Podcaster: Host : Phil Linden, Augie Allen, TJ Tarazevits & James Parkus ; Guest: Chris Hadfield
Title: SPEXcast : Q&A with Chris Hadfield
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : https://wiki.rit.edu/display/SPEX/SPEXcast
Twitter: @RITSPEX
Description: Phil, TJ, Augie, Drew, Chris had the opportunity to speak with Canadian astronaut, pilot and engineer Commander Chris Hadfield about his experiences in space, and asked him a few questions about the past, present, and future of space exploration.
Bio: SPEXcast is a weekly podcast diving into a variety of space topics. SPEXcast are a group of Rochester Institute of Technology students that are excited about space and space exploration
Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who was the first Canadian to walk in space.
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Transcript:
[00:00]
Commander Chris Hadfield: Hi, I’m Commander Chris Hadfield and you’re listening to SPEXcast, brought to you by RIT Space Exploration.
[00:06] (music)
[00:14]
Phil: Welcome to SPEXcast, a podcast about the science and technology of space exploration. My name is Phil and today we have an interview with astronaut Chris Hadfield. TJ, Augie, Drew, Chris and I had the opportunity to speak with Commander Hadfield via Skype just a few weeks ago. We talked to him about his experiences in space, and asked him a few questions about the past, present, and future of space exploration.
[00:41]
Phil: This is our final installment for our SPEX Summer Series and weekly episodes of SPEXcast will resume in late August. We really enjoyed doing these interviews for you guys this summer and we already have a few more lined up down the road. So, we hope you enjoy. Quick heads up: I was in a loud place, there was background noise, I muted when I could. I hope it’s not too distracting. Thanks!
[01:04]
Cmdr H: Good afternoon! How are you?
All: Great. How are you?
Cmdr H: I’m well.
Phil: My name is Phil, we met the other day. I’m the Director of outreach for RIT Space Exploration, and here in the call with us we have our student director TJ…
TJ: Hello.
Phil: SPEX member Chris…
Chris:Hello.
Cmdr H: Hello Chris.
Phil: Our High Altitude Balloon team lead, Drew…
Cmdr H: Hello Drew, you don’t look high altitude, you have an NBL shirt on.
All: (laughter)
Phil: And alumni for RIT SPEX, Augie.
Augie: Afternoon.
Cmdr H: Hello Augie, good afternoon. Nice to see all of you face-to-face.
Phil: In this podcast we talk about everything space exploration, and today we were hoping to talk to you about your experiences as a test pilot, as an astronaut, and the space industry in general.
Cmdr H: Hi. My name is Chris Hadfield. I’m a pilot, a fighter pilot, a test pilot, I was a colonol in the Air Force, I was an astronaut for 21 years, flew in space 3 times – Space Shuttle twice, Soyuz once, Russian Space Station – and then helped build and commanded the International Space Station. Nice to be joining you.
[02:22]
TJ: You visited Mir and the ISS, a completely Russian-built space station and an international collaboration. What did you find different about each space station, from their design to how it was run, and what was the same?
Cmdr H: The big difference between Mir, which was the biggest and most Russian space station – or Soviet space station – ever built, and the one that’s up there right now, the International Space station… The biggest difference is size and power. The International Space Station has far more solar arrays, so we generate ten times… I don’t even know the right number, but a lot more electricity. And then the internal volume is huge. There’s a lot more space in the International Space Station. Mir would be like a small little addition onto the back of the international station. But fundamentally, they’re pretty similar. It’s a bunch of pieces that all had to fit on a rocket. So each one has to fit on a rail car or in the back of a Space Shuttle or on top of a Soyuz or Proton or something rocket, so that limits the length and diameter of everything. And then once you get them up there, you have to bolt them all together and then it’s a question of how many do you have and how much power do they have. And the International Space Station is just bigger and had a lot more vehicles coming to it. But once you’re on board, it’s still the same sort of serene, quietly busy, peaceful, weightless laboratory environment. It’s kind of a really enviable place to get to, no matter how hard it is to construct or travel.
[03:59]
Drew: So on that note, in terms of space stations, do you think the future of space stations and human habitation in space is going to be something modular like those two space stations or something more like SkyLab?
