our son jamie.

and we love to fly and see places from wild angles. you are going to see it from their perspective. i did not get to vote on when i went so december was the time -- december 2011. i just love the statement. i am sure bill, who you are going to hear from later has , better pictures of the space museum in moscow, but it is a piece of stone and metal that makes a statement -- this is what it is like to launch into space, it is not an easy thing . and, to me, this monument really says that. i'm having my son understand a little bit of what it is like to live in a different country -- he just visited. but to realize that this place where everything is different, my mom spent time with those folks having to understand what it was like with them. this is the first woman to go to space, and it was really amazing to meet her -- i met her several times. we had -- she wanted to make sure we had tea before i went to

space. valentina tereshkova. a really wonderful woman. it was a traveling adventure, we traveled in russian airplanes which isn't quite like traveling from here, but you meet the folks up front and feel fine about it. when the guy goes down the aisle and picks up the plank, the sort of door in the middle of the aisle, and takes a big wrench and bang something really hard and shuts the door and goes back to the cockpit, it is not the most confidence inspiring, but he was confident. it was great. here we are. this is my family. my stepson josias who is 31. we are in quarantine officially there, so you see people in white coats. bill, you are probably in this picture. maybe?

this is our quarantine -- they invite the press in for a day and this is the sign outside the quarantine. and i have a very clever and enterprising husband, so even though there are rules -- there are rules and we follow them but there is always a way. >> awww. >> it is nice to say goodbye and i was worried about whether my son would think spaceflight is really exciting. he is not under arrest, but i will say that rockets are rocket s. but getting to meet the swat team in florida when i launched and the russian military -- those were high on his list. i was sure with the nasa supervision and everything that -- i was sure everybody was doing fine while i was doing my last training exercises and getting ready to go. because they were under the leadership of their father. yes. we got to plant a tree, a great russian tradition.

before you go to space. it may not look like a tree and probably still doesn't because it was planted in december in kazakhstan, but that is my tree. my husband is a glass artist so there is a little planet at the base of that tree and to me there are all the signs with all these astronauts named on them -- and it is a special group to be a part of. i didn't get to launch the rocket, i saw the backup rocket go. but we were in quarantine at this point that the family gets to see the rocket in the rocket on the pad. >> this is a demonstration -- >> whoops. i don't know how that gets on there but if you could turn the sound off completely that would be great.

one little question that comes up on the screen, and then it is answered forever -- it really makes you crazy. this is the space station. i love this because it looks like animation but it is not. it is about a three minute video that shows the launch and getting ready. training. i like to show how small it is. >> this is a demonstration of -- >> if you could just mute the sound on the computer itself, does that work? if not, we are not going to do too many videos and we will not worry about it. this is the hotel you stay in, the russian priest blesses everybody and i'm waving behind glass and my son and my husband . that is my crewmate paolo's wife in back. i begged the guys take small steps and short ones and they did not listen. if you see the whole film, it looks like i am running the -- for the rocket.

then lunch. we are up in that tiny little part up there. it is hard to describe and watching is terrifying because it takes a long time for the rocket to leave the pad and it is hard when you're watching hoping everything is fine. but when you are inside suddenly , it starts and it is going and you realize you are not stopping. i did the same rendezvous 34 orbits about a day and a half, that greg did and now we are up in the space station. this is my favorite scene in the film even though it shows my backside because it is not about floating around up there. it is like living on a different planet, and you fly from place to place. this was the launch of my family's point of view, walking to the bus saying goodbye. this picture makes me cry because it is hard to leave

folks on the ground, and i think we explore as families. after launch everybody is celebrating, and i had 12 friends and family that came to the lunch and john levine, the mountain climbing friend was interested in coming to the explorers club and we never spend a saturday together so it was great for us to be together. now i live vicariously through john, because he goes on these cool expeditions. there is our crew. somebody that will look familiar to you in the next year is scott kelly. this is the twin brother of mark kelly married to gabrielle giffords. that happened -- gabrielle was injured while we were in the space station together and scott is on his way to spend a year in space. he is a neat guy, and it was wonderful to be up there, he was commander for part of that time. and i will introduce the rest of the crew here.

