My 2nd Favorite Astronaut - Steve Swanson
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Tosh Show. Tosh Show. Tosh Show for show.

Time to do another episode of Toss Show. If only there were a way to speed this up. Eddie? Yep. Play me some of that Benny Hill music I love so much. ... ... ... ... ...

Oh, God. Say what you want, Eddie. The comedy of Benny Hill holds up. Timeless. I mean, the guy just got it. How was your week, Eddie? It was pretty good. How about you? Good. You went to Omaha, Nebraska? Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha? Somewhere in middle America. That's right.

Counting crows, get ready to go. Oh, man, the counting crows. Oh, I love them. I love the counting crows. Actually, I didn't. I actually didn't like them. Did you like the counting crows? Okay, what about the black crows? Black crows I pretended like I liked because they were cool, but I didn't really like them.

I didn't really like that music. Those are the crows. Cheryl. Cheryl Crow. Probably the best crow. Yeah, and Cheryl I like. Except for when she dated that alt-right fuckhead. You know who I'm talking about? I do not, but I do. Kid Rock. Oh, did they? I forgot about that. You forgot about Cheryl Crow and Kid Rock's romance? Mike. She's got to hate that. She's got to hate that she used to let that monster. Anyway. Anyway.

I imagine their conversations were deep. Tons of conspiracy theories. He's a big anti-vaxxer, all that nonsense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I'm a big conspiracy nut.

They global warming now in my day, we just called it seasons. You know how you fight a climate change, Eddie? How here's how you fight it. Okay. Everyone in the country open up their doors, turn your AC on full blast. Boom. Boom.

Guarantee we drop the temperature a degree or two. We're back on track. What other conspiracy theories do you believe in, Ed? I don't believe in any of them. You don't? No. Oh, man. You're brainwashed, you sheep. I'm a sheeple. Part of the sheeple. The aliens built the pyramids? Nope. Nope.

No, they didn't do that. That was slaves. All right. I'm positive. Right? It was slaves that built the pyramid. It wasn't aliens. 100%. Okay. 9-11 was an inside job. Nope. Saudis. That's what I think. Yeah. That's what you think? Good. I think so. Chemtrails are a secret government weapon. Chemtrails. Uh-uh.

No, that one I actually know for fact. That's just old mufflers, jet mufflers. They're not as good. Some people think sports are scripted. Yeah, and those are people whose teams suck. Sports aren't fixed. You're just a Browns fan. I mean, come on. Next you're going to tell me that the moon landing...

wasn't real. Well, I have it on good authority from today's guest that you're an idiot. Enjoy.

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My guest today has spent more than six months in space and has over 11 million NASA frequent flyer miles. Please welcome astronaut Steve Swanson. Now, am I supposed to say thank you for your service or salute you or anything? Nothing like that. No, no. Opposite way around for me because I feel the U.S. taxpayer paid for my trips. And so I owe people for that, honestly. You get overtime up there? Yeah.

I get $2 extra because we do our per diem. We fill out a travel form for low Earth orbit, right? But everything is covered except for miscellaneous, which is $2 a day. So you get $2 a day. What are you spending on up there? A pay-per-view? Do people say thank you for what you've done? They do. They do. But I just like – I didn't suffer. So – I mean –

I don't know. Six months in space sounds like it, that's pretty taxing. It was. It was taxing. It's taxing on the body and also psychologically it's taxing. At the same time, I had a lot of fun. So it's one of those give and take kind of things. You think you could handle prison now? Ha ha ha ha ha.

Not far off. I was stuck with a bunch of guys in a small can for a while. Yeah, exactly. But no, we had a good time together. All right. I'm going to get into all of it. Steve, start with the first one. Do you believe in ghosts? I heard that was a question coming, so I would like you to find ghosts for me first. Well...

I'm a scientist, so I'm trying to figure out exactly where we're going on this actual question here. You know, souls. Humans after death. Right. That's a good question. Personally, I have not experienced that.

However, we had an incident at the house, which is a couple of cases where it was interesting. I'll put it that way. My daughter, who is probably this time meeting around like four, was the first time, comes down one morning and says, Uncle Jeff talked to me last night. And he had this whole conversation. He tells us in great detail about what happened. We get the phone call then a couple hours later. He died that night.

Right. Exactly. Like, whoa, okay. Two years later, it happens again. How old was she? About four or five-ish. Two years later. You got to get rid of that kid. Well, she's like 35 now. I know, but I'm just saying at four, you had your chance. It happens again with her great-grandmother. Same thing. And then the great-grandmother was passed away? Yeah, passed away also. How far after the conversation? Like that night, I mean, that night again. Your daughter's a murderer. I know.

With your mind, yes, exactly. Just hope she never has a dream where she's talking to you. You're like, oh, no, the clock is ticking. Exactly. All right, so that's your experience with it. So you believe there's something out there, some communication? There's something, but I can't define what that is or anything like that.

