Astronaut Garett Reisman Spent 95 Days in Space | Joe Rogan

Thanks for inviting me, this is awesome. I've seen a bunch of videos online of you talking about space and your dream of being an astronaut as a young man. What is it like just to see the earth from above and to be…you lived up there for what? 95 days? 95 days, which actually is kind of a bummer, to be honest with you, because you know this if you saw that video maybe, but the thing is, if you stay for a hundred days, they give you a patch, right? I'm at day 95 and the space shuttle Discovery shows up to bring me home and Mark Kelly was a commander. He goes, Garrett, it's time to hop in and come home. And I'm like, man, I just need five more days to get that patch. Can't we just like go around a few more times or something? Yeah, it seems like 95 days should be enough, man. Give the man a patch. Right, right. You know, how much does a patch cost? What's the longest anybody stayed up there? The longest for an American was Scott Kelly's nearly a year in space, the longest in a row, basically. But it was a Russian that stayed up there for longer than a year and he has the all-time record. How…when they come back, like what is 90 days like coming back? Because I've talked to people who've gone there when they come back, their balance is all off, the equilibrium is all screwy. You're kind of messed up and your vestibular system is what's affected the most. At least that's what's most noticeable when you first get back. Actually, the first thing I noticed, let me back up, is how heavy things were again. You know, so I like I took off my helmet and I was holding it in my hand and it felt like I was holding the anchor to the USS Nimitz, you know? It's like, I'm like, how am I ever going to brush my teeth? It'd be like too arduous, you know? Does your body severely weaken in 95 days? Well, back in the day, back when I was going there, so that mission, my long-term mission was back in 2008. And back then, we were still losing bone density and muscle mass as we're going up there. About…you lost about 1% of bone every month. So I was about 3% low. They don't anymore? They don't anymore because we found out, we came up with better countermeasures to prevent that. What are the countermeasures? It's basically working out. Oh. And this resistive exercise that does it for you, which we knew back when I was going, but the problem was we had this machine that was kind of a first generation of the workout machine and it could do large reps but low load. So you're doing like a lot of reps at low weight. And that helped, but what helps, it turns out, we found this out kind of by happenstance, but it turns out that high load, low reps works much better. And so we got this new machine that you could really crank it up to 11 and the guys now that are working out on that thing are coming home with no muscle or bone loss at all. Wow. That's…because what's the Canadian gentleman that we had on? Yes, Chris Hadfield. When Commander Hadfield came back, I believe he said it took him a whole year to recover. Yeah. I mean, that was still like in the early…still kind of in the early days. So I don't know which machine he used. He probably did use a new one, but overall it does take…to get everything back, to get your full vestibular system back, your sense of balance, to get all your bone, all your muscle back to baseline. It took me a year to get all that back too. Wow. It's kind of like rehabbing from a major sports injury. That's got to be so strange. Your body just wants to shrivel up when you're up there because there's no gravity. Yeah. It's really interesting because it's an adaptation and the body is incredible. So what it's doing is it's realizing, hey, you know, I don't have to carry my own weight anymore. So why do I need this big bulky skeleton? Right? Wow. It's like you're becoming kind of like a fish where you're shedding all the bone density because you don't have to…your body realizes, I don't need it. It's like a fish in water. You know how fish have very slender bones. Yeah. That's an interesting way to look at it, like a fish. Yeah. Wow. And we fight it by working out. And how often do you have to work out? Every day? Every day. Every day. How often? Like how much time? They schedule two hours. No, you're not on the machine for two hours. Wow. So that's also prepping, you know, getting changed and, you know, cleaning up afterwards. But so you're working out a good hour every day. What is it like to sweat in space? It's weird because what happens is if you don't notice, like in the beginning you don't even realize it, but it's all building up. And even without like if you have no hair to soak it up, it just builds up like this thin film of water on your head, like a coating of water. And you don't even notice it because it doesn't run down. And then somebody calls your name and you're like, yeah. And then, psh, like this. Oh, that's crazy. I never even thought of that. So it just kind of floats off your body. Yeah. It's like a dog shaking itself, you know, and it just goes everywhere. So if you have it on your arm, you can kind of just go, psh, and the sweat will go flying. You know, your crewmates won't be too happy with you if you do this a lot. But yeah. Wow. Is there video of people doing that in space? There's got to be. There should be. We've shot so much video. Somebody's got to have done that. But... So are you basically doing like compound movements, like deadlifts and squats and things along those lines? Yeah. Functional fitness kind of stuff where... But... And you're focusing on certain areas. So the bone loss comes mostly from your legs because you're not loading. So basically our bones need a stimulus to regenerate. And it happens to us every day. So as you walk, as you go upstairs, that load that the bones feel, the compressive load is telling the bone, hey, make some more. Now you take that away and the bone stops making more. And that's the problem. People say, like, can't you just take like calcium pills? But it's not a mineral deficiency. It's just a load. It's no load. That's interesting. The body adapts so quickly. Yeah. That 90 days has such... And if you didn't do anything for 90 days at all, you'd be in real trouble, right? Yeah. That's what's really kind of freaky. And about like, well, what if we