The path to becoming an astronaut is not clear. The path was not clear for me either. Dave Friedberg, this is Woody Hobart calling you from the International Space Station. How do you hear me? Hey Woody, I hear you well. How are you? 22 years of experience living and working in space.

We have learned so much. And so what that sets us up to do now is to go further. Space is hard. It just is hard. It's not a forgiving place. We intend to set up a sustained human presence on the moon and we're going to set up a proving ground to go to Mars.

Thank you so much. It is such an honor to be here. I'm going to start with a bit of history. The left-hand photo is one of the last moments in recorded human history when all living humans were on earth. This was October 31st of the year 2000 at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

And the crew of Expedition 1 launched up to the International Space Station. It was just three modules at that time. And they started a continuous human presence in space that continues today. By 2011, the ISS was assembled and looked roughly like this. Humans live in the pressurized modules running front to back in this photo.

And the truss running left to right is unpressurized. So only accessible by spacewalk. ISS is solar powered. On an average workday, it consumes about 75 kilowatts. It is a million pounds of mass in low earth orbit. It's about 250 miles above earth. To stay in that orbit, it has to travel five miles every second.

So that works out to a 90-minute orbit. We see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day. Now in 2011, when the space shuttle retired, it left us our only option to continue sending humans up to the space station was a Russian Soyuz rocket. That situation changed in May of 2020.

SpaceX made history. They launched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on a test flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft. And at that time, the world was just two months in grappling with the COVID pandemic. And All In had just published episode three. Bob and Doug spent two months on the space station before they successfully returned.

And I didn't know it at the time, but I would eventually fly on Crew Dragon Endeavor, which is the same capsule as Bob and Doug. Less than a year later, I was assigned to be the pilot for the Crew 6 mission up to the ISS. And so my crew from left to right, on the left, Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedayev, Commander Steve Bowen, myself flying as pilot.

And then Sultan Alnayati was the first UAE astronaut to do a long-duration mission, six months on the ISS. We actually scrubbed our very first launch attempt. We got within two and a half minutes of launch. And we had an issue with the system that ignites our engines. And so we had to scrub.

We got all the fuel off the vehicle. And three days later, we were ready to try again. You're on your back. You lift off at about one and a half Gs. By the time all the fuel burns out, you're up about four and a half Gs. And then we stage.

This is the second stage engine. And again, it starts off with only a little bit of acceleration. It builds up to about four and a half Gs. And so 12 minutes after launch, you're in space. This is where we experience weightlessness for the first time. And we took about a day, like 24 hours, to do all the phasing up to the ISS.

For me, the ISS had been this place that I'd trained about. It's kind of an abstract object off in space. And actually arriving and seeing it in our thermal camera, I still remember, sent chills down my spine. It's pretty fun, the first few days, getting used to weightlessness. Steve was our resident chef.

He was famous for baking pies. Baking pies in space. And we had a great handover with crew five, who kind of taught us all the little tricks to living and working in space. And we got right to work. Full complement of science experiments. This is the Japanese module. You see the primary glove box mounted sideways.

And that's American astronaut Frank Rubio working in the glove box. He currently has the American record for duration of a single space flight. Now, it turns out weightlessness causes heart tissue to age much faster than on Earth. So we're using that as a model to study treatments for heart disease.

So I still remember the day that Sultan looked through the microscope and saw these beating heart cells. Just mind blowing. We printed a section of human meniscus using a biofabrication facility. And in addition to all the science, we have to do all of the maintenance and repairs on board.

So this is some of the less glamorous stuff. This is fixing our toilet. We have to do regular maintenance on the spacesuits to keep them ready for action. Try to find me in this photo. This is repairing one of our CO2 scrubbing machines. You see my legs poking out.

And this is how we get rid of trash. We load up cargo vehicles and send them home to a destructive re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. There is a regular cadence of these cargo vehicles coming to and from ISS all the time. Frank and I here are capturing the NG-19 mission with our Canadian robotic arm and berthing it to the bottom of Node 1.