Did you want to be an astronaut as a child? No. When was the first time you got that itch? When I was just graduating with my master's at 25. Okay. Yeah. You were born in Syracuse, New York and became an astronaut. That's a pretty great journey. Because what I know of Syracuse... I lived there six months.

Six months. And then you moved out to Denver or Colorado? No, I was in Arizona. I moved around a lot growing up. So I think I went to 12 different schools by the time I graduated. My dad just had different jobs and we moved a lot. Same here. Anyways, it was good because I got to learn how to socialize pretty well. As an engineer, it wasn't my strength.

And you never got a say in when you were moving. Oh, no, no. When you hear of these kids nowadays, we're like, their parents are like, well, I don't want to pull them from his school, so we're just going to figure a way. It's like, my parents never gave two thoughts until we're moving next week. Exactly. I went to Italy, Venezuela, and France. Oh, you had good moves. Yeah, well, then I went to Pennsylvania. Uh-huh.

Some parts of Pennsylvania are wonderful. It was Jiri Iri, Mistake by the Lake. It was the name for it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's tough. Yeah. No, but there was pros and cons to everything, though. You went to school at FAU. That was my master's, right. So undergraduate was University of Colorado. What do you think of Deion Sanders? Um...

That's a really good question. I do like what he's done with the football program in the sense he can recruit better than probably anybody else. That sure was fun the first four games last year. Wasn't it? Yes, it was great. Oh, that was fun. I enjoyed it tremendously, but then reality set in. And then Texas A&M.

Which, by the way, that city, I enjoy it. One of my best shows was at Texas A&M. Really? Good. Yeah. It's a fun little town. Did you enjoy that or no? Yeah. So my wife and I spent a year up there. I got a fellowship out of NASA to go live and do all my studies for my PhD there. And so we did that. And it was really great, actually, for us because, one, it was a nice small town. And it worked out well for us because we had small kids at the time and we could get a babysitter really cheap. And

all the bars were used to having college students. So they would have really early times, like from six to nine, they would be 50 cent drinks or something like that. So we'd go out then, get a dinner, get some drinks and go to a movie after that. And we'd come home, we'd spend like 30 bucks on the whole night. You know, that was wonderful for us. Did you ever live in Titusville, Florida? Never lived there. Visited many times. Did you ever eat at Dixie Crossroads? Yes, I did. You did? Yes. How many rock shrimp did you go with? I think like 18, I think it was. Oh,

Oh, no, no. I think you go two dozen, four dozen are all you can eat. Let me tell you something about Rockstrom. It's the shrimp that thinks it's a lobster. I'm going to tell you why I got upset with astronauts as a child, because when launches would get scrubbed, when you lived in Titusville—

I was a surfer, and we would go out to Playland Beach. Sure, right, and they would close it, right? They closed the beach when a shuttle was on the launch pad. But then if they scrubbed a launch for weather or a million other reasons, it would just stay closed. And sometimes they would sit out there for a long time, and, oh, I would fume at you guys. I mean, just get in there and go. Yeah.

Get out of here. You were just an engineer at NASA. You didn't plan to be an astronaut, or did you plan? I started trying when I was 25. Okay. What does trying mean? Applied. And then I work on, okay, I look to see what other people who become astronauts have done, and then try to work your resume to kind of match up that as best you can. Now, my sister worked at NASA. She was an engineer. My sister was there in the late 80s, early 90s. She was like the only female. And then she...

started having children and decided to stay at home and homeschool all of them. That's, that's, listen, she, my dad also worked at NASA, uh, for a while, but human resources, nothing cool. By the way, on behalf of every father out there that has a job that their kid isn't impressed with, I'd like to say, fuck you. Uh,

You know, they could probably never like, oh, we know your dad's an astronaut. Did your kids use that all the time? No, because in the school where they went, there was other kids whose dads were astronauts or moms were astronauts.

So it was like, it was a run of the mill thing. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So you applied when you're 25 years old, how long of a process from applying? 12 years. 12 years. Were you immediately accepted though at 25? Oh no, no. It didn't get accepted at all right away. I got the rejection letter, which is normal. Right. Okay. And then, and I got another job working software. I was like,

master's in computer science. So I started working in software. But then NASA calls up about, I don't know, nine months later and says, hey, you know, we don't have a national job for you, but we have another job for you. And so I took that one, which actually had been a really good job for me. It was software. Started off with working on an aircraft called a shuttle training aircraft, an airborne simulator of the shuttle. And it was a really cool vehicle. I mean, it was a Gulfstream G2. So it was like a small business jet kind of thing, but we've highly modified to fly like the shuttle. And

in all computer control kind of aspect. Have you been a pilot your whole life? Not yet. This is my first jump into operational world, and I realized I really like the operational world. What the hell's going on with Boeing, by the way? Yeah.

