With probably the best sense of humor an astronaut has ever had, Dr. Garrett Reisman, the featured speaker at last Tuesday evening’s Malibu Library Speaker Series, entertained and educated a packed house at City Hall. The veteran astronaut started the evening lamenting that if he could have only stayed in space five days longer than his 95-day stretch aboard the International Space Station, he would have received a special patch to add to his NASA jacket, already covered in patches commemorating his three space missions. The crowd roared with laughter and that’s just how Reisman intended the evening to go while sharing his adventures in space.
Reisman, who flew on three Space Shuttles and walked in space three times, is now a senior advisor for the cutting-edge company Space X and is a professor at USC. He flew in Space Shuttle Discovery, commanded by well-known astronaut Mark Kelly, and joked that he begged Kelly to fly around five more days to get that coveted patch.
On the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2010, Reisman had a 14-day mission, but still didn’t qualify for the patch, saying it had to be 100 days in a row in space.Â
In 2008, Reisman flew with the crew of Endeavor and described the launch “straight out of a science fiction movie.” He remembered the scale of the launch tower as massive and “alive” with churning machinery and noises—filled with things that “go boom.” Reisman explained the shuttle takes off from zero to 17,500 miles per hour in just 8.5 minutes with a G-Force of three that “pushes you down, making you feel three times heavier.Â
“It goes on for minutes. You do all the equations in your head and realize you’re going really fast. There’s no other acceleration like that,” the astronaut described. Reisman joked even his boss Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster doesn’t go as fast.
The astronaut said when you go from three Gs to zero, “It feels like you’re being shot out of your seat.” Describing his first space trip on Endeavor, he said he saw a pale blue glow and realized it was Earth.Â
“I expected something transformative,” he explained, but the astronaut said when he floated up to the window, it was underwhelming. “It was kind of pretty. Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn didn’t know what to expect and were blown away by the view.”Â
Showing a picture of Earth, the veteran astronaut pointed out the atmosphere.Â
“Look how thin that is. When you see that with your own eyes, it’s really terrifying,” Reisman said. “It looks so fragile.” He likened Earth to a spaceship, saying, “We’re all a crew on Spaceship Earth. That surface is our life support system. It provides our air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. Having crewed a space ship, if you ignore and do not maintain your life support system, really bad things happen. That’s what we’re doing to this planet. We have to stop. It’s insane.”Â
Reisman also talked about his favorite parts of being in the shuttle.
“One of the most fun things about being up in space is being in a micro gravity environment where you can float or fly,” Reisman related. “You push away and go shooting across the space station like Superman. It’s awesome. That was as much fun on day 95 as day one.”Â
Reisman then described his three space walks as “the coolest thing.” He wasn’t sure he’d qualify, due to his short height, but Reisman had the last laugh when he showed a picture of himself on a spacewalk working with a 60-foot robot arm to install an antenna. He chuckled that the smaller one is, the less likelihood of being hit by deadly space junk. The crowd then roared when he showed a picture of himself installing his own home TV antenna.
Now in the private sector, Reisman explained how Space X and its competitors, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, are leading the way in space exploration with much lower costs than NASA. He compared the space race today to aviation in the early 20th century when the private sector also led the way, showing a picture of Charles Lindbergh and his plane “The Spirit of St. Louis” built by a private company Ryan Aircraft in San Diego.
“This is an amazing time in space because we are going through an incredible leap in technology, capability and affordability lead by the private sector,” he said.Â
Finally asked by a youngster if he ever walked on the moon, Reisman retorted, “I will probably never set foot on the moon, but one day you might.”