don't fight this? Because all these adaptations you go through are not a problem when you're in space. It's only a problem if you want to come home, right? Losing that bone, even like not using your vestibular organs anymore, your semicircular canals, your otolith organs, you're not making use of those for your balance. You're just going purely on the visual. What that does initially is it make you kind of sick. You get kind of... It's like being air sick or seasick. But once your body adapts, you're fine. So the question is like, what would we become if we didn't fight it? What if we just went with it and stayed up there? I feel like a water balloon. What would you become, right? You become... Actually, the place I think in science fiction that gets it the most correct is if you watch The Expanse. You ever watch that show? No. I heard it's a really good show. I never got into it though. It's good. And they get it right because they show people like these belters that live in partial gravity like their whole lives. And they have much more slender bones. And they catch this terrorist guy and they want to torture him. And all they do is they make him stand up in gravity and on Earth. And it's incredibly painful for him. Oh, wow. Yeah, that would probably be what would happen. And it must take a long ass time to get everything back. If you went from Earth gravity to the space station and you lived up there for a year and didn't do anything about it and then came back to Earth, you'd basically be like, it would be hard to crawl, right? Yeah. If you don't try to fight it, the vestibular stuff would come back probably about the same rate, but you would be really hurting with your muscle atrophy and your bone. So you would lose a lot of your skeleton if you're up there for a year and did nothing. And you would also... All your muscles that you don't use like in your legs and your postural muscles, so in your lower back, you're not using those anymore. So they would just waste away to nothing. You'd be okay in your arms because you're doing everything you do is with your arms. That's how you move. That's how you get around is by pulling and pushing. But there's no walk-in, there's no stairs, there's nothing. Does it affect the way you think at all? Some people describe an issue with short-term memory. They call it space brain. Boy, is that a small group of people that would understand what you're talking about there. I got space brain. Bro, I got that too. Oh, yeah. So it's something that... I never really noticed it, but I don't know how much of that is real and how much of it is like you're freaking out because you're in space, right? So it's distracting and maybe you forget what that number was you were supposed to remember. If you're really in the middle of something and you're all excited and you can't remember somebody's phone number, it's kind of like that. Oh, okay. So it's just... I would imagine that just being up there breathing that recirculated air, it's got to be odd, right? Yeah. And it might stink, but I don't know because the other thing that happens is you have this big fluid shift. So right now we have a lot of blood pulling up in our legs and our heart. Its most important job, of course, is to feed the brain oxygenated blood. And then when you take the gravity vector out of the picture, the heart sends too much up to the brain and the stuff doesn't collect in our legs anymore and it all shoots up here and you get the shift of all that blood volume to your upper body and your head gets all puffed up. Whoa. Yeah, like my... So my first night in space, I went to sleep, which is kind of hard to do because you're in space. You don't want to go to sleep, right? Yeah. And on that first night, I woke up in the middle of the night and I could have sworn I was standing on my head doing a headstand or a handstand. I'm like, why am I standing on my head in my sleep? This is strange, right? And then I looked at the window, I saw the earth, I'm like, oh, that's right, I'm in space. So all the blood was just kind of pooling in your head. Yeah. Because it feels like hanging by gravity boots or something. It feels exactly like that. Wow. After a day or two, you get used to it and it doesn't bother you anymore, but you feel congested because you still have all this volume up here. So your sense of smell and your sense of taste are all deadened. Oh, wow. It's kind of like... Yeah. So it's kind of like when you have a cold and your sense of smell and your sense of taste are like not as strong. So it's like that all the time. That's why we take... We cover... We have every hot sauce known to humankind up on the space station. Oh, really? We got sriracha. You know, Louisiana Cajun fire sauce and all, whatever. We got a whole stockpile of it because you pour that on everything so you can get some taste because otherwise everything tastes really bland. Oh, wow. Now, what are you eating up there? Oh, it's terrible. Is it freeze dried foods mostly or... Yeah. You don't go for the food, all right? There's not like a foodie holiday. So you got basically two choices. You have the American food, which is essentially MREs, like military freeze dried or radiated, you know, infinite shelf life kind of stuff. And then the Russian food is also based on their military rations, but from submarines. And the Russian food actually tastes better, but the problem is one of presentation because it comes in cans. So you get these cans and even though it tastes good, you open that can up and you look at it and it's like, God, it looks like dog food. There's like congealed and... Yeah. But it tastes better. It tastes better, but it's just like so unappetized when you open that can up and... You know, it's just not... What would happen if you brought fresh things up there? Would they rot at the same rate that they would rot in America? Yeah. The thing is we have no refrigeration. We didn't when I was there. They actually have a small refrigerator now. So you can't have anything that needs to be refrigerated. But you would usually like for the first couple of days, we'd take a bag of fresh food and we took like sandwiches and fruits and vegetables and stuff. And then because that's the last time you're going to have it. After that, it's all going to be just the stuff in the packets that you add water to.