And the team on the ground is always sending us with every new cargo vehicle fresh food. It's always a special treat. We also have to take care of ourselves. This is Sultan on our treadmill. It's mounted on the wall. You run facing the floor. We do like 2 and 1/2 hours of exercise every day.

Half cardio and half this resistance exercise. So lots of time to listen to music and podcasts. I did get to talk to Friedberg. We had a great conversation, actually, from Low Earth Orbit. I love chess, so I got a chess board sent up. And we actually played ISS Crew versus Mission Control.

We played a few games back and forth, did like one or two moves every day. And we always picked out a flight controller from a specific console to make our moves on the board in Mission Control. Now, one of my favorite parts of training, preparing, was spacewalk training. It's really tactile, learning to use a pressurized spacesuit.

So we have the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston. Amazing team of divers supporting us to practice all of our procedures. And I was thrilled when I found out that I would get to do two spacewalks to install a couple new ISS rollout solar arrays. They're the vertical rolls you see in this photo.

We were getting ready for the spacewalks. And two weeks prior, we were flying over the Pacific Ocean and got some photos of this storm, which unfortunately damaged one of the ground sites in Guam that supports the satellites that we use to talk to Mission Control. So this meant that during my spacewalks, we would not have the ability to talk to Mission Control for some large chunks of time.

Everyone rallied. Frank and Sultan set up this kind of command post in the US lab on the space station. So in addition to operating the robotic arm, they would hand off back and forth with Mission Control for those comm gaps. And Frank and Sultan would walk us through all of our procedures.

My friend Brian, who will be speaking shortly, actually, told me that my mission would be an utter failure if I didn't get at least one space selfie. So I got this as soon as I could. Frank and Sultan flew me over to the arrays. And Steve and I unbolted them.

And then this is the commute out to the work site. The array unit, it's 800 pounds of mass. So it's weightless. But you still feel the inertia of that 800 pounds in your hands. So mainly, I was happy I did not drop it. After we finished the installation, Steve got this shot.

There's two Dragon spacecraft in this photo. On the right side of Node 2 is Crew 6 Dragon Endeavor, what I flew up in. And then up on the top is CRS-28. That's a cargo vehicle that flew the arrays up. And down in the end of the robotic arm, you can see the foot restraint that was holding me while I was holding the arrays.

So it was an amazing mission. After 185 days, it was time for Crew 6 to come home. The Dragon hatch itself is closed. That coming at 419 AM Central Time. You see the thrusters firing as we back away and get another nice view of ISS. Airspace 6 on the big loop.

Depart burn one is complete and nominal. Sultan got this view past his feet of the plasma as we re-entered Earth's atmosphere. We're basically inside a meteor. Drogue pyros have fired. And we have good confirmation of drogue chutes. Two drogues. The drogue slowed us down to about 140 miles an hour, sets us up to deploy main safely.

And you can see here the hot spacecraft and cold parachutes in the thermal cam. We landed in some of the highest seas to date for Crew Dragon. An amazing recovery team comes out, they rig the vehicle, and they lift us onto the recovery ship with us still inside. So you see our smiling faces here.

It was like the thrill of a lifetime to get to spend six months living and working in space. But there's also just nothing like returning home to the people you love. Thank you. I want to spend just a moment beyond my mission and talk about where we're headed next.

NASA is headed back to the moon. And to really put this in context, I just have to show you. So I've asked Friedberg for some help, and he's kindly agreed. Come on out. For you. OK. Go on this side. All the way down? Or-- Stay with me for a second.

OK. So it's a convenient quirk of the scale of the objects in our solar system that if you make the Earth a basketball-- this is the Earth-- then the moon is a tennis ball. And I invite you, if you don't know this answer, to think about how far the moon is from Earth in this scale.

If you already know, that's fine. But take a guess. Should I say the answer? 180,000 miles? 225,000 miles. 225,000 miles? All right. When should Friedberg stop? I'm not going to do very well on Jeopardy. Here we go. When should he stop? Now? Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. OK, slow down.