this is paolo, from italy. the thing i would like you to look at in this picture is to realize this is a picture of all of us really excited about going to space. [laughter] but the thing is this is a , picture of us excited about going to space, if you find a picture of our crewmate in the middle, every picture of him he looks exactly like that. not because he is not excited, it is just his way. one of the many lessons we all needed to learn about each other to get along in a place this big and this small. we had a very important job to do and today is a good day to talk about it. i was the second person to capture a free flying supply ship. in this case we are capturing

the japanese supply ship and i am the robotic arm operator and paolo is in charge of the ship itself. and just this morning, as walt cunningham was finishing his talk, the space station crew released the spacex dragon which is the fifth of their ships to be at the international space station. and so it is something that now happens almost as a commonplace event. for us on board, it is not commonplace when this thing -- not commonplace. when this thing comes up next you it is the size of a school bus. and this is where the performance thing comes in, -- performance factor and knowing you have done your homework comes in, and one of the things i tell people when they haven't done it before is when it gets

there it will be really, really big. i'm not trying to be cute, it is distracting to have this thing -- in the simulator it never looks that big and the reality of capturing it and doing it safely, we happened to capture right over the finger lakes, so look at this picture. this is just moments after we captured. everything is safe and all the mechanisms have done their things. i looked out the window and there is lake ontario and the finger lakes and long island and the hudson, and you can look off in the corner is cape cod. it was a good place to capture a supply ship. we get a lot of cool things when we open those packages chocolates from the russians pretty cool. but this is what we really get from the supply ships, which is, up there, we're finding out because we have very little gravity, what do liquids really want to do, one of the scientific things we learn

about, what about combustion and how do things burn? combustion down here it happens , in this dynamic way where the lighter gases are rising and new fuel is coming in. measurements we have to make an less than a second down here, we can make over 30 seconds or 40 seconds because those weightless gasses, those lighter gases are not rising. so it is more of a sphere and the math is easier and it is a laboratory beyond any other. these are crystals that we can grow -- i say this is the ugly earth crystal and the beautiful space crystal, but this diagram is the most beautiful thing on the page. and this tiny part of it, the water molecule that we did not know belonged in the jigsaw puzzle and is perfect to complete the structure.

this is important for muscular dystrophy. we do a lot of medical experiments and i like it because i'm doing all the test s that the olympic athletes do but i was far from olympic athlete. and i was down here -- the bone loss research alone is significant -- 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 if i don't do something about it. we are learning about exercise and the bad news is exercise is here to stay especially weight-bearing exercise. we do that by running on a tread -- treadmill. and we also have a weightlifting machine, but it is based on resistance and it can go from six pounds to 600 pounds. there is an infinite amount of work to do and this is what it is like for us.

the exercise machine is upside down and down there is the kubla where we take our pictures and look out the window. we exercise two hours per day and i cannot give you anybody else's data but i came back with the same amount of bone that i left with. it does not mean it is the same. we do a lot of blood and urine collection because it happens so fast, it is easy to make those measurements by doing those samples and that is what is significant about the spacex release today where the capsule was attached to the space station until this morning. it came up a few weeks ago. they've been doing experiments. and it has been released from the space station and let go -- and that 3:30 -- i have to do my math. 11:23 pacific is when it is supposed to land in the pacific ocean. and so those samples that we and astronauts like myself have collected are coming back to earth on the spacex so they can

be analyzed down here. it is phenomenal research. that is a phenomenal point of view, a window looking out of the space station. i like having a shot where this is taken from a shuttle but it shows you how small the station is in comparison to the earth, we took on our mission 60,000 pictures and every time i hit the shutter i said please let it be like a picture bill would take. i am serious. i cannot wait for you to hear from bill after me. i revere his pictures and i love what they tell you. and i know he has been angling to come up here, and i would be voting, ok? bill said he would volunteer. the food is not good, though ok? it is really a magical place. this is our aurora borealis. there was news about a big sunspot today in the news. they will be seeing quite a bit of aurora up there. hopefully, down here we will see.

