He Led The Crewed Mission To Go The Farthest Since Apollo | Jared Isaacman | Polaris Dawn

I'm doing great. That was a way too generous of an intro, but I love the opening reel. Man, it's hard not to get fired up seeing that footage. How often you guys update that thing? Oh my god. I can't believe you just did this. It's my baby. I'm the one that made that with the help of Ryan Caten. And I'm woefully behind. It needs so much updating because we've had so many amazing Starship visuals. Like the catch isn't in it yet, perfect example. Yeah, I need to get on that. But thank you. You said the same exact thing last time we did this. I was thinking I did, because it was very cool. Yeah, the last month or so of spaceflight, there's probably a lot more footage you could drop in that thing.

Very generous of you. It's lucky to be here. So I'm all good. Thanks for having me today. It's cool.

It was. It was unbelievable. It was literally right there when we got off the helicopter. We didn't eat much in space. We didn't really have much time for it, and all of the fresh food that we had you couldn't use after the EVA. So we had basically the MREs for the last three days. So we just didn't eat much. And I actually think SpaceX got the idea for it from — we spoke to Tim Dodd in space. And I think he asked us whether it was during the recording or just casually, what are you guys most looking forward to eating when you get back? And SpaceX was obviously listening in to the comms. So we had 50% of us that said a double cheeseburger, and then another crew member said steak. So we're still in the beef family. I think majority rules, and when we got off the helicopter, it was an unbelievable double cheeseburger waiting for us. SpaceX made it. It was pretty nice.

Well, just like general health-wise, we feel great. Kid ran his 16th Ironman two weeks after coming back from space and placed like fifth in his age group and got invited to World Championship. So he's obviously on another level of human fitness. But we all feel good. I say that because you're like, is everybody rested? I don't know if we're rested. We haven't been home much. This could be maybe my fourth night at home since I've come back. And I think that I really speak for the whole crew on that. We've just been on the road a lot. For about almost two and a half weeks of it, there was a bunch of science and research plus debriefs and data review. And we're actually not even done yet. Monday or Tuesday next week we'll be done. We've been visiting every one of the SpaceX sites and just getting a chance to meet all the people that contributed to the effort and thank them, just kind of sharing the accomplishment together, I guess. And also celebrate all the other historic missions they've done in the last month or so, which is pretty awesome. We've just been on the road a bunch, but it's been really fun. We're still kind of on mission. We haven't really gotten to that time to catch up on rest or really reflect yet.

And they still do. A lot of the places we went to the NASA crews have gone to as well, and it is awesome. It's really hard to do missions like this or really any human spaceflight mission, and it takes the contributions of thousands of people. You owe it to them to express your appreciation and share in the experience together. So yeah, I think all the crews do it, which is great.

Launch is just awesome, man. Now with two different crews going up, I can tell you it's always the same. Everybody's got huge smiles, lots of exhilaration. I think Kid was giving the thumbs up on the way up. It's not like there's a lot of fear going into it, which is crazy because you got a controlled explosion zorching you to orbital velocities, but just a lot of confidence that the vehicle's going to do its thing. And if it doesn't like something, it knows how to get away from Falcon very quickly. So it's just a lot of trust. I think everyone goes into it with this, like the day has arrived, this is going to be a hell of a ride, just enjoy it. So everybody's just really charged up. That no change at all on this crew. Everybody felt exactly the same way. And I think the cool part was I was able to share a little bit of the sensations, the changes that are going to happen, whether it's throttle up or down or what they're going to feel at stage separation, to help the crew stay ahead of what the rocket's doing. But other than that, I think everybody was just really excited going uphill. The day arrived.