There. So in this scale, it's 24 feet. You can do the math. So we will stay here. Let's lose the tape measure. And stay there, Friedberg. I would not make a good astronaut. I was telling Woody, I'm like, I can't imagine you walk out in space, and it's like, there's just space?

That. Like, I'm not-- sorry. Go ahead. Don't drop the moon either. I'm sorry. I just want to tell you a couple of things here. This is the Earth. I told you the ISS, where I was, was-- I spent six months half an inch off the basketball. That's where low Earth orbit is.

And you guys probably saw Polaris Dawn launched this morning. Maybe a quick round of applause for SpaceX. So they're going way higher than the ISS, way higher. They're going an inch off the basketball. With Artemis-- so we already launched Artemis in 2022. It flew uncrewed out around the moon.

And the Artemis 2 crew is already in training to fly Orion around the moon and come home. And then Artemis 3 is going to be the landing on the surface of the moon. And we're going to set up shop. We're going to make a proving ground to get to Mars.

And so while we have this scale, Mars-- let's see. If you could imagine 3/4 of a mile away in this scale, 3/4 of a mile, that's Mars. And we're doing all this work on the moon to eventually get to Mars. And then-- I know you guys are forward thinking.

So I just want you to imagine beyond even Mars. 34 miles-- 34 miles away is Uranus. I heard Shamov laugh. He loved that. Amazing. All right. I think we're going to talk for a minute. Yeah, that was great. Thank you. Let's chat. Grab a seat right here. Grab a seat right here.

What should we do with the Earth? Good question. So a couple of quick questions. What's the timeline, Artemis 2, Artemis 3? Yeah. And yeah, just tell us a little bit about the timelines. It's super exciting. We already launched Artemis 1. Artemis 2 crew is in training. Right now, they're scheduled to fly in the fall of 2025, so in a year.

They're going to test out the Orion spacecraft. That flight's going to be a big deal. They're actually going to go further from Earth than humans have ever been, because they go a little farther from the moon than Apollo did. Wow. And then the plan right now is for that first crewed landing in 2026 with Artemis 3.

2026. Yeah. Are you in the running to be-- Yeah, every astronaut in the office is in the running to be assigned to an Artemis mission. Is it like the movie "Right Stuff," where you guys are all super competitive with each other? Tell us about the cooperative and the competitive nature of being an astronaut in the NASA program.

It's actually one of the most fun things. So it's definitely kind of a wait in line till you're told that you're assigned to a mission. I still remember when I got the phone call assigning me to Crew 6 to do my first mission. It's just one of those phone calls you'll never forget.

It's actually not-- we all support one another, and there's honestly nothing cooler than watching your friends fly to space. And we all know we're eventually going to have that chance. So it's less directly competitive than you might imagine. So does the moon base kind of feel like an ISS?

Is it like we're going to set up a facility at some point? And is that sort of long term planning going on? Absolutely. And I think, yeah, there's a strategic plan looking way out into that Artemis campaign. We talked about it being a sustained presence. Right now, I mean, I think we'd all love to eventually have a permanent presence, meaning that humans are always on the moon.

At first, it's not going to be that. We're going to send missions. But unlike Apollo, we are really going to stay. We intend to stay there for a long time. And we're actually-- unlike Apollo, instead of going to the equator, we're going to go initially to the South Pole, which is scientifically really interesting.

And the intent is to do all the cool things-- rovers, moon bases, nuclear power on the moon. We want to do it all. Why did it take humans half a century to come back and do this again? I think-- Did we really go to the moon, by the way?

We absolutely went to the moon. Just for the Joe Rogan crowd, I just want to make sure. I think it's political will. We have to decide that it's what we want to do. And I think that's one of the coolest things about this time. I mean, who's heard of Artemis program?

Yeah. Few people. Good many. We could probably do a better job advertising. But you know what? The cool thing about Artemis is we truly have bipartisan support. That's NASA's issue over many years is, can you sustain as administrations change? Because it takes a long time to do this stuff.

And right now, we feel like we have real bipartisan support to go do this. The people want us to go do this. And sorry. And so once you're on the moon, there's a lot of constant resupply needed in the current model. So that's part of the logistics. It's like, how do we continually resupply?