Cmdr H: The real driver to almost anything is the reality of how all the pieces got there. I mean, you could make your house out of one solid piece of plastic, right? You could 3D print your house. But it would be really complicated and it makes a lot more sense to build your house out of pieces that are all delivered. Some of them are pre-fab because you might have a truck, but you can’t have a pre-fab piece of your house that’s 80×80 because it couldn’t go down the road. It’s exactly the same for a space station. The biggest piece can only be as big as the vehicle that brought it there. So it almost always has to be modular. Unless we completely reinvent rockets, so that you could maybe put a little box of anti-gravity underneath something that you could build on Earth and then just lift it up into orbit, but that doesn’t exist. So I think that for the foreseeable future, space stations – whether they’re orbiting the Earth or orbiting the Moon or on the surface of the Moon, or orbiting Mars or on the surface of Mars – they’re all gonna go up one big lump at a time. And when they get there we’ll start bolting them together to make a steadily increasing size of habitable volume in one of those places.
[05:30]
Augie: Very cool. So along the same lines but regarding spacecraft – as a test pilot, would you feel comfortable riding aboard a vehicle that is fully autonomous and had no manual controls whatsoever? Or maybe just a few “abort” kind of controls? And do you think that pilots themselves are going to be necessary in the future?
Cmdr H: Well, it’s a real tradeoff of risk versus benefit. I feel completely comfortable on a moving sidewalk, which is an autonomous vehicle that moves me from one place to another with no driver. But I look at it and I recognize that the speed’s aren’t too high and if tall the mechanisms suddenly fail it may knock me over but it probably won’t hurt me. Same think with elevators. They’re pretty much autonomous, nobody’s operating them. There are little trains in some airports in some places where you get on and there’s no driver. They’re automated when they go from place to place. But as the complexity goes up – there are no truly autonomous complicated vehicles yet. None. Not even a tricycle. All of them until this point need some kind of human help. We’re talking about autonomous cars but we’re a long way from truly autonomous cars. Under specific applications, just like with a tram car or moving sidewalk, an autonomous car works great. But under the complexity of reality, it’s far more nuanced and difficult. And when you put in the third dimension, it gets even harder. So it’s a real question of how much risk do you want to take versus the cost and the complexity of the thing you want to build.
Cmdr H: When my dad was training to be an airline pilot in 1958-59, everybody was telling him “Don’t do that, within 10 years we won’t have pilots in airplanes anymore.” And here it is in 2016 and the minimum number of pilots you can have in any decent sized airliner is two. Just for safety. And when Sully Sullenberger took off out of New York and made all of those clever, unpredictable but absolutely necessary human decisions to land his airplane in the Hudson… If there had been a computer in charge, all of those hundreds of people would have been killed. But because there was somebody on board, he saved the day. So it’s a trade-off.
Cmdr H: You asked me if I’d be comfortable – I’d want to see the moving sidewalk. I’d want to see the tram car. I’d want to see what the risks are. Right now I’m not comfortable because I don’t know what the risks are or what the benefits are. And just because some engineer thinks it’s going to be simpler doesn’t mean that it’s overall better or more capable or in fact safer.
[08:05]
Phil : Right now a lot of fighter planes are fly-by-wire. Is there a very big step between having hands off the controls and having a computer interpret a pilot’s controls? Is the decision-making the difference between you being comfortable and not?
Cmdr H:All fly-by-wire means… It’s really kind of the opposite. It’s fly-by-computer. When you pull back on the stick on a little simple aircraft it actually moves wires and that moves the control surfaces. When I pull back on the stick in an F18 it tells the computer “this is what the pilot is doing and so therefore based on this speed and altitude and density and everything else, move the control surfaces this much.” So from the pilot’s point of view it’s sort of transparent; the airplane is an extension of yourself doing what you’re asking it to do. If you automate that then what’s the point? Who are you automating it for? Vehicles serve different purposes. A fighter aircraft is therefore rapid reaction and nuanced flexibility in doing what it needs to do. It’s not a drone. If a drone does it better, send a drone. But if you’re in an environment with very complicated rules of the engagement or where there is a subtlety to what is happening or where it’s a really difficult visual environment to be able to make a good conclusion in, then you probably want the cunning and the reactive nature of the human mind. But, I mean, I’m an engineer and a pilot and an astronaut. Technology is what enables us to do almost everything. I’m all for it. But often the people that think automation is going to work are not the people who have actually seen the environment where they are designing it for. They make incorrect assumptions and so it’s going to be a balance. Eventually of course the automation will increase and it ought to. But the point of doing it all is human. Robots don’t care. They can tell you what temperature it is but they don’t care what temperature it is. We’re the only things that care therefore it’s our decision and our interpretation that, at the end, really matters.