You got a fix for them? Yeah. I've been keeping updated a little bit on that, talking to some people, but it's just, it's not good. It's kind of a shit show, honestly. Yep. Your first mission into space was what year? 2007. The first time you're taken off...

Were you at any point like, oh, no? Yeah. So, yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. So every time we got in that vehicle, as you pointed with the aborts, right? So I assumed I was not taking off that day. Okay. And so you get in and so they're like, all right. And you're going through that like standard stuff like it was a training day. I know, big deal. But then with two minutes to go, everything now is working fine. And they tell you to close and lock your visor and turn on your O2. And that means like, holy crap. Yeah.

we could be going today, you know? And that's when I got nervous. Cause then you really think, you know, did I make the best decisions in life here? Did you ever do a night launch? Uh, yeah. Night launches. I, as a kid, that was when I was like, okay, I'm, I'm wildly impressed because when, when a night launch, even if you were 30 miles away, I mean, even if you were Cocoa beach or wherever it was, it was daylight, it was daylight for, you know, the,

the first 15 seconds of that launch. You know, we don't get to see that good view though. Are you just, are you looking out? Well, so yeah, so the first time I was really trying to pay attention and really do my job. Second time, I didn't care so much. But so there's a window right above me, like here, and I have a, so I had a mirror on my hand so I could watch. And you know how that big, you know, vapor cloud comes at the beginning before because they're trying to put the water suppression on the system so you don't damage the launch pad.

And so I could watch that. I was watching that whole thing and watching the, then I watched Injun's light and then watch the whole thing happen at the beginning, you know, for the first like five seconds. And then as we're going up and then I got back and paid attention to what I was supposed to be doing. It's melting everything below it, isn't it? Well, I mean, it doesn't, they've done it in a way so that it doesn't really damage it badly. But there is some damage. There is always some damage you have to go and repair. It's a lot of force. Yeah. Yeah.

It is. That's a big boy going straight up. So all that training necessary, by the way? We train for a lot of malfunctions, right? If you don't get malfunctions, then can you consider that good training or not? Fair. Right. But I also think that I found it interesting on, you know, after going through all this training, we spend, I guess, where months in that simulator going over all these different malfunctions and working together as a team to try to get better, you know, execution on all that stuff.

But when you get in the real vehicle and it launches, you are thrown back in your seat. I mean, it's a lot of Gs on your body, right? And it's shaking, one of those solar rocket boosters. And the idea that you could reach up and hit these switches, I mean, your arms would be going like this, right? We're just like laughing at ourselves. Like half the things we train to do, we wouldn't be able to do because of that.

And so it was like, I think it was one of those things that make you feel good that you could possibly survive. Did you do that one training thing where they just give you Mach 15 or whatever and make you just spin you around the thing? Was that really a... I don't think that, no. That doesn't exist? That doesn't exist, no. The centrifuge, is that what you're talking about? No, no, no. That's the only thing I ever remember from movies. It's like, oh, you want to be an astronaut? Here, see if you can survive being dizzy. Oh, that spinning thing back and forth? We don't have that now.

What movies get it right? Any of them? Apollo 13 was the best. Okay. Right. They tried to get it right. They just tried to get it right. Yeah. Will you boldly go on record as saying that you hate Star Trek and Star Wars? Not Star Trek. I am a huge Star Trek fan. You love it. Yes.

That's part of the reason I think I became an astronaut is because of Star Trek. The worst reason to become an astronaut. What about the new stuff now? I like Strange New Worlds quite a bit. Have you seen that one yet? Nope. You're probably not a Star Trek fan, but you're telling me. Oh, no, no, no.

I don't watch any of it. You know what? The one space movie that I watched that, what was the one that I'm going to talk about that infuriated me? Where he ends up tiny and he's in the books. Interstellar. What is it? Interstellar. Interstellar. Yeah, yeah.

Here's what Interstellar is. That's like where they're like, we're going to make a movie. We'll get people interested. And then we're just going to a huge F you to everybody that watched this. We're going to end it like this. Yeah. Did you see it? I saw it. I watched it once.

Well, yeah. Who's going to watch that twice? Exactly. I don't remember much about it. I just remember that the end, he was like in the bookshelf or something. He was like pushing books or something like that. Yelling at his daughter to look at him. It's the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. Your first mission, how long were you in space for? Just two weeks.

Two weeks. Was your body, when you came back, were you like, oh, whoa, this was... Yeah, so what it was is you come back and you feel heavy when you first come back and you're a little wobbly. You're just a little bit off balance. What was your fighting weight back then? About what it is now, 185 or something like that. And you came back and you weighed the same or less? Yeah, pretty much the same, right. What about the paradox of living in such confined spaces? Interesting.

in space when it's just infinite space around you? Is that bizarre? Yeah, yeah. You know, I would say, because we don't really look out into space. I said we don't have windows. They all look down on Earth. And so you're not really, unless you're on a spacewalk, you're not looking out into space. And it's just black anyway. Never seen anything fly by? Any junk? Well, meteors and stuff you can see fly by once in a while, but that's pretty rare. Nothing ever comes close?

