This is Later with Lee Matthews The Lee Matthews Podcast More what You Hear Weekday
Afternoon's on the Drive. Doctor Katie Coleman is a former NASA astronaut. You
know, I think once an astronaut, always an astronaut. I don't know
if there's such a thing as being a former astronaut, but anyway, also
Air Force colonel with more. Yeah, I mean, you've done something pretty
significant. I think you'll it'll always be with you for crying out loud,
well, you know, I mean, the great news is that there are
you know, there's a bunch of us that are retired now, and it's
important to know whether I'm speaking for the agency or not, you know that
I still work there. And at the same time, I will tell you
that once you're a part of that mission, you never start stop being a
part of that mission. I don't think so. I've got a dear friend
works down at Johnson and he works in the telemetry and it's it's such a
big part of him that I don't think he will ever let go of that.
He will always work in some capacity, whether consulting or maybe working for
a contractor even though he's almost retirement age exactly, and getting data up and
down and voice up and down. Yeah, I mean everybody takes it for
granted until it doesn't work, and then they all want your friend. Okay.
He got me through a calculus one in college and then I finally threw
in the towel and he went on from there. But that's he was my
tutor. He was still one of my best friends. Anyway. I'm delighted
to have him along. Delighted to have you along. Doctor Katie Coleman,
a subject of the new documentary The Long The Longest Goodbye in theaters on Amazon
and Apple TV. We're going to Mars, doctor Katie. It's exciting,
Well, it really is so exciting, and it's hard to understand that it's
going to happen. It's not going to be, you know, next week,
it's not going to be next year. And having lived up on the
space station and thinking about the things that actually didn't work, which is our
job, you know, I just thought, you know, we're not going
to Mars because we're not ready yet. Because there's a lot of details,
and this movie is pretty cool because it really addresses the human part of those
details. Some of the challenges that we are facing with these human details,
what are they? Well, I think that this movie The Space The Longest
Goodbye, which by the way, is going to start streaming on PBS today.
So I'm very excited about that, mostly because the more people that get
to make them to see this movie, I think it's the better because everybody's
curious about going to Mars, and it's so important to realize that. I
mean, this movie puts the human into human spaceflight. You know, we
keep hearing like launches go, you know, and so many of them all
the time, how many you know one, but not that many of them
have humans on them. And when you have humans on there, it's different.
It's harder because you need to make it as safe as we can,
which takes time, it takes money, it takes really innovative engineering. And
so this movie talks about what do we need to do to take care of
the humans once we actually have them on that spacecraft and on the space station.
We're practicing that right now, checking out some of the techniques or tools
that psychologically could help us have a better you know, have a better mission
and be more present for our mission. The more I look into what NASA
does and how they do. Doctor Katie Coleman's with us. She is an
astronaut Air Force kernel too and subject of space The Longest Goodbye streaming on PBS,
also on Amazon and Apple TV. The more I look into it,
the more I realize very little is changed in the processing anyway. Since Orville
and Wilbur took their first flight, they studied, they took copious notes,
they made improvements, and it wasn't an overnight process. It never is.
But you learn so much every day. You're learning ten times more than you
knew the day before, absolutely, you know. I mean, for example,
you know some of the very human things up there. I mean,
if you think about what your day is like, you get up in the
morning, you know, you go to work, and you come home,
and what are what are the things that kind of really matter to you that
make you feel just kind of comforted a bit, you know, it's when
you can explain your day. For some people, everybody's different, right For
me, it's when I can explain my data, my husband or my girlfriends
or whatever, you know, So having that communication is important. And for
some people it's you know, I want to sit down and I've been working
so hard all day and I just want to watch TV if that's not an
old fashioned thing to say, or listen to my favorite, my favorite you
know podcast. And and so we actually some of the things we're experimenting with
is what makes people, what makes people, you know, feel like they've
got what they need to kind of feel centered. And we send shows everything
from documentaries to I mean, whatever they want to watch in their quote unquote
free time, That's what we send up there, and have these really marvelous
agreements with the media companies to do that. And you know, things that
we can we pick things that we can watch together, you know, all
those kinds of things we build in the build to communicate with our families by
phone. I talked to mine every day of the one hundred and fifty nine
that I was up there, except for three and also for US video conferences
once a week or so. But what this movie addresses is one of the
things that's going to be hard about. That is, what if every time
you come home and you want to tell your spouse how you or your sweetheart
how your day was, you say that, and then twenty minutes later they
hear it, and then twenty minutes later you hear what they said to say
back. That's going to be really hard. And so there's some really creative
and kind of wild ideas in this film that are about how can we make
people feel like they've got what they need. This is doctor Katie Coleman,
astronaut with NASA, featured in Space The Longest Goodbye. It's about what we're
doing and how we're working on the trip to Mars as a nation and with
NASA. One of the I think best written novels about this, although it
was fiction, was Andy Weers, The Martian. He did a lot of
homework about what would have to be done and the kinds of things that would
have to be done, and I know a lot of it was kind of
made up. A lot of it was kind of a but that's kind of
what you're doing, isn't it? For? How do you deal with food,
how do you deal with sanitation? And like you said, how do
you deal with long periods of isolation? Exactly? And I understand that Andy
had a lot of things a lot of things right. And what I love
about media, whether it's a book or a documentary, is that it has
the power for people to understand more about the world of space exploration, and
it lets them realize that it might be them. And the cool thing that
I think about the Martian is that book came out and NASA's applications tripled.
So we were like when I applied back in the early nineties, you know,
two thousand or so, by the you know, early today, it
came up to about six thousand. That book came out and eighteen thousand people
raised their hands and said they wanted to be part of the NASA team.
And I think it shows you the very power of that media. And he
knows that I say this. The only thing that I think would make that
movie more perfect, because it was really amazing, is if the hero or
the heroine was a woman in that case, and that we still don't see.
But fiction does allow us to have that kind of representation. And in
this case, in the case of The Longest Goodbye Space, the Longest Goodbye,
you get to meet me, and you get to meet Caleb Barron,
an active NASA astronaut, who were very different from each other. And I've
learned some amazing things and one of the coolest things, I mean, she's
she's a former submariner, sub mariner, I guess they would say. And
she's just really, really neat. And there's a scene in the movie that
is kind of that is scary. Okay, if I was up in space,
i'd be And the question came to her in a panel, Hey,
what were you thinking when this situation happened? That was like, okay,
let's get to the rescue craft. And her response was, okay, you
know, we did everything we needed to do and then you know, so
we're in the rescue craft, we're all safe and as a crew, or
at least she spoke for herself, she said, we just got up here.
Are we going to have to go home? Now here? This s
very amazing thing happens and she's worried about going home, And that I think
is true of a lot of us, is that we really trust the people
on the ground have made it as safe as it can be, not going
to be safe, and it's really we love the steps we're taking and can't
wait to take more. Well, it's consistent with some of the conversations I've
read with Jim Lovell and Apollo thirteen. They just worked the problem, They
kept focused on what they got to do, to get through it and didn't
concentrate on the emotion of it at all. And yeah, even though their
mention was a failure, I mean, probably the most successful failure of all
time. I agree. And actually I know this is for Oklahoma City.
They have an amazing, amazing museum there where they're all these awesome space and
aviation stories and I urge people to go and listen to those stories because the
heart of the people never changes and you'll see some of that going all the
way back to Wiley Post. In fact, Doctor Katie Coleman, we could
talk for hours, I know, but we'll have to watch your documentary streaming
on PBS and on Amazon and Apple TV. The Longest Good Space colon,
the longest Goodbye out Now. We thank you for joining us. Thank you
very much, Leach. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the
Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from
five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation