Astronaut Terry Virts Spent Over 200 Days in Space

You spent 200 days in space. In a row. I did. My first flight was two weeks, my second flight was 200 days. That's insane. Yeah. What does that feel like? The two weeks was not enough. I got back to Earth and I was like, man, that was awesome. I need to go do this again. And after 200 days, it was awesome, but it was like, all right, I checked the box and you know, I've done everything. I've done everything. I was a shuttle pilot, you know, station commander. I did spacewalks. So I had a chance. I feel like I had a chance to do everything. I made an IMAX movie while I was up there. I feel like I had a chance to do, you know, everything I wanted to do. When you did two weeks, is there a recovery period when you return after two weeks? Yeah, for sure. But it's pretty quick. Like when you land, I was super dizzy and I felt like everything was heavy. I was the last guy out of the shuttle because I was a pilot and they came in. All right, time to get out virtually. I grabbed my helmet and I was like, be careful. This thing weighs 500 pounds. And that night I was just like, I wanted someone next to me. I didn't fall over, but I felt like I was going to. But after a day or two, I was fine. But after the long duration flight, it was like that first day sucked. I could do everything. I could walk around and they make you do this torture where you have to get on your stomach and do, it was like burpees, you know, get up as fast as you can. They were trying to make you pass out from orthostatic intolerance. So I could do all that stuff. I just hated it. And then the second day was a little bit better. First day was like a couple bottles of wine. The second day was like a bottle of wine. The third day was like a glass or two. And by a week later, they make you do this balance test where they put you in this big box. You can't see anything. And then they move the box and you're like, whoa. And they have four sensors on your feet where if your feet are doing this, you know, you have bad balance. And if your feet go and recover, you're good. So I did my balance test before flight and after flight. And after 200 days in space, a week later, my balance score was better than it was before I launched, which I couldn't believe. But I tell you that story just to say that, you know, the human body is amazing. It can adapt pretty quickly. That's great. So what is the like from the time you land after 200 days and then when you're 100% how much time is that? So they there's some rule about driving cars like they don't want you driving cars for a couple of weeks and the doctors got to sign off before you drive. But like I said, after a week, I was I had a better balance score. And after a week, I did 20 pull ups at the gym. I was not 100%, but I was like 90%. Now is this because of exercises that they prescribe while you're in space? Absolutely. Yeah. What kind of what kind of stuff do you have to do up there? So they give you two and a half hours a day. The Russians learned on MIR that your bone density, it's like a linear progression down, you know, about one and a half percent a month you lose bone density. One and a half percent. It's a straight line. It doesn't like bottom out. And they had a guy up there for 440 days. He's the most ever time and space and one mission. So to combat that, we exercise and they found that like pounding resistive exercise is what helps your bones and your muscles. So we have a weightlifting machine. It's kind of like a Bowflex and a treadmill and a bike. And I was religious about those things. I did them every day except for my three spacewalk days. And we had this really big emergency where other than those four days, I exercise every day. And are you sweating up there? You sweat a lot when you exercise. Just doing this, you don't sweat at all. You could wear the same underwear and shirt for weeks and you don't even notice. But if you have your exercise shirt after a day, it's like drenched in stinky, like a stinky underarm or shirt. Because there's no circulation of air. There's not as much. Well, just like if you go to the gym and you get after it for an hour, you're going to be sweating. So it's the same thing in space. But even if you just walk around throughout the day, you can tell you got to wash your clothes, but in space you don't. Like for some reason, you just don't stink on normal. Are they giving you like Merino wool clothes to wear or something? So we had underarm or shirts. After a day or two, it's like they stink and you only got one shirt every two weeks. So those things, they were ripe after a couple of days. So I did this experiment with wool clothes. Like you said, it was like a New Zealand company. I forgot the name of it. And I was kind of worried because I didn't want to, I thought it'd itch, you know, wool stuff. So I wore this thing every day for a month. Got completely drenched, sweaty every day for a month in it. And it did not stink at all. Like Merino wool is amazing. It's amazing. It blew me away. It's something called First Light. My friend Steve Rannell is one of the owners of it. It's a hunting company and most of their clothing, particularly all their base layers and stuff is all made out of Merino wool. And the first time I'd ever worn it was on a hunting trip. You realize when you go hunting, like one of the big problems is it's freezing cold out, but you're hiking with a lot of gear, so you sweat. And then you have to sit down and you freeze your ass off. But you don't with Merino wool. When Merino wool is wet, it still keeps you warm. And so these guys started making hunting gear out of it. And it's incredible stuff because it really doesn't smell. It's so bizarre. I sweat it, drenching sweat every day for a month. And I did that twice and it didn't smell at all. It blew me away. It's weird. Yeah, but I guess it's organic. I mean, the fibers from the wool and just for whatever reason, it just shakes. I don't know what scientific analysis they've ever done on it, but they can't really seem to do that with synthetics. They try it with synthetics, but they can't quite get there. You need a washing machine. So were you the one who figured that out? You brought that stuff with you? Well, I mean, it was like a formal experiment. You know, NASA said that I was working on mice and doing astronomy and testing out new wool fabric. It was just one of the 250 experiments I did. But it was a good one to do because I didn't stink for a couple months, which was nice. That's crazy that even in space, Merino wool is the way to go. That's nuts. Yeah. I was worried. I was afraid it was going to be itchy, but I got like XXL. I wanted it loose. I didn't want like wool rubbing on me, but it worked. It doesn't itch. You think of it as like being like that coarse wool that your grandfather wore that makes you scratchy. Right. But no, they get it down to where it feels like cotton. It's very soft. They got it figured out, man. That stuff was awesome. So when you're using these machines, they're all resistance band machines. Is that what it is? Yeah. In my book, I have a whole I make fun of the acronyms. It's ARED, which is the NASA acronym for workout machine. So it uses vacuum. There's like tubes, like a cylinder. So instead of compressing the air for your force, you're pulling against a vacuum and you can get the ARED machine is 600 pounds. So you can, I can't bench or squat 600 pounds, but you can put it on there so you could hurt yourself. And the really interesting about these machines is they they're not attached to the wall of the station. They're on like springs and moving devices. They're called vibration isolation system because if it was attached, think about like running on a treadmill, that's a lot of pounding, you know, 200 pounds pounding. And the earth doesn't really move that much when you do it on earth. But in space, there's nothing supporting the space station. So even though it's a million pounds, the vibration from exercise would actually start to knock it out of orbit, not out of orbit. You break it apart, actually. Really? They told us in a couple minutes of that will snap it in half. Yeah, because the whole thing starts to bend and flex. And if you're doing it in resonance, it's really dangerous. They've got videos of like the solar rays and these things are big. They don't fit in the football field. There are hundreds of feet and they start moving. If the astronaut forgets to if they leave the if they forget to use the vibration system correctly, the station starts flexing. And Houston, there's some guy that monitors and like the alarm goes off and they call you up, stop doing what you're doing. Whoa. It kind of blew me away at it. It's a million pound massive spaceship, but still there's nothing stopping it. There's nothing like supporting it. There's no like frame. No, it's just floating. So even the exercise of you running on a treadmill or you doing squats, there's a lot of if you're pushing 400 pounds this way, something's pushing 400 pounds that way. So if you're going up and down in the right frequency, it'll, it'll snap the station in half. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. You can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. 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