Now, it'd be exciting to see some whiz behind you, no? We had to move the station a few times due to, you know, space debris. Does the station have an engine? How fast is that thing? Yeah, it's pretty slow, actually, because we just move small amounts of speed, it will change our orbit. That's all it is. So you're not really, it doesn't take off. But it has an actual engine that can move it around. Yeah, we really use the cargo vehicles. We'll put them on, put them on the back and use that to actually reboost and change their orbits.

It does have them though. It's a tugboat up there is basically what's going on. It's not much, you know. Does all the waste have to come back? No, no. So most of our trash burns up.

We have a cargo vehicle that comes up and brings us his supplies, but it's not made for reentry. So we just let it go and it burns up in reentry. So all our trash burns up and becomes just elemental particles. You ever been sick in space? No. Does anybody ever get sick up there? Hardly at all. We go into quarantine prior to going up and that really limits the amount of bugs we take with us. What's the temp up there? 73 degrees every day.

Why is that so funny to you? Just the monotony. Yeah, exactly. You don't need to look at your phone. What is it going to be? What about sleeping? Did you get used to it quickly or no? It took a little while, a week or two, because you just got to learn to go to sleep standing up sort of like, right? You're in a sleeping bag, but it's attached to a wall, ceiling, wherever, right? And there's no pillow, though. There's no blanket. There's nothing. And so you're just kind of floating there, and you got to figure out how to get yourself in that

kind of go to sleep position. When was the first time that you got to walk, like actually walk in space? Base walk on that first mission. The first mission. Did you say anything cool before you left? No.

You didn't have a line? I didn't have a line. No. God, I hope I don't screw this up. That's pretty much what you're thinking. To infinity and beyond, none of that? But my first spacewalk, that was the most interesting one, I think, for me, because it was different. I mean, we trained in this big, large pool on how we're going to do the spacewalk. And you do the one, like, in the shuttle, we did it seven times at least before we went out and did the real one in space.

And so I go out and I have lights on my helmet so I can see like 10 feet in front of me. And I feel like, oh, this is just great. It's like the pool. I'm feeling comfortable. And I work my way out to this work site, which happens to be the very end of the station at this time. The last handrail, I have a spot. And then we put down this tether to hold me right in that spot, right? And I'm working away.

And then the sun comes out and I get this view of, you know, Earth 250 miles below me, you know, the blackness of space, the station over here, you know, like that. And my brain goes, what the fuck are you doing? I froze. I literally just like could not move, you know. And I was holding on that handrail. I swear I put a dent in that handrail because I was just like –

Oh, my God. You know? And I taught myself, though, like, you know, okay, hold it. No, you're okay. You know, you were just, you know, a minute ago, all was good. You know? And you had to just go through this whole talk yourself down kind of routine. You know, because I thought, like, oh, everything's great. Man, it hit me like a ton of bricks, man. Yeah. Have you ever had to talk another astronaut down? No.

No, no. Just like from mentally getting into a space where they're like, oh, this isn't good. I would say not like that. I mean, sometimes you help them through like, hey, this is what we're going to have to do here. And you kind of give them more instruction that way, but not like, you know, like, oh, it's going to be okay kind of thing like that. Because I'm always seeing that in movies where they're screaming at somebody like, just look at me. Trust me. Yeah.

No, we haven't been there. So, no, but I didn't tell anybody, you know, I, of course I was quiet this whole time. Right. You know, they didn't know, nobody knew. You didn't share this with anybody? I didn't share. No, my God. Oh, you're not allowed to? No, I could. I know. I mean, I can share it. I mean, with you, the people, but I mean, during that moment, I did not share. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, you know, I mean, we've got to be professional. You got to like, you know, no, I'm ready for my next task, you know, but it took me a little while to actually get going again. What's the point of the spacewalk?

On the shuttle missions, it was to build a space station. So we'd bring a piece of space station in the cargo bay of the shuttle, use robotic arms, get it out close to where we're attaching it, and then we'd go out in the spacewalk and do all the attachment and stuff to get it built. Now, no disrespect, but as nerds, are you guys the best builders? Ha ha ha!

Well, we tried to train. Like, I like working on my car and stuff like that. Okay. So I felt like, you know, I was decent at it. I mean, we talked about that idea between operational and scientific kind of thing. You've got to be somewhere in the middle because if you're far over scientific, you can't, you know, you don't even know maybe how to use a screwdriver, right? Right. And so you want to be somewhere in between so you understand it, but you also can then do all the operations at the same time.

Because I work with some of these guys here. We're doing some simple drywall on a new studio, and I'm just like staring at these guys. Eddie's falling off ladders. I'm just like, we're just a circus, yet you get somebody that does drywall, and they float a wall in five seconds. Oh, I know. It's a talent, isn't it? It's artistry. I mean, it's completely impressive. While on a spacewalk, can you feel the absence of sound? Yeah.

