NASA Astronaut Woody Hoburg | All-In Summit 2024

the path to becoming an astronaut is not clear the path was not clear for me either Dave fredberg this is Woody hoberg calling you from the International Space Station how do you hear me hey Woody I hear you will how are you 22 years of experience living and working in space we have learned so much and so what that sets us up to do now is to go further space is hard it just is hard it's not a forgiving place we intend to set up a sustained human presence on the moon and we're going to set up a Proving Ground to go to Mars thank you so much it is such an honor to be here I'm going to start with a a bit of History the leftand photo is one of the last moments in recorded

human history when all living humans were on Earth this was October 31st of the year 2000 at bikon or cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and the crew of expedition one launched up to the International Space Station it was just three modules at that time and they started a continuous human presence in space that continues today by 2011 the ISS was assembled and looked roughly like this humans live in the pressurized modules running front to back in this photo and the truss running left to right is unpressurized so only accessible by Space Walk ISS is solar powered on a on an average workday it consumes about 75 kilowatts it is a million pounds of mass

in low earth orbit it's about 250 miles above Earth to stay in that orbit it has to travel 5 miles every second so that works out to a 90minut orbit we see 16 Sun and 16 sunsets every day now in in 2011 when the space shuttle retired it left us our only option to continue sending humans up to the space station was a Russian so rocket that situation changed in May of 2020 SpaceX made history they launched NASA astronauts Bob bin and Doug Hurley on a test flight of the crew Dragon spacecraft and at that time the world was just two months in grappling with the co pandemic and Allin had just published

episode three Bob and Doug spent two months on the space station before they successfully returned and I didn't know it at the time but I would eventually fly on crew Dragon Endeavor which is the same capsule as Bob and Doug less than a year later I was assigned to be the pilot for the crew 6 Mission up to the ISS and so my crew from left to right on the left Russian cosmonaut Andre fidth Commander Steve Bowen myself flying as pilot and then uh Sultan aladi was the first UAE astronaut to do a long duration Mission six months on the ISS we actually scrubbed our very first launch attempt we got within 2 and a

half minutes of launch and we had an issue with the system that ignites our engines and so um we had to scrub we got all the fuel off the vehicle and 3 days lat later we were ready to try again ready for an on time launch for the instant 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 engine full power and lift off you're on your back you lift off at about one and a half [Applause] G's station pitching down R 1.7 Million by the time all the fuel burns out you're up about 4 and2 Gs and then we stage this is the second stage engine and again it starts off with only a little bit of acceleration it builds up to about 4 and 1/2 GS there you can see on your screen confirmation Dragon

separation confirmed and so 12 minutes after launch you're in space this is where we experienced weightlessness for the first time and we took about a day like 24 hours to to do all the phasing up to the ISS for me the ISS had been this place that I trained about it's kind of an abstract object off in space and actually arriving and seeing it in our thermal camera I still remember it sent chills down my spine it's pretty fun the first few days getting used to weightlessness Steve uh was our resident Chef he was famous for baking pies in space and we had a great Handover with crew five who kind of taught us all the the little tricks to living and working

in space and we got right to work um full complement of science experiments this this uh is the Japanese module you see the primary glove box mount sideways and that's American astronaut Frank Rubio working in the glove box he currently has the American record for uh duration of a single space flight now it turns out weightlessness causes heart tissue to age much faster than on Earth so we're using that as a model to study treatments for heart disease so see that top one beating looks like happy heart cells so I still remember the day that Sultan looked through the microscope and saw these Beating Heart cells just mindblowing we printed a section of human miniscus

using a biofabrication facility and in addition to all the science we have to do all of the maintenance and repairs on board so this is some of the less glamorous stuff this is fixing our toilet we have to do regular maintenance on the space suits to keep them ready for action uh try to find me in this photo this is repairing one of our CO2 scrubbing machines you see my legs poking out and this is how we get rid of trash we load up cargo vehicles and send them home to a destructive re-entry through Earth's atmosphere there's a regular Cadence of these cargo vehicles coming

to and from ISS all the time Frank and I here are capturing uh the ng19 mission with our Canadian robotic arm and birthing it to the bottom of node one and the team on the ground is always uh sending us with every new cargo vehicle fresh fresh food and it's always a special treat we also have to take care of ourselves this is Sultan on our treadmill it's mounted on the wall you run facing the floor we do like two and a half hours of exercise every day half cardio and half this resistance exercise so lots of time to listen to music and podcasts I did get to talk to fredberg for uh we had a great conversation

actually um from low earth orbit I love chess so I got a chess board sent up and we actually played ISS crew versus Mission Control we played a few games back and forth did like one or two moves every day and and we always picked out a flight controller from a specific console to make our moves on the board in Mission Control now one of my favorite parts of training uh preparing was spacewalk training it's really tactile learning to use a pressurized space suit so we have the neutral boyancy lab in Houston amazing team of divers supporting us to practice all of our procedures and I was