[10:21]
T.J.: Very interesting. So Boeing and SpaceX are both working on the next generation of American crewed vehicles. As a veteran of two shuttle launches and a Soyuz launch, how do you compare these new vehicles of capsule design to what you’ve flown on previously?
Cmdr. H: You know, when you look back at early airplanes like the Wright Flyer or what Blériot flew across the English Channel or what McCurdy flew at Baddeck in Canada, those airplanes were ridiculous. They were stupid looking. They were terrible design. I mean, you look at those early airplanes and you think “what are they thinking? The tail’s on the wrong side and wing warping, what a stupid idea.” It’s really easy, in retrospect, to judge a design. But eventually airplanes – we started seeing what is the actual natural shape for an airplane? What makes sense? And if you look at a Dreamliner; you know, the Boeing 787, that is one exquisitely designed airplane where they’ve traded off everything and done it millions and millions of times to come up with – basically 110 years of evolution in aircraft design to come out with that at the other end. In space flight we’re still really early. We’re still like Wright brothers and Blériot, we’re even the Montgolfier, we’re just figuring it out. We’re still determining what is the natural shape for a spaceship. It’s partially driven by engines but the natural shape for a ship that launches through the atmosphere on a rocket and then comes back into the atmosphere using friction to slow down the natural shape is a capsule. It’s the logical shape. It’s what we used initially, sort of, it’s what the Russians have used all along with a short experiment into Buran, which was like a shuttle knockoff and it is what the Americans have used almost exclusively apart from Shuttle. Shuttle was immensely capable, as was the Wright Flyer. But it had a lot of flaws. Two crews died, we killed a lot of people with the space shuttle and we lost two vehicles and the cost of maintaining it was outlandish, partially because of the design of it. I think going back to an advance capsule shape, like SpaceX has been using with their Dragon capsule and soon with their crewed, with people on board the Dragon and then what Boeing’s building as well. That’s the natural shape for a spaceship. At least one to come in and out of an atmosphere. Once you’re in orbit you can look like anything you want. But for an atmospheric entry vehicle the capsule, at least at this point, it’s the natural, evolved shape for a spaceship.
[13:04]
T.J.:Now do you still see a place in lifted bodies? Dream Chaser didn’t win a Commercial Crew contract but their smaller vehicle is in the new round of Commercial Cargo and they’re working on development. Do you still think there is a place for winged vehicles in space flight?
Cmdr. H:Well there is a place for every vehicle if you have enough money. I mean we could have a thousand different designs and be trying them all out. But the real question is “how many can you afford?” and “how purposeful can you be?” We could have cars that have twelve wheels and eleven and ten and nine and three and right down to two. You could probably design a unicycle car. But people are pretty much settled on four because it is kinda the practical design. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for a three wheeled car or a two wheeled car. It’s just what’s the most practical for the amount of money you want to spend for the job you are trying to do. And winged vehicles, you only really need wings at landing. Maybe a little bit for entry. So the rest of the time they’re just weight and aerodynamic drag and a thermal problem and a damage problem. They have some benefits and some disadvantages. If you’ve got unlimited money, let’s build everything. But if you can only build one spaceship, I wouldn’t put wings on it.
T.J.: Awesome answer.
[14:22]
Chris: NASA has plans to decommission the International Space Station in 2024, which is a little less than a decade from now.
Cmdr. H:No they don’t actually. The space station is design until 2028, probably 2030. It’s only the current level of political agreement that takes it as far as 2024 but nobody’s planning on deorbiting it in 2024.
Chris: So 2028, 2030, which is a decade/12 years; just following those numbers, what are your opinions on a potential decommission of the International Space Station? Has it run its course and is it ready to be decommissioned? And if so, what do you think the future of space habitation holds for us?