Your spacesuit has a fan going.

So you hear this fan going, except there was one time on mine, we have an old computer inside the spacesuit that kind of runs the system, right? And mine froze. And so I had to power off for 30 seconds, standard power on, reset, right? So for 30 seconds, I had complete silence. And any oxygen during that 30 seconds? Yeah, because the regulator still works, so I still get oxygen. I just wanted to know if you had to hold your breath for 30 seconds. But that was kind of cool because that was really quiet out there.

I just got to look out, you know, and that was my only job was after I turned off, don't move, just sit there and watch things for a while. That was kind of cool. Was the moon landing real? Yes. Hmm. Hmm. How do you

How do you reason with flat earthers? Oh, well, I don't think one you can reason with them too, because they're not coming from a spot of logic. Have you ever met any? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, and they talk to you? Yeah, yeah. And what's their argument? Well, it's hard because nothing is logical, right? They just, they have these ideas, but, and you can try to explain in physics how that would not work out, but they just don't understand the physics to understand that what you're trying to get the point across. Yeah, it's just very difficult.

And I do like the thing that they will say, like, they look at other planets and say they're all round. Like, yeah, Mars is round and Jupiter's round, but not Earth. Oh. How do you even make that logic? I don't know. I didn't know they had that one. Listen, I want to believe. I want to believe there's an edge.

Seems kind of neat. It's beautiful up there. I mean, what's that like knowing that you're just of a handful of humans that have ever seen that perspective? Yeah, it was. I think that's a real lucky thing to get that perspective, honestly. And really, it was on the longer six months one because the shorter ones, you're working like 12, 16-hour days, right? And you don't really get that much time to really look out and –

really take it all in, I think. Uh, but when you're up there for six months, uh, we would go hang out in this area we call the cupola, which is a glass bottom boat, basically looking back at earth. And you can then hang out there and just get to know the planet really well. And it's kind of, I thought that was really nice. Uh,

You know, you don't know it by countries because there's no lines, of course, right, on that aspect. But it's like this one big ecosystem. And when being up there six months, you got to see the seasons change and all that kind of stuff and watch that all happen. And that, to me, was just a really cool thing to be able to, like, analyze our environment in that way. Yeah. That really separates you from almost all of us. I mean, that's seared into your brain forever. Yeah. But I wish more people could see it. I think we would then treat our planet a little differently if we could do that.

Especially world leaders, maybe. Ah, good luck. Yeah, right. Oh, man. Oh, boy. We're on the cusp of that debate. Jesus Christ. Oh, we're all in trouble. I've always heard that you're doing space experiments on the space station. But what are they actually? Like, what are these experiments that you're doing all day long? Quite a few on the human body.

Okay. Right. We're doing, so like for us, we were determining, you know, what has happening to our body. You're trying to do that, figure out. And there are lots of bad things going, actually going on. It's like aging really quickly. We got cardiovascular disease, got changes in the vision. You got immune systems doesn't get as good as it goes bad. All these different things are happening to your body, you know, muscle loss, bone loss, all these things are going on. So we're measuring all these kind of aspects of that and then try to find ways to mitigate it too. So sometimes you're taking some medicine to

or something that are doing something to try to mitigate these things. And so they're trying to get that kind of data. There's tons like protein crystal growth, which is trying to look at... Because you can grow crystals in space better than you can on Earth because without gravity, they form like perfectly in space. Okay. Right? So we can use that to then determine actually how to make better medicines and stuff like that. Well, a lot of plant stuff too. I actually grew the first edible food, romaine lettuce.

We had a system for that. Thank goodness you said romaine. If you would have said iceberg, I would have been like, you would have been a waste of a mission. That would have been a waste of time, right? The funny thing about that one for me was, since it was the first time we grew this food, they didn't want us to eat it because they didn't want to test it before. They worried about microbes or something like that. It may be okay. But we looked at it and were like, hmm. It looks fine. It looks fine to us. We tested it. Yeah.

It was fine. You know, but it was—I joke with that. It was like when plain romaine lettuce tasted really good, and it just tells you what the other food was really like. And you hate the food in space. Shuttle flights weren't so bad. The long-duration one, the six-month one, it was pretty bad food. Here's what I don't understand. Why does the food have to be bad? It doesn't. They just—NASA does it in-house.

For some reason, I don't really understand. I feel, though, the people who create the food must have grown up in, like, Iowa and ate at a Denny's every day, and that's what they have to eat, you know? I don't—why can't you bring up real food and have it wrapped properly? It's not like you can't heat things up up there. Well, they have to have a shelf life of, like, three years. Right.