it is really an amazing view from up there, very special and educational as well, italy indeed shaped like a boot. i was up there on my first mission with a guy from massachusetts with a massachusetts accent and we saw this picture of new england in the daytime in beautiful weather. and we looked down, and i love being from a place in western massachusetts with very distinctive geography. you can see cape cod there, and al says, "oh my gosh. it looks just like the map." [laughter] in the winter it is easier to find your way around because here is the connecticut river and here is my landmark, cape cod and boston. i live right here in western mass with my husband and my family. either fortunately or

unfortunately, i work full-time in houston, texas and we have quite the commuting life. and have done for some time. there is an up close and detailed picture. i love it shows where -- i love pictures where i look straight down and see them in a detailed way and realized everybody down there is doing something and i wonder what it is but there are also views in that room with all the windows, that is a different structure than we have ever had and this is something to keep in mind for all the different kinds of exploration -- how do you experience that exploration? up until the cupola, we had portholes. that means you are looking through a window. you're going across the pacific ocean and you know hawaii is there somewhere and it goes by fast and is really tiny. you're always trying to experience things in these glimpses. and yet when you have windows

all around you and here too you can see something coming and you feel like you are there with your family. then you see it receding in the distance, and you see the curve of the earth. it gives you a feeling of being more humanly present. scenes like this remind me of what it would feel like when you see your home receding in the distance and yet they will still be there and will be home when it is time. this is not myself, but tracy caldwell. i love this picture, because i think it is the epitome of a human and a relationship with their planet. happens to be the earth in this case. then it is time for landing. i did not really want to come home. one of my fellow astronauts said, if i could bring my family with me, i would never come home. and i feel that way as well. i would've stayed another six

months in a minute, but if you are landing you better focus on landing. greg gave some nice descriptions of it. kelly likes to say it is like going over niagara falls in a barrel on fire full of by a -- followed by a collision with a mack truck. bill, did you take this picture? yes. bill has these wonderful pictures. if it wasn't for these, i don't know that i would remember what it felt like to be landing. i landed like $1 million, let's say the bigger they are, the harder they fall. so i think it was easier to be a smaller person in that case. but as beautiful as space was and is much as i love the view sometimes -- for me it was nice to be home and to be part of the view. this is our farm in western massachusetts, just an unbelievably gorgeous place. especially this time of year. nice to be able to have home and work so close.

all the different dimensions of the place that we live -- i show the pictures at the end and in terms of exploring you don't have to go very far. and exploration is about a spirit and a way of being present in your surroundings. we have some pretty amazing places right here on the planet, in our backyard and a beautiful view. these are all pictures that my husband took. just beautiful places, and things just happen and you want to capture that moment and keep it, and one of the ways to do that is to take pictures. this is aurora borealis. this was over our house in massachusetts. that might be possible this week, given the forecast. we took this picture about two weeks after i came home -- there is something so wonderful about being home. and it is important to remember there are folks who make all

that happen, and there are all that happen, and there are -- folks who make all that happen, and there are friends like john and susan, and my husband who wore all the hats , while i was gone and some of them were funny. he took this picture in space to show he was feeding our child balanced meals. and really the times our child eats the worst is when he is with his mother. my husband is a glass artist and is known for making these wild planets. to me, he made these planets long before he and i ever met and he was inspired by michael collins, who said that when he was in that lunar module that ian anderson referred to when he looked back at the earth he could cover the earth with his thumb. and josh thought that was a sentiment and feeling that kids should understand in our -- about where our planet is in the neighborhood.