thrilled when I found out that I would get to do two spacewalks to in install a couple new ISS rollout solar arrays they're the vertical uh rolls you see in this photo we were getting ready for the spacewalks and two weeks prior we were flying over the Pacific Ocean and got some photos of this storm which unfortunately damaged one of the ground sites in Guam that supports the satellites that we used to talk to Mission Control so this meant that during my space walks we would not have the ability to talk to Mission Control for some large G uh chunks of time everyone rallied uh Frank and Sultan set up this kind of Command Post

in the US lab on the space station so in addition to operating the robotic arm they would hand off back and forth with mission control for those com gaps and Frank and Sultan would walk us through all of our procedures my friend Brian who will be speaking shortly actually told me that my mission would be an utter failure if I didn't get at least one space selfie so I got this as soon as I could uh Franken Sultan flew me over to the arrays and Steve and I unbolted them and then this is the commute out to the work site the array unit it's 800 lb of mass so it's weightless but you still feel

the inertia of that 800 PBS in your hands so mainly I was happy I did not drop it um after we finished the installation Steve got this shot there's two dragon spacecraft in this photo on the right side of node 2 is crew6 Dragon Endeavor what I flew up in and then up on the top is CRS 28 that's a cargo vehicle that flew the arrays up and down in the end of the robotic arm you can see the foot restraint that was holding me while I was holding the arrays so it was an amazing mission after 185 days it was time for crew 6 to come home the dragon hatch itself is closed that coming at 4:19 a.m. Central Time you see the thrusters firing as we back away and get another nice view of

is on the big loop the part burn one is complete and nominal Sultan got this view past his feet of the plasma as we re-entered our atmosphere we're basically inside a meteor so pyro Hive fired and we have good confirmation of drug shoots Two drugs and releas the drug slow us down to about 140 mph sets us up to deploy Mains safely and you can you can see here the hot spacecraft and cold parachutes in the thermal cam we landed in some of the highest Seas to date um for crew Dragon an amazing recovery team comes out rig the vehicle and they Lift Us onto the recovery ship with us still inside so you see our smiling faces here

it was like the thrill of a lifetime to get to spend six months living and working in space but there's also just nothing like returning home to the people you love thank you I want to spend just a moment uh beyond my mission and talk about where we're headed next NASA is headed back to the moon and to really put this in context I I just have to show you so I've asked fredberg for some help and he's kindly agreed come on out for you okay go on this side all the way down or stay with me for a second okay so it's a it's a convenient Quirk of the scale of the objects in our solar system that if you make the earth a

basketball this is the earth then the Moon is a tennis ball and I invite you if you don't know this answer to think about how far the Moon is from Earth in this scale if you already know that's fine but take a guess should I say the answer do uh 180,000 miles 225,000 miles 225,000 miles all right when I'm going to do very well on Jeopardy here we go when should he stop now keep going keep going keep going okay slow down there so in this scale it's 24 feet you can do the math so we we will stay here let's lose the tape measure and stay there freedberg I would not make a good aftera I was telling Woody I'm like I

can't imagine like you walk out in space and it's like there's just space that like I'm not sorry go ahead don't drop the moon either I'm sorry I just want to tell you a couple things here this is the earth I told you this the ISS where I was was I spent six months half an inch off the basketball wow that's where low earth orbit is wow and you guys probably saw Polaris Dawn launched this morning maybe a quick Round of Applause for SpaceX [Music] so they're going way higher than the is ISS way higher they're going an inch off the basketball with aremis so we already

launched Artemis in 2022 it flew uncrewed out around the moon and the Artemis 2 crew is already in training to fly Orion around the moon and come home and then emis 3 is going to be the landing on the surface of the Moon and we're going to set up shop we're going to make a Proving Ground to get to Mars and so while we have this scale Mars let's let's see if you could imagine 3/4 of a mile away in this scale 3/4 of a mile that's Mars and we're doing all this work on the moon to eventually get to Mars and then I know you guys are Forward Thinking so I just want you to imagine Beyond even Mars 34 miles 34 miles away is Uranus

[Applause] [Music] I I heard Cham laugh he love that amazing all right I think we're going to talk for a minute yeah that was great Woody thank you let's chat grab a seat right here grab a SE right here what should we do with the Earth good question um so couple quick questions what's the timeline emis 2 Artemis 3 yeah and um yeah just tell us a little bit about the timelines it's super setting we already launched emis 1 emus 2 crew is in training right now they're scheduled to fly in the fall of 2025 so in a year um they're going to test out the Orion spacecraft that flight's going to be a big deal they're

actually going to go further from Earth than humans have ever been because they go a little farther from the Moon than Apollo did wow and then uh the plan right now is for that first crude Landing in 2026 with Artemis 3 2026 yep are you in the running to be yeah every astronaut in the office is in the running to be assigned to an emis mission is it like movie Right Stuff where you guys are all super competitive with each other on like or how tell us about the Cooperative or the competitive nature of being an astronaut in the NASA program it's actually one of the most fun things so it's definitely kind of a wait in line till you're told that