Why? Well, because like say the ones on the relaundration, they'll send it off on a cargo vehicle and they'll have to pack that cargo vehicle months before it launches and stuff like that. And then they have to ship it there. It's just like this whole process. I still feel like you could –

They could fix that. Oh, they could. I mean, just buying like the off-the-shelf kind of like, you know, camping freeze-dried food is much better than what we had at NASA. See, I couldn't go to space for my stomach. I have a pretty sensitive stomach, little IBS possibly. I just don't know how that would work up there. Yeah, I'm not really sure either, but the body is amazing at adapting to that environment because, you know, technically you can like turn upside down and eat food if you wanted to right here on Earth, right? So even against gravity, you can swallow, you can swallow water, everything like that.

Really? I thought, well, how does waterboarding work? I thought the fact that you were in the... You just can't breathe. Oh, God. Is that the problem? Breathing during waterboarding? What about blood? Blood's never rushing. You're never getting headaches? Only time I got headaches was when I got hungry. That's how I knew I was hungry. So...

I never got stomach pain kind of hunger, thanks. I would just get headaches. Did you know the astronaut that drove 900 miles wearing an adult diaper? Yes, I did. You knew Lisa? Oh, yeah. I shared an officer for about a year. She was going to confront another woman about dating an astronaut that she had been involved with regardless. What is the sex life? Sex life. Did she have sex in space? Is that what? No, no, no. Okay.

Has anyone had sex in space? Not that I know of. I'll put it that way. Well, I also have to qualify that on the question. Do you mean with somebody else or by yourself? There you go. By yourself is happening. Six months. Are all beds off when you're up there? Do you get hall passes? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, because I've always heard of guys were like, oh, you know, I'm out of town. There's different rules. Off the planet, I feel like you should be able to do whatever. I agree with your logic there. However...

What's the most people that were up there at one time? Oh, man. Like, there's nine right now. But I think there's time when you had a shuttle and six. It could have been up to 13 people. Russians. How did they go six months without just—are they drinking constantly up there? Constantly? No. No.

Occasionally? So you got the rule is you have to, you know, alcohol is not allowed on the space station. That's what you always say. So from then on, it's all hypothetical. Okay. And really, the reason you do that is because you're protecting the people who actually might hypothetically help get stuff to station. Okay. Because they can get in trouble. Okay. So you have to always qualify everything like, well, if...

If that would have happened, this is how it would have gone down. What's your perspective of Russians since you've spent so much time? As a people, they were nice for us. You know, they were always just like normally. They have the same kind of goals in life. They want to be happy, have a good family, safe, secure, all that kind of stuff. So there's really no difference on the people. There's no Russian just stuck on the space station currently? No, but actually, you know, there is a Russian still flies on the SpaceX and we fly a U.S. person on the Soyuz still.

Right now, we do a swap every time. Okay. And so they still—we still are, you know, partners in the space program. You were part of a mission that launched from Kazakhstan, which is weird since that's—the only reason I really know the country is because of Borat. I just want to know, is it very nice? Well, where I was was a little Russian enclave.

Right? Called Baikonur. Okay. And it's where Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, actually launched from. So it was their first space launch facility for Soviet Union back then. And so it was like this little, like I would say, like, I don't know, five square miles or whatever of just...

Russia. Do they let you bring weed gummies up there? No. We were looking at trying to figure out ways to, like, homemade stuff. But they check everything out. Well, because I just think when you're in that glass bottom boat— That would be a wonderful experience.

It seems like something that they would want to test. We always joked like, over Colorado now? Uh-huh. You spent 195 days, 20 hours, and 47 minutes in space. How much of that time was dedicated to balling yourself up and letting other astronauts spin you real fast?

A couple hours of that. We actually had, so we had a system that you would, to read it, some bunny cord you could make tight and you would then ball yourself around that. Okay. Right? So that would be around your, like, kind of your gut and you're holding it and you're like that. And then they could spin you and you would not then float off that way. So you could spin that way and you could really go fast. I mean, you went really, really fast doing that.

I was a child. We are children. Come on. I know. I love it. We came up with so many new games up there. What about fights? You ever get in a physical fight up there? No physical fights. I brought Nerf dart guns to solve our disputes. Oh. Yes. We would have duels. Direct shot into a Russian's temple? Yeah.

Point blank. When you came home after, what was the muscles like? So that was interesting because we work out two hours every day up there to try to maintain some muscles and some bone density, right? But it's not perfect. So we don't get all the muscles. So you have some muscles that are decently strong and other ones are really, really weak. Like a core was just extremely weak.

Like you couldn't, like doing a sit-up was almost impossible kind of thing. And so that took like six months of rehab to kind of get that all back going together. What kind of workout are you doing up there? Just like maxing out on bench? We actually can do bench. We can do squats. So we have a system for like lifting weights. And then we have a treadmill, which has a bungee cord system to hold you down. And then an exercise bike too. So two cardios and you switch off on the cardios and then you do your lifting every day. Wow.

