Now that you are at Lockheed Martin, how are you involved in the Orion mission?
At Lockheed Martin, we have a very dedicated and talented team working on designing and building the Orion spacecraft led by Mike Hawes. My team’s role is to look farther out and help NASA come up with missions that Orion could do on the third flight and beyond. Orion will play a very important role in flying humans to Mars and returning them safely to Earth, but we have to put together a whole plan to make sure we can go when we are ready and complete the mission safely.
What are some of the differences between the Mars mission and the other past missions that you have traveled on?
Duration. My spaceflight missions were a little less than two weeks long. A round trip mission to Mars will be closer to three years. You pack differently for a trip this long; for example I only took one tube of toothpaste with me on my missions, but how many tubes of toothpaste would you pack for a three year trip.
What was the hardest thing for you about traveling through space when you were an astronaut?
One of the most fun parts was also the hardest. Everything floats! Imagine if you will, sitting at your desk in school with a pencil and a piece of paper. First, you float, so you have to work to stay in your seat. Your pencil floats so you cannot set it down or it will float away; same with your paper. OBTW, your desk also floats. This is both very, very fun, but can make it challenging to get your work done on time. I’ll leave it to your science teacher to explain why everything is floating.
What will be the astronauts’ biggest challenges of living on the Orion for 5840.01 hours?
Spaceflight is a team sport. The biggest challenges for any spaceflight will be being a good team player. Everyone has many different jobs that all have to be done near perfectly, so you need everyone working to help each other out in as many ways as possible.
In your opinion, do you think it is a good idea for people to move to Mars?
In my opinion, Absolutely! Mars, yes, but not just Mars. I know there is a lot I have left to learn, and I believe there is a lot that we have left to learn. I think exploring in many different forms is one of the ways we will learn more than we know today. For me personally, I’m drawn to the space exploration part.
If you had the chance, would you go to Mars?
YES!
We read that when you were a child, you thought that being an astronaut would be a cool profession. What advice do you have for kids how are interested in space travel?
Do your very best in school.
This is actually my advice no matter what you are interested in doing in the future. It turns out that doing your best in school, in all subjects, will open up doors for you in the future and allow you to choose from many more options, maybe even space travel.
We read that it can take about 20 minutes for a signal to travel between Earth and Mars. Do you think this delay will make communication difficult for the crew?
Here’s a question for you, is the Earth closer to Mars or the Sun?
It depends on when you are asking, right? So when the Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun, the communication will be different/difficult. You won’t be able to talk on the phone, it turns out that just a few seconds of delay makes talking to each other hard. We’ll need to come up with ways to work around this delay. The first one that comes to my mind is making video clips and sending them back and forth. Is this something your group is willing to try out, and let me know what works well and what we still need to improve? Imagine being on Earth and trying to explain something to your teammate that is on Mars (twenty minutes away).