you're assigned to a mission I still remember when I got the phone call assigning me to crew 6 to to do my first mission it's just one of those phone calls you'll never forget you know um it's it's actually not we all support one another and there's honestly nothing cooler than watching your friends fly to space yeah so and we all know we're eventually going to have that chance and so it's less like directly competitive than you might imagine so does the moon base kind of feel like an ISS is it like we're going to set up a facility at some point and is there that sort of long-term planning going on absolutely

and I think yeah there's a strategic plan looking way out into that Artemis campaign we talked about it being a sustained presence you know right now um I mean I think we'd all love to eventually have a permanent presence meaning that humans are always on the moon yeah at first it's not going to be that we're going to send missions uh but unlike Apollo we are really going to stay we intend to stay there for a long time and we're actually in unlike Apollo instead of going to the equator we're going to go initially to the South Pole which is scientifically really interesting and the intent is to do all the cool things Rovers moon bases like nuclear power on the moon we want to do

it all why did it take humans half a century to come back and do this again I think um did we really go to the Moon by the way we absolutely went to the moon just for the The Joe Rogan crowd I just want to make sure we're like I think I I think it's you know political will right yeah we have to decide that it's what we want to do and I think that's one of the coolest things about this time I mean who's heard of Artemis program yeah few people good good many um we could probably do a better job advertising but you know what like the cool thing about Artemis is we we truly have bipartisan support that's NASA's um

like issue over many years is can you sustain as administrations change because it takes a long time to do this stuff and right now we feel like we have real bipartisan support to go do this the people want us to go do this and sorry and so once you're on the moon there's a lot of constant resupply needed in the current model so that's part of the logistics is like how do we continually resupply yeah and I think as the missions get more complex it stship involved in 100% so right now um we actually have two providers so SpaceX is Big Starship yeah maybe you can just talk about why it's so important yeah so um the we already talked about the Orion

spacecraft which is what the astronuts are going to fly from Earth to the to a lunar orbit in but the human Landing system which is going to take them down to the surface we have two providers for that and one of those and actually the one we plan to use for that first landing is the SpaceX Starship they' uh SpaceX plans to do an uncr demo before we send our astronauts down and we're super looking forward to it so is emis um a close partnership with SpaceX that NASA relies on and SpaceX is a critical um partner to that program to that mission yeah we're using them for our for our Landing then SpaceX talks and Elon talked a lot yesterday about trying

to get Starship uncrewed over to Mars in two years and is I don't want you to necessarily aine in a negative way but like how realistic is it that there's going to be a crude Starship to Mars in four years as he claimed and is that a NASA partnership or is that we are cheering on every Starship flight I mean I've watched every single one it's we love the development so if we can get to Mars in years um that's great what NASA is specifically Contracting SpaceX on is to go to the Moon we believe the Moon is the right place to go set up a sustained presence and really practice um set up a

Proving Ground to eventually go to Mars and does all the development on Starship is in the direction of goodness it's yeah and is it um does NASA have a development program on getting to Mars and timelines do they have talk about that at all and is there is there an actual Mission yet we actually reorganized within NASA and we have an entire directorate called the Moon to Mars directorate and so um it's absolutely we see the moon as our path to Mars and that is absolutely the strategy yeah um so uh maybe you could just tell us coming a little bit closer to Earth uh the Polaris Mission it's 5 days long they just launched this

morning Elon was here and then he he actually flew in came to the summit got back on his plane went back to Florida and they got off yeah so maybe you could tell us a little bit about the mission and what these folks are going to be doing we didn't get to talk about it with Elon yesterday it's amazing and you know Jared Scott Sarah and um Jared Jared isman yeah Jared isman is the the commander I mean and he paid for the whole M yeah yeah he paid for the the whole mission I mean these guys are friends actually you know friends and family so we're rooting them on if you if you've been to Florida and see there's a different emotion when you see a crude launch than an uncrewed launch

like uncrewed launch big rocket go up cool um when you see when you have friends and family on board one of these Rockets it it's a different experience to watch the launch so um we're rooting them on they're in space right now experiencing and they're going to do a space walk they're going to do a space walk in a couple days that's right um it'll be the first commercial space walk so NASA's been doing space walks for a long time but they are making history they're going to depressurize the vehicle to vacuum so they don't have an air loock or anything they're going to take the vehicle all the way to vacuum they're all in a suit they're all going to be in suits they have to be they'll

open the hatch and um I think it's Jared and Sarah that are going to go out and do that first uh I believe uh do that first space walk so they're going to go out and be like holy I'm in space yeah I I'll say I don't know that I'm not not super up to date on the details of I'm sure they have objectives for the spacewalk it's always how it is you while you're out there there's things you want to do imagine at the ISS you walk out it's a large structure there there's there's some grounding context to it but yeah these guys are just outside of the the capsule yeah and I think another interesting you know I had the benefit on ISS I had been floating

for months actually before I did my space walk so I was used to the idea that you're now in this world where everything floats and so going outside I mean you look down and it's a 250 mile drop to the surface of Earth but it didn't feel scary or anything because I knew I was just going to stay floating next to space station where everything's falling um their experience they've only had a couple days to orient to this um so it'll be um pretty cool yeah well I mean cool for some it takes a different kind of person I don't know um really incredible guys please join me in thanking Woody for being here at the all Summit