Cmdr. H: All machines eventually break and all equipment eventually wears out and when you’re building a spaceship you have to launch and leave. You launch something and you may not be able to get to that joint or that pump or that fan for twenty years or twenty five years. So when you design it, you have to say what is the life, how much grease am I going to put in there, how good of bushings and bearings and how hard of steel and all the rest of it and you have a design life and a mean time between failure that you try to guess at. And when we originally designed the space station we said 2028. And everything was sort of built to last until 2028. The first piece was launched in ’98. So it will be thirty years old and bet none of you five guys is driving a thirty-year old car at least not on a regular basis anyway. Machinery gets old. When you ask if the space station is going to be ready to be decommissioned, it isn’t now. I mean parts of it are only a few months old. It just got there. We work a little bit to keep everything running but it’s running great. You know, touch wood (knocking sound), it’s doing great. But by 2024, 2028, 2030, guaranteed, stuff’s going to be breaking more often. It’s going to become more like an old car, old house, old whatever. Old body. It takes more maintenance and you need to then put more time into fixing it until eventually, if you just extrapolate that, all we would ever do is fix the space station. We’d never do any science at all. Well we want to run the two hundred experiments on board. You have to trade off crew time versus the time it takes to fix it (repeat at 16:40) and at some point say “okay, just like the old car, it’s time to retire it and move on to something else.” That estimate, as you say, is a little over a decade away probably. I think it’s worth mentioning that Russia and the United States both just signed a contract to extend the space station to at least 2024. It’s pretty hard right now to find things Russia and the United States are agreeing to for at least a decade in the future. That’s pretty symbolic as well as significant I think. But eventually of course, space station will wear out just like everything and then we’ll do with it what we do with all big space equipment. We’ll drive it into an uninhabited part of the world. Just fire its engines so it falls down; normally the south Pacific because you have almost no chance of hitting anything valuable, hitting anybody.
Cmdr. H: But, where to go next, I think was the last part of your question, Chris. What do we do next? I think we’ll have learned enough from the space station to hopefully turn Earth orbit over to commercial usage. That’s what Elon Musk is working on. It’s what Boeing is working on, it’s what Bigelow is working on. How can you build an infrastructure and enough knowledge and communication and safety that maybe you can start commercially financing access to low earth orbit. Just like the huge amount that was put into rail travel originally. Before it became privately profitable. Or air travel there were huge amount invested through the First World War, Second Word War, NACA, all that stuff. Until then it became profitable. Hopefully by 2028, 2030 we’ll be able to do that in low earth orbit. And it will free up the governments, the people that can afford to have some vision long term and not have to answer to their shareholders, to go further. Obviously, the next destination is the moon. It’s only three days away and we’ve just barely visited there, you know, six times. We’ve just kicked around a little bit of dirt in a tiny little section a generation ago. It’s a wonderful observatory of the earth. I would say, look at what we did in Antarctica for the last hundred and ten years and that’s what we’re going to do on the moon. Initially we can just get there. Then we can maybe stay there for the good season. And then we can start to stay there for maybe the whole winter. Until now, almost one hundred of us live not just in Antarctica but at the South Pole year round. Which would have been crazy not very long ago but now we can do it. It’s teaching us about the background radiation of the universe and the origins of time and the universe itself and Earth’s history and Earth’s climate. We use Antarctica as a tremendous observatory and scientific station. I think that’s going to happen on the moon for the next, whatever, I don’t know, fifty years. It depends how fast we invent things. But to me that’s the logical progression. Probe everywhere, start settling on the space station, use it up until that vehicle is about done, and then go to the next lily pad in the pond, which is the moon. And then eventually we’ll invent and test and know enough that we can go further. Maybe to asteroids maybe to the moons of Mars, maybe even Mars itself. No big rush, but eventually we’ll get there.
Chris: Awesome, thank you.
[19:57]
Phil: Do you think after we have the capability of settling on the moon or elsewhere that there are a place for space stations? Right now we are only doing science on the space station but if we’re doing science on the moon or some other base, do you think there is still a purpose for purely orbiting habitation?