so in that three pounds i managed to bring a planet or two for folks in my family. but to me it is a spirit of exploration, and some people do this by physically going on the expeditions. and some people take the representation and some people tell stories and write movies and books and write music that take us to these places. but when it all comes to an end -- it comes down to family knowing you can leave your family at home and they will do ok with their cat that does not know he is not a dog. [laughter] and i will finish, saying, in terms of curiosity and exploration, the people younger than all of us they are the answer and they are the ones and they need to have this kind of look and this kind of excitement . and i think here in the explorers club you get a big piece of sharing that

exploration. this picture of myself and the 134 crew and the rest of myspace asian crew -- when you see this, my third grade teacher did not know i would be in this picture, nobody knew even in high school maybe not in college, and not for a really long time. and that is why we have to take care of all those kids, we don't know who will be in a picture like this, or who will be calling us from the space station or calling us from mars to say hello. so we have got a lot of really exciting things to do in the space program. i know everybody thinks is gone and over because we don't have a space shuttle. it is a vehicle. it is a way to get to places that we are meant to be and we are meant to go. and it is hard to do things without a shuttle, but at the same time it was time to retire it, and it is a little paralyzing for the program but it is time to be on to these other things that we need to do with our commercial partners

doing the things we know how to do, getting people and stuff up. nasa has no business doing stuff we already know how to do as people here on the planet. we need to do and take the risks for exploration, for the things you cannot ask the companies to do. so we are together with those companies in the supply ship business, and with commercial crew, then building vehicles. we are making sure they are doing that part while we are getting on to the business of exploration and taking all the careful steps that we need to do go on to mars. but as my last slide i will tell , you that some of those steps never change and it is nice to look at the new stuff and things that are not familiar, but for some things it is nice to go back to the familiar, and we are a part of all of them. thank you. [applause] >> before we open it to the audience for questions, i have a couple questions myself. how tall are you?

>> [laughter] it depends where i am. down here today, on the earth i am 5'4", and in space i'm five foot five and a quarter. >> is that because of the hair? >> i'm nine feet tall with the hair. [laughter] >> that is the next question. when i first met you just now, i did not recognize you because of all the photos your hair is up in the air, what is the deal? >> it's that microgravity science. seriously. my hair was four inches shorter than it is right now. it is just that without the weight of gravity you get to figure out what does it really want to do and that is what it does. it wasn't in my way because when you turn your head it stays with you, but it was in a lot of other people's way sometimes. >> he spoke just a bit about this at the end. do you think you will be going up -- you are one of the active astronauts, we go up on spacex to the space station? do you think?

>> i don't care what ship it is -- seriously. i mean i just want to go. , people say would you rather be in a shuttle or -- it is the soyuz? it is the taxi, not to belittle any of them but to me it is about being there come a it is -- about being there, about living there. it is about finding out things you cannot do any other place . and i fully expect that someone -- i would love it to be me and you can tell anyone you want and pass that along -- c-span i would like to go. soon. but it is not my job to go soon, there is a line and the line is long. and a lot of our newer folks are in the line and it is really important that they are and that they go. because in building these vehicles and doing these future exploration things it is not ones and zeros, any of you who've ever been on an expedition, i know you're taken something out of your pack and it did not work the way you

expected it to. and that is going to happen, you need to have things that are designed by people or at least have their input that really understand what it will feel like to be there and to use that thing. that's why we need the new people to fly. but if they all get so they don't feel like going -- i would go. i will ask one more question. a risqué question. i know your friend is a mountain climber. i am a climber myself and there are people in this audience with -- who have sumitted everest. as a woman, up there on the space station with all those men and all the things that go on, having to go to the bathroom, do you feel any different as a woman? on the mountains, it is all the same. we do not care. >> some things are just the same except like you never do that into the wind -- universal. right? [laughter] exactly, right? up in space, it is easier than

any camping trip i have ever been on in terms of the bathroom and the privacy and the clothes, i had a lot more clothes up in space that i did when i went to antarctica. same long underwear for six weeks and proud of it. it works. but we are all different and when i was up there i had a marvelous crew of guys and actually there were things that we all had to figure out that we are all very different. and i would say to them, think of it this way, when they might be exasperated about something that i might do which i was exasperated about things they did as well, and it happens that way and they would look at me and i would say think of it this way, it is only six months, if we were married it would be forever. it is really -- it is not -- i think we try to enjoy each other's differences and the physical part -- it is really pretty seamless. i never really thought that much about it. >> that is great. opening up for a couple