The stop and go is something we got pretty used to over the last two and a half years. It's kind of the nature of the beast with a development program. There were a lot of periods where we thought we were six months away from going to space, and then you learn something or there's a setback and you have to push it out another six months. So I think we were pretty well adjusted. It was kind of on theme to go into quarantine and wind up launching two weeks later than we thought. We were in quarantine about three weeks. The good news is that the Crew-8 guys actually surpassed us in terms of weather delays on their return. So I said it's good news because now Polaris Dawn is no longer the problem child tied up 39A for as long as it did, and the Crew-8 guys with some pretty impressive photography skills got a couple more weeks in space. So it all worked out. Dragon is very sensitive to wind limitations, predominantly the horizontal velocity that can hit the vehicle on splashdown. That has a pretty firm limitation. So it's hard when you get multiple days out in the future to say can I be better than 99.5% not to violate that wind speed. That's really the degree of certainty you need in order to fly Dragon, whether you're coming back from the space station or not. But we were fine. We were running every day, grilling, flying jets. We were having a great time in quarantine. We just felt bad for everybody else. A lot of people flew out to see the launch and then had to get sent home. They did get somewhat of a consolation prize. They got to see my first booster launch and then have a fiery end to its career. But for it to, you know, for people to be sidelined for a couple weeks, I know that was hard on everybody but the crew. Hard on families, but we had a great time. We were fine.

It was a really great moment when we got to orbit. So much time had gone into the mission. I was eager to see them finally arrive. And they did great. They loved it there. Everybody kind of fought for every second to get stuff done and take advantage of the opportunities. So it was very special.

You're really just trying not to get sick. That's the whole thing. We ran, we barbecued, we spent time with family, we watched movies. It was really fun. I would say the hardest part was we had to do a pretty serious sleep shift. When we got there, on the media day a week out, we stayed up for like 36 hours and did a slam shift. Basically our day began at 8 p.m. Eastern and ended at 11 a.m. That really beat us up for a bit. Then when the mission started slipping, we were like, we can probably back off this a little bit. So we kind of got back to normal, and then two days before we went to space, it was like we think we're going to have a window. Everybody slammed back. So that was probably the hardest part of quarantine, how it was playing with our sleep schedule. But it all was good. We kept busy.

It was a pretty long time. I think you've heard us all mention this a couple times because it was pretty serious, the lack of sleep. In a lot of ways, you learn from every human spaceflight mission. There just aren't that many of them not to come away with some takeaways. I think there was maybe an impression at one point even inside SpaceX that the free flyer world is easier for us because it's entirely within our control. We're not going to the space station, we don't have to work with other entities on it. And there's some truth that there are a lot of challenges that come with it. Right from the get-go, you have to work within this defined time period which has to fit within weather because you have only so much consumables. So you're on the clock right away. There's just no time for acclimating to the spaceflight environment. As soon as you get there, you've got to go. With this crew, with what we had set out that we wanted to do, there was no way we were going to not try and get through all of it. And then there were some milestones that you couldn't move. When we would go for the EVA was a very specific window. We had maybe within 12 hours to play with, but it had to be done by a certain time period. When we would do the Starlink test was going to be a certain time period. When we were going to do a mobility demo. So there were things that you couldn't move if people weren't feeling well or whatnot. And then you had all that other science and research. So it creates this race that's on. The easiest thing to give up is sleep. And we gave up a lot of it.

You know, we know it too. There were a lot of people on that mission with us. Mission control was completely beat. They didn't sleep for like five days, it felt like, even though they had a couple shifts. Our families were up. And anyone who was following the mission, it seemed like everything that was cool that was going on was like 3:00 in the morning. So we know a lot of people endured that sleep deprivation event with us. And we appreciate it.

Yeah, we got — I give us like an F, maybe a D on this. We had an awesome playlist. All of our friends and family contributed to it, and it was very cool because each major event that was going to happen by that day had a theme for what songs went into it. Some of it was dark humor. In any case, we had a great plan for it, and then we were awful about it in space. Somebody would realize, did we forget to hit play? And you were like, the whole day went by. So we probably listened to like 4% of the playlist. It was pretty bad.

I suspect there was some Linkin Park in there. We tried to in each phase of flight or major event think of songs of what the worst case would be in this particular situation, and that was like the theme of the song. We use a lot of humor to disarm some of the realities in human spaceflight. Probably none of them that are too good to share.