Cmdr. H: Well it’s sort of like saying “is there a place for laboratories?” And most people would say, “No. I don’t work in a laboratory. What do laboratories do? Why don’t we just have one?” Most people, it’s not part of their live and they have no idea but of course there are thousands and thousands of laboratories operating on the surface of the world all the time and the reason we have a laboratory normally it to control a set of conditions so that we can draw accurate scientific conclusions. Earth orbit offers us an environment to do things in that you can’t do on the surface. Part of that can be commercialized. But the cost of launch has been too high. To try and do zero-g manufacturing. You can do some stuff up there you can’t do on earth. But if it costs too much then no one is going to do it. It’s not profitable. But what SpaceX has done recently with landing their first stage rocket, and they’re planning on launching a used rocket in October. I went to the SpaceX plant last week and had a look at it. Those engines are sitting there. All they had to do is clean all the soot off them. It’s incredible. As soon as they have done enough iterations, they’re doing it really cleverly, that we can actually start reusing first stage rockets, then a lot of business people are going to go “Hey! Two orders of magnitude cheaper? That appeals to me.” I can suddenly start using the environment up there to do whatever; grow crystals, make ball bearings, create things that you can’t create on Earth. That’s the time to open it up to free enterprise. Don’t let engineers from the military like me or government people dictate what this new environment should be used for. Let them take advantage of the opportunities and capabilities that have been built by all of these years of investment. So my answer is “yeah, of course there will be.” It might just be partially tourism. Some people want to go up there for a ride. I mean, what’s the point of the Taj Mahal? The Taj Mahal has no use at all. But it bring in a million people a year and a huge financial endeavor just so people can go look. Imagine how many people, if you get the price down low enough; get Ryanair going to space or something. People want to go have a look. Why not? It’s not up to the six of us to predict the market that’s going to exist.
Phil: Thank you very much. We have one last question, and this is actually mine. I want to know what are key features of a space suit for you? When you were at the space station, you did some EVAs. I read about a mishap that happened where you ended up having to vent some oxygen to space and that’s super scary. In sci. fi. they always depict, like The Martian or Interstellar, these really form fitting suits but now a days the suits are really bulky. I would want a buffer between me and space I was wondering what your thoughts would be.
Cmdr. H: To do a spacewalk, it’s really not a spacewalk of course. You’re going out alone into the universe in a one-person spaceship is really what it is. It’s not a suit, it’s a one-person spaceship. And if you watch the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey you’ll see Dave going outside and his looks like a little bubble. It’s got some robot arms on the front and he sits there and looks out the window and it’s got all the life support equipment in there. But it’s more like a little minivan. Really it’s a one-person spaceship. But if you shrink that down to its absolute simplest, down to just the suit that protects you, then what you end up with is a hull around your body that somehow keeps the pressure in and then a cooling system and an air purification system and a communication system and a propulsion system, all of that has to be somehow part of your spacesuit. Way down the list is comfort and fashion. But when you’re designing a spacesuit for a movie then way way up the list is comfort and fashion and they’re not really keeping anybody alive at all. Hopefully the designs will continue to get better. The number one thing is keeping the astronaut alive and allowing them to do the job out there. So really focusing on the parts of it like the gloves have to be very ductile and give you a lot of tactility. And it has to be tough and redundant and simple all those other things. They are not comfortable, they’re bulky, they make your rear end look big but they are the only way we can do spacewalks and spacewalking is the coolest thing that I can imagine. I’ve done all those other things we said in the introduction but all five of you would love to go for a spacewalk. You wouldn’t be thinking about that your suit didn’t look like a movie when you’re out there.
[25:19]
Phil: Thank you! I can’t thank you enough commander Hadfield. This has been an amazing experience. Thank you so much for your time.
Cmdr. H: Thank you Augie and Drew and Chris and Tom and Phil. Thanks very much. It’s nice to join all of you. Thanks for making this work so smoothly. That’s a pretty cool technological achievement in itself.
All: (various thanks)
[25:40]
(music)
Phil: That concludes episode 18, our interview with Chris Hadfield and our SPEX Summer Series. We hope you have as much fun as we did making this and don’t forget to tell us what you think. We are open on Twitter at RITSPEX and by email at SPEXcast(at)gmail.com. You can also find RIT Space Exploration on Facebook at facebook(dot)com/ritspex and in the coming weeks you can look forward to a new episode in September with Tory Bruno, president and CEO of the United Launch Alliance. And when Augie Allan comes back from the SmallSat conference in Utah he’s going to tell us all about it. What he saw firsthand. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Our music is by Kevin Hartnell. We’ll see you next week.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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