Yeah. But that's just to minimize your loss. Are you happy with what Elon is doing? Not Elon, SpaceX. Are you happy with what SpaceX is doing? Yeah, yeah. Good. I like that distinction. So, I always give everybody a gift that's on my show, and I didn't know what to give you, but then I found this. This is...

I don't know why they gave this to me, but when I graduated high school... Oh, from Titusville? From Titusville. I went to astronaut high school. They gave me my diploma laminated...

This is my actual diploma. Oh, wow. But I guess they thought that when you graduated high school back then that you would need— That's as far as you're getting. Right? A, and that you would need to carry it around and show it to people to prove that you graduated high school. Well, you are from Florida, right? Yeah. Well, I'm not from Florida. I was born in Germany, but let's not get into it. George?

I was born in Germany and grew up in Florida. It's a bad mix, I'm aware. But anyway, so I want you to have my diploma from astronaut high school. People always ask me, like the school, what was its affiliation? Was it like space school? They always assumed that. Right, right, right. No, there was just already a Titusville High School, and we were the second high school. But we were always considered the richer high school. But now that I look back on it, I don't even know if that's true, if that's just something that was made up.

There was no... There was no rich part of Titus, but it was there? No, there wasn't. You're welcome. You keep my diploma. Get it off my table. Set that on the floor. It was also... It was the astronaut war eagles, which that made no sense. That does not make any sense, no. So there's a big eagle going through an A, which is we just stole the logo from Anheuser-Busch. Right.

I never thought about that. Yeah, yeah, right. Now explain to me what you brought. Yeah, yeah. Let me do this. Is it your high school diploma? No, no. This is a... It's something about you and issues with your bowel syndrome. Oh, no. Is this actually... Is it used? No, but Apollo fecal bag here. Amazing. Yep, yep, yep. And then actually, this is the helper. So if you need to...

Wait, wait, wait. Oh, because you're so constipated? No, well, and helping. I thought that was for the penis. So we have a, we call it separation anxiety. Has this been used? Why is it such this color? It's just old. What's this in here? Probably, I don't know what that is. I don't know.

It's one of those things that says do not eat on it? Yeah, yeah, definitely don't eat it. Hold on. So do you peel this off and it sticks to you? Afterwards. No, just close it up. Oh, okay. So you just hold it to you? Yeah, yeah. So that would be—so the station was much more—I would joke in here—better because it was just another plastic tube you would go into. We put gloves on because everything floats, and you have to then tend everything into the spot where you want it to go.

Again, they spend no time on these things, which I could come up with a better system than that. Yeah, well, it was cheap and easy. That's for sure. Why not like a light vacuum setting? That would be nice, but that was not happening.

Okay. All right. This is disturbing. Yes, it is. I know the Apollo guys. I'm not really sure what they were doing. All right? Yeah, Apollo guys are just straight. They had some kinky stuff going on. There were some monsters up there. I don't even want to know. I don't even want to know what Buzz was doing. Yeah, really. But this is the...

Oh, look at this. The station bathroom. That actually, this is beautiful. Isn't that a nice can? No, that's exactly what you want to see. I mean, that looks like a real bathroom. Did you stand to pee?

No, there's a hose, but there was a hose coming out of here. You can just see this part of it right down here, right? Okay. And it has a funnel on the end of it. Okay. And you just float and you just use the funnel. It's a wet vac, really. Yeah, okay. That makes more sense. Now they're getting it. If we do recycle, though, all the urine and condensate on board. And you got wet wipes. Oh, gosh, yes, you need wet wipes. Yeah, you weren't having to wipe dry. That's nice. I have to admit, probably my biggest mistake I made in space happened right there.

Dare I ask what your biggest mistake in space was? Yeah. So I talk about that wet vac, right? And you basically on the end of the hose, there's just a valve. You turn 90 degrees, turns on the wet vac. It does a little pre-treat into the system so that it can help process the urine later and stuff like that. And you wait a few seconds and then you can use it like no big deal, right? Well, I went in at one time distracted and I forgot to turn it on.

And so I still grab it and I'm still using it. And then I realized like, you know, wait a minute, I don't hear anything.

And now is urine just floating around the room? Well, I looked down. This is where I got the stupid part of it going in there. I looked down because I thought, like, I better check real quick. I looked down, and sure enough, there's a large sphere of urine, you know, kind of between me and this hose, like down there. But what I do is I stupidly, I jolted. I jumped. I went like that, which all it did was create little ones floating.

floating out. Yes. So then I, I turn on the, on the hose and then I'm trying to chase them down as I'm going, but I don't get all of them. They get on the walls. And so I spent the next half hour cleaning up the walls of the bathroom. I mean, as far as big mistakes go, that's not bad. I would, I probably would have painted that whole shuttle at some point. Do the guys who trained for years, but never get to go to space still refer to themselves as astronauts?

That's a good question. I don't...