questions, you in the back. somebody give him a microphone. >> following up on a question that jim asked to the space station that was not answered, if you do eat correctly, get all the right nutrients, and exercise, how does one age in space after a long period of time? i guess it depends on the time. >> there are some things that are different and we are still finding out. and some of those lessons come right back down here to earth . and the osteoporosis lessons are huge. and every time one of us has some kind of surgery or something and they take something out everybody wants to see it. i will have a physical the rest of my life once per year and we are looking at some different medical issues. cataracts have been an issue for many folks through the years due to cosmic radiation up there. that helps us understand more

about eye health down here. pressure on the brain is one of the things that we are looking at where we are saying it has manifested in some changes in vision. some people have that. i didn't happen to have that. we are also looking at skeletal things. what does it mean when you get taller and shorter every time you exercise up there, every single day? in some ways, it promotes better back disk health, and in some ways it may not be the best advantage. we get to study lots of those things. when you get to do something like that, i felt like i could live forever and still feel that way. >> how are we doing on time? do we have time for questions? five more minutes? yes, you. >> thank you. i could almost empathize with your emotions when you stare at your home and the earth. but what were you thinking when you are looking to the other

side of the dark universe? what were your thoughts? i really like the music part but could you tell me what kind of sound you heard from the universe when you were up there? what kind of sound, sound you heard? >> what kind of sound you hear up there. >> when you stare into the dark universe. >> looking out into space is just beautiful. i mean it is not that much , different from down here except to me it looked deeper and was really clear that you were seeing -- it would change every single second. you would see a different part of the deep dark night sky and it was beautiful. it was in some ways harder to see the constellations because there are so many stars and bodies that you can see but we would have to turn all the lights out. and it was one of our favorite

things to do, to look at space at night and the earth as well. in terms of sound, inside the space station it is quite mechanical fan noise loud. there is a little hum, but we have done a lot to silence things. and i came back with no degradation in my hearing. which was great. like that. like that noise. >> one more question. >> in the space station, what did you miss the most from earth from a emotional and physical perspective? >> i missed my family. i am saying the family group. seriously, i missed my family a lot. in some ways, it is just a wonderful connection to feel. i had every confidence that i would be going back to see them, and that the work i was doing up there was really important and

it was worth being away from them. and i think sometimes it makes you feel very human to miss them. but i didn't actually wish to go home, in fact the day that i left i really would've loved to have stayed another six months. the prior six months had shown that everybody on earth was doing just great. there is so much work to do up up there, and so much good work, and just not enough time to do it and sleep. and there is not enough time. all of us are just constantly wishing we could have more time up there because the things that you do personally like some of the music stuff that i did to reach out, i think those things are important and the time you spend communicating with the public and making video or media projects that can be shared, that time is really important . and the experiments themselves that you either really have a hand in or maybe just enable or turn on or unpack and put in the right machine, there is all levels of participation and all

those things are invaluable opportunities. so i loved being up there and i really did not quite want to come home. >> our next presenter will be bill ingalls and he is a fabulous photographer and friend of cady, we have two photographs he has graciously donated that we will auction off to pay for this event. and cady cannot sign anything officially but she is here and if somebody bought that photo -- i bet she would sign it. but she cannot sign it beforehand. how about a giant applause for cady coleman? and ian anderson? [applause] >> more conversations at the explorers club with space travelers tomorrow night at 8:00 p.m. it includes apollo 16 astronaut charlie duke, the 10th man to

walk on the lunar surface. he was the voice at nasa's mission control when apollo 11 became the first manned space flight to land on the moon in 1969. q&a is 10 years old. to mark a decade of compelling conversations, we are featuring one interview from each year of the series over the holiday season. today, documentary filmmaker rory kennedy on last days in vietnam, in which she chronicles the evacuation of u.s. personnel from south vietnam in 1975. >> watch live coverage of the house c-span and the senate live on c-span 2.

>> last month military veterans gathered at the navy memorial for a conference honoring their service. this segment is about the tuskegee airmen with stories from those who played part in the legendary aviation unit and recount the discrimination they accounted while in the service. this was hosted by students from the nation's colleges and military economies. [applause] >> good morning, ladies and gentlemen. my name is nicole caple aspiring aviator. this morning i have the honor of introducing veterans of the first