What you're describing is true. When a very comfortable piece of clothing is pressurized up, you have to work against it and your MET rates go up. But that's not why my arm was that way. The suit is designed in such a way that literally wherever you stop moving is where the arm stays. So that was just my arm resting. Everything I was doing was with the other arm. And then I switched arms when I went from the right hand of the mobility test to the left hand. People have asked, looks like your arm was stuck like that. I was like, I wasn't using it. A lot of what you learn in training is if you don't have to be working against the suit, don't. These are all lessons learned 60 years ago from early EVAs when people were blinded by their sweat. We did so much testing of how to minimize our MET rates when we were out there. Subsequently, by the way, I was almost freezing. There was so much fear of overheating. The suit did such a good job with cooling. But that was just where my arm was. The suit's mobility was very good. It was equal to or better than we expected in a lot of ways. And it doesn't blow up into that huge balloon. The first day of Polaris Dawn training, essentially I wore my Inspiration 4 suit and we ran it up to 5.2 PSI. That was a marshmallow man moment. There's nothing streamlined about the IVA suit when it's fully dressed up, and mobility was not good. And it doesn't need to do anything other than get you home alive if you ever have to use it. Versus the Polaris Dawn EVA suits we flew, very streamlined and the mobility was pretty awesome. But they'll keep improving on it. That's the whole idea. This is just one iteration along the line of many to get to a suit that is capable of operating on Mars or the moon.

100%. You see people's thoughts of how far that suit is from what its intended purpose is. This is what SpaceX does. A couple years ago they were trying to perfect catching suborbital landings of just Starship. Now they caught the whole Super Heavy on the chopsticks. This thing is happening very quickly. When we were just out in Hawthorne, we've already seen the new wrist rotators that they're building into the suit. We knew probably nine months before we flew the changes that were going to go in from a thermal regulation perspective. And obviously the backpack is not lost on anyone. You're probably not going to dangle off a Starship with a 500-foot-long umbilical when you're on the moon or Mars. So SpaceX has got a great roadmap. They learn from this, they make it better. This is what they do really well.

On my first mission in space, the impact on me, how I was changed from seeing our planet and seeing the moon, I went into the second mission feeling very similarly. I took different things away from the EVA than I would have just looking out the window. Looking out the window is a pure visual stimulus, and it is very incredible. There is more, I feel like energy, the brightness of the earth is something that isn't captured in a lot of video. Seeing the moon like that was the motivation for me to continue to go out and explore and make progress, because we are a speck of dust, a microscopic speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe. That was everything I took away from the first mission. The EVA's perspective was different. Looking at earth was relatively the same, but looking into the darkness of space with just the visor separating you from the vacuum of space was a very unwelcoming feeling. It was like a warning sign that everything you are looking at is going to kill you. This is very hard. If you want to try and come out and conquer this last frontier, it's going to be difficult, very difficult. That was what I felt looking into the darkness of space. It was not a hospitable environment.

Yeah.

I think it was somewhat specific. It was a custom-designed scale by SpaceX where each number corresponded to a degree of difficulty, from something that is completely unusable to in line with expectations to exceeding expectations. I know who gets credit for it at SpaceX and kind of created the entire test matrix that we were adhering to, but it was somewhat specific to our operation.

Yeah, in our world, the smaller the number, the worse would have been. So fives would have been unthinkable actually.

That's a great way to describe it. We describe it very similarly. The first couple days on orbit, your odds are at least 50% of the crew members are going to feel really unwell with space adaptation syndrome. There is no correlation to seasickness or motion sickness on Earth. You could be somebody who gets really carsick and you're amazing in space, and you're somebody who never gets sick on Earth, you could be out in the water in high sea states and you're going to be a wreck in space. That is the reality. My first mission it was 50%. My second mission, it was 50%. And to have to go through that while also getting dragged up the hill was very hard. What I mean by dragging up the hill is we were continuously lowering the pressure in the vehicle. The idea: you want to go from Dragon's nominal one atmosphere, 14.7 PSI, to when you're in the suit at 5.2 PSI, there's a big pressure difference. High to low is where you have your risk of DCS, and low to high is generally the cure — that's where we're crushing those bubbles again. So the idea is if you can acclimate your body gradually to a lower and lower pressure, when you open the soda can, if you will, no bubbles. That's what we want. Throughout basically the first 48 hours, we gradually lowered pressure from one atmosphere to about 8.6. So you're getting pulled more and more up the mountain. At various points, we gradually tweaked up the oxygen concentration in the vehicle so that you weren't hypoxic at that lower pressure but still stayed underneath flammability limits. It was a balancing game. I feel very comfortable saying that for the crew members that were trying to acclimate to space, that did not help. But there was no choice. The ISS, they can do a...