I don't know what they really do. I don't know if they really do that or not. Do they ever feel bad? Do they ever give these people like a Rudy moment where they're like, oh, we just, this guy's been doing this for so long. We've got to give him a mission. Well, it depends on the situations. So in one, it's really rare for somebody to go into the program and make it through actually the first couple of years, you're actually not a full astronaut yet. You're called astronaut candidate. And you got to make it through all these tests to become an astronaut. Yeah.

And that's still like 98% of people make it through that or something like that, right? Okay. And then after that, so most people after that are going to get in there. Some people have screwed up though and not flown. But usually they do something that causes that aspect. Are you always going to be like in the loop of what's going on?

I mean, you know, that's a good question. Like, you still know people who are there working on all the stuff like that. And you stay in contact with everybody. And so I don't know, like always in the loop, you know. But you like, you're still fascinated by it. Oh, I love the mission. I love the mission. And that was like the best thing I think I worked at NASA was the people because everybody was there, not for money, for the mission.

And it was just great to just to be with a group of people who cared so much about what they did. It was a wonderful place to work. I mean, everybody was happy to go to work. And we also then, you know, it was like a gig to like the party in a way because everybody would, you know, after missions, we'd all go out and have, you know, party, have drinks, all that kind of stuff like that. So it was normal situation that you got to know these people really, really well. Do you want to go back up again? I would go for a short duration. I don't know if I want to spend six months again.

What about one of those planes that just drops for five seconds? That would be fun too. I would do that. Really? You would want to do that? Oh, sure. That'd be fun. I can respect everything that you've done and I think it's amazing. And yet I'm like totally, I'm just wired like, nope, that's not my thing. I'm glad you got it. I'm glad somebody's doing it. I will not want to do that. You have, what are these balloons that we're supposed to do or that I can do? Oh, sulfur hexafluoride.

So what it is, it's an inert gas. However, it is the opposite of helium. So as you breathe it in, instead of making you talk in a high voice, it makes you talk in a really low voice. And what's the point? Is this... Humor. No, but it really, it's used for other things. It's actually an insulator and you can use it for electrical insulation and stuff like that. It has nothing to do with space whatsoever? No, not at all. It's used for chemistry experiments. Okay.

Well, that is, that is. Is that disappointing? Well, no, not at all. I actually like it better, but it's just strictly for giggles. It's too funny. Bring me one of those balloons. I'm going to see what this does. Okay, so what am I supposed to do with this experiment here? So you're going to breathe out all the air out again, just like you would normally like that. And then just start breathing it in and then say your quote you want to say. Let me hear Eddie's voice. He's coming here.

Citizens of Gotham, I am here to take that man down. This is amazing. I love this. Do I take the whole thing? As much as you can.

Steve, I appreciate what you've done for us. Okay. How long do I, when do I need to start hyperventilating? It's going to end here in a second. Okay. Oh, it's good. There you go. There you go. I just breathe it out. Yeah. Good. Deep, deep breath out. I'll be honest with you. That was a little more exciting than I thought it was going to be. Steve, thank you very much for being on the show. We appreciate it. And I look forward to a,

Oh, man. Going to space with you one day. Yeah. It'd be fun.

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Hey, Carl, can you believe it? I got to talk to a real astronaut. I want to thank Steve for being on the show. He gave me one of his mission patches that was technically rejected because he had designed it and he'd actually put the Star Trek logo, incorporated it into his mission patch because he's a huge Star Trek fan. I'm like, well, why didn't you give it to me on there? He's like, well, you were making fun of Star Trek, so...

I didn't want to give it to you. Anyway, that was nice of him. All right. What else is going on? I got a sneeze. You want to hear it, Carl? Nothing? All right. We got the GOAT. All episodes are available on Prime. Got some new stand-up. Where are we going? San Ynez? Vegas? New Orleans? Hawaii? Get your tickets. Tickets? Tickets here. Get your tickets.

I'll bark day of show, stand on a street corner, start barking, sell some tickets. I can usually move 20, 30 tickets. By the way, everyone should know that day of show.

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It's sad. It's like a Ricky Bobby situation. Anyway, boyswearpink.com. Another one of my son's terrific, imaginative...

bedtime stories for when he was, when he was three years old, check it out on YouTube. So you can see Eddie's brilliant animation and the subtitles. So you don't go crazy trying to figure out what he's saying. Like my wife does every week when I forward her one of these stories, I'm like, Hey, Eddie needs you to transcribe this. And she's like, God damn it. What's he saying here? And then we ask him and he's like, I don't know. See you next week.

One was a...

One was a sea. One was a tower. And one was a boat. A red boat. And then, once, one in the one was a mermaid. This story has gone off the rails. The end.

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All opinions are their own and not a guarantee of a similar outcome. This episode is brought to you by FX is the old man. The hit show returns starring Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow. The former CIA agent sets off on his most important mission to date to recover his daughter after she's kidnapped. The stakes get higher and more secrets are uncovered. FX is the old man premieres September 12th on FX stream on Hulu.

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