exploration involves risk and that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it flying across the pacific ocean in space happens pretty quick but man that is a gigantic ocean and you look down and there's lit from space and there's nothing but water in all directions and i would often think about what was it like to be on a ship where you didn't know you're just going on a parallel and you know you run into australia captain cook or those guys so i would think about them from the you know 22 degree comfort of my space station and
think man that was those are some pretty brave guys to do that it's so easy to get bogged down in daily stress and i got emails and there's traffic and blah blah blah and i can just like close my eyes and realize that there's the most unbelievable sunset that you can't even imagine happening right now just you know right on the other side of the earth and this amazing milky way is out there and so that kind of puts the mundane in perspective not to say that you know things are meaningless here we're just a
speck in the giant universe but to say that there really is a bigger picture you know more meaningful things and not to get too stressed out about the daily life life in the 50s and 60s is different than you know life in the 90s and 2000s and we weren't developing a new fighter jet every year to nowadays the airplanes take decades and billions of dollars but the whole concept of you're going to go do something that hasn't been done or we're still doing that i mean even today with new airplanes or new bombs or missiles
or whatever you're testing on a fighter is is still there it is better to not be idle that's when people go to antarctica or on a sub or something that's when you kind of go crazy if you don't have any work to do but that's not a problem on the space station at least and on that segment on the modules that we have there's more than enough work for those three people you know every day to keep them busy but the psychological aspect is is super important in fact and i've been in space for a
couple months in this nice comfortable sterile like i said 22 degree 15 humidity environment so we said let's make it rain station's full of laptops we put this rain mp3 file but the sounds of earth were something that i missed when we were in space i remember with my crew there were six of us we were having dinner together one night i said guys there's over six billion people on earth and there's six of us here we're like one and a billion lucky not that we're good or whatever we just are pretty lucky to be
up here but my personal story i tell people don't tell themselves no so i always knew i wanted to be an astronaut my as a teenager my room was full of airplane pictures and space pictures and but i didn't think it was possible because no one actually gets to be an astronaut that's a crazy dream but i figured out what you needed to do there's something that i've heard called the overview effect people like yourselves that have spent so much time watching the earth rotate do you feel like it's changed you as a person so
you it has you know um there's a couple of great effects from that the overview effect my crewmate samantha put it this way that you get to see earth as a spaceship flying through the universe it's like when you're here born and raised on earth you just this is home this and everything else is out there but when you're out there you can look back and see that the earth is a spaceship and and uh the the words that she used are we need to be crewmates not just passengers which i think is a great
description of it when i landed for my first space flight i landed got reunited with my family did medical tests and i went back to my room and i was like alone and so just like any business traveler you go to your room you turn on tv so i turned on the tv and i just landed on the space shuttle a couple hours ago cnn amazon and i watched it for like 30 seconds and i was like you got to be kidding me this is news it was complete meaningless blah blah blah and it that
was my one moment where i went all this stuff is really meaningless very few some things are meaningful but most stuff isn't that we worry about on earth because i i'm like i was just flying through the atmosphere and you know the perspective really is um i think a great thing a great change for me anyway there was one day i was floating down from the russian segment of the u.s segment and the main module is node 1 where everything connects and as i was floating through node 1 and i had been in space for
a couple months in this nice comfortable sterile like i said 22 degree 15 humidity environment metal and plastic it was nice it was like a hollywood space spaceship and i heard these birds chirping and i like stopped and i went that was a bird i just heard and i looked in the node three and misha kornienko was in there exercising on our weight lifting machine basically and there was birds that i started talking to him in russia and i said misha i hear a bird and he said yeah listen to this and so the russian
psychologist had sent him an mp3 of bird noises like noises from space and it was the coolest thing i had ever heard in my life and so i said well tell them to send me some so they emailed me some mp3 files and at night time probably for about a month i would put my headsets on and fall asleep in my sleeping bag listening to rain just the sound of rain from earth and it was so awesome so everybody all of a sudden got all excited about birds and crickets they're like a nut you know
like at night time when you can hear crickets that or a crowded restaurant they sent up you could just hear glasses clanging and crowd noise um so we said let's make it rain so one weekend we put rain on all the laptops station's full of laptops we put this rain mp3 file and it was kind of cool for a while and then by saturday by sunday night we were ready to you know jump off a building so we turned the rain off we're like that's enough rain but the sounds of earth were something that i
missed everybody up there too seemed to enjoy that do you really think we understand that psychological change that happens when you're up there and separated from earth for so long you know there's a guy named jack stucer he's a phd who does the psychology investigation and most astronauts keep journals i i did and you can be completely honest with them because they never get released and he analyzes you know how people do and and uh he's got a great in fact he studied a lot of the antarctic expeditions and submarines as kind of a precursor
to long-duration space flight and uh we do understand a lot of the things that make people happy a lot of things that make them unhappy and it's really important i mean when you are working together and there's no escape you know um it's super important that that can really make a mission go wrong or right in fact when i was commander one of my goals was to like each other when we were done you know when i was commander of execution 43 and i think our expedition 43 crewmates are all good friends we email each
other every week the russians and europeans and americans and so but it's that's an important part of space flight i think when you're leading any organization you need to understand who you're leading if you're a army platoon sergeant and you've got a group of 18 year olds out of high school you tell them what time to wake up you tell them to put their right shoe boot on first and then put your left boot on and hold your gun and do this you know you're very directive about every aspect of everything that's on one scale
and on the other side of the scale if you're leading astronauts who are all you you know it's very collaborative and it's all right guys let's what's a better way to do this or here's our problem how are we going to solve it it's very collaborative until there's an emergency we we had a couple of emergency cases when that happens do this do that you become directive but 98 of the time it's very collaborative and a lot of we made some good changes i think to the station just by saying hey what do you think
what ideas and it's more like hey how you know you work together but you kind of have to know your situation are you going to be directive or going to be collaborative uh and that's true on earth that's true for you know every um every every facet and i think if you come across as you know it all people can see through you in like two seconds and know that that you know that's not true so that that's how that's kind of was my philosophy about leadership [Music] [Music] you