Yeah. And I think as the missions get more complex-- Is Starship involved in-- 100%. So right now, we actually have two providers for-- So SpaceX's big Starship. Yeah. Maybe you can just talk about why it's so important. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. So we already talked about the Orion spacecraft, which is what the astronauts are going to fly from Earth to a lunar orbit in.

But the human landing system, which is going to take them down to the surface, we have two providers for that and one of those. And actually, the one we plan to use for that first landing is the SpaceX Starship. SpaceX plans to do an uncrewed demo before we send our astronauts down.

And we're super looking forward to it. So is Artemis a close partnership with SpaceX that NASA relies on, and SpaceX is a critical partner to that program, to that mission? Yeah. We're using them for our landing. Then SpaceX talks-- and Elon talked a lot yesterday about trying to get Starship uncrewed over to Mars in two years.

And I don't want you to necessarily opine in a negative way, but how realistic is it that there's going to be a crewed Starship to Mars in four years, as he claimed? And is that a NASA partnership, or is that-- We are cheering on every Starship flight. I mean, I've watched every single one.

We love the development. So if we can get to Mars in four years, that's great. What NASA is specifically contracting SpaceX on is to go to the moon. We believe the moon is the right place to go set up a sustained presence and really practice, set up a proving ground to eventually go to Mars.

But all the development on Starship is in the direction of goodness. And does NASA have a development program on getting to Mars and timelines? Do they talk about that at all? And is there an actual mission yet? We actually reorganized within NASA, and we have an entire directorate called the Moon to Mars Directorate.

And so it's absolutely-- we see the moon as our path to Mars, and that is absolutely the strategy. Yeah. So maybe you could just tell us, coming a little bit closer to Earth, the Polaris mission. It's five days long. They just launched this morning. Elon was here, and then he actually flew in, came to the summit, got back on his plane, went back to Florida, and they got off.

Yeah. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about the mission and what these folks are going to be doing, because we didn't get to talk about it with Elon yesterday. It's amazing. And Jared, Scott, Sarah, and-- Jared Isaacman. Yeah, Jared Isaacman is the commander. I mean-- And he paid for the whole mission.

Yeah. Yeah, he paid for the whole mission. I mean, these guys are friends, actually, friends and family, so we're rooting them on. If you've been to Florida and see-- there's a different emotion when you see a crewed launch than an uncrewed launch. Like, uncrewed launch, big rocket, go up, cool.

When you have friends and family on board one of these rockets, it's a different experience to watch the launch. So we're rooting them on. They're in space right now experiencing-- And they're going to do a spacewalk. They're going to do a spacewalk in a couple of days. That's right.

It'll be the first commercial spacewalk. So NASA's been doing spacewalks for a long time, but they are making history. They're going to depressurize the vehicle to vacuum. So they don't have an airlock or anything. They're going to take the vehicle all the way to vacuum. So they're all in a suit.

They're all going to be in suits. They have to be. They'll open the hatch. And I think it's Jared and Sarah that are going to go out and do that first, I believe, do that first spacewalk. So they're going to go out and be like, holy shit, I'm in space.

Yeah. I'll say, I don't know that I'm not super up to date on the details of-- I'm sure they have objectives for the spacewalk. It's always how it is. While you're out there, there's things you want to do. Because I've got to imagine at the ISS, you walk out.

It's a large structure. There's some grounding context to it. But these guys are just outside of the capsule. Yeah. And I think another interesting-- I had the benefit on ISS-- I had been floating for months, actually, before I did my spacewalk. So I was used to the idea that you're now in this world where everything floats.

And so going outside-- I mean, you look down, and it's a 250-mile drop to the surface of Earth. But it didn't feel scary or anything, because I knew I was just going to stay floating next to a space station where everything's falling. They've only had a couple of days to orient to this.

So it'll be pretty cool. Yeah, well, I mean, cool for some. It takes a different kind of person. I don't know. Really incredible. Guys, please join me in thanking Woody for being here at the All in Summit.