151. Mike Foreman: From Navy Pilot to NASA Astronaut

• Mike’s journey from Navy pilot to NASA astronaut
• The astronaut selection process and lessons in persistence
• Training for life and work in space
• The experience of conducting spacewalks
• Viewing Earth from orbit
• Life after NASA
• The future of lunar and Mars exploration

About Mike Foreman

Mike Foreman is a retired U.S. Naval Aviator from Wadsworth, Ohio, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Aerospace Engineering, later earning a Master’s in Aeronautical Engineering with Distinction and completing the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, also with Distinction, in 1990. He logged over 7,500 flight hours across more than 50 aircraft types before joining NASA’s astronaut program in 1998. Over two space shuttle missions (STS-123 and STS-129), he spent over 637 hours in space, including 5 spacewalks totaling 32 hours and 19 minutes helping build the International Space Station. After 17 years at NASA, he left in 2015 to join his wife Lorrie’s construction project management firm, Venturi Outcomes. Both now retired from that business, Mike is a motivational speaker and Mayor of Friendswood, Texas.

Mike Foreman Transcription

Welcome to Access to Inspiration. I’m your host, Sue Stockdale. Have you ever wondered what happens when people choose to step beyond the limits of what feels possible? Whether that’s leaving earth racing at over 200 miles an hour, challenging conventional thinking, or embracing new technologies?

The greatest insights often come from those willing to venture into the unknown. That’s the inspiration behind Series 21. Over the coming weeks, you’ll hear remarkable conversations with an astronaut racing driver, business leader, innovators and thinkers, each sharing their experiences that have shaped their lives and the lessons they have learned.

Along the way. We’re beginning the series with someone who has literally seen our world from a different perspective. Mike Foreman is a retired US Naval Aviator, former NASA astronaut veteran of two space shuttle missions, and five space walks, and now mayor of Friendswood in Texas. In this conversation, he will talk about what it takes to prepare for life in space. I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation.

sue: Welcome to the podcast, Mike Foreman. It’s a real privilege to speak to you today.

mike: Great to be here. Sue, I’ve been looking forward to this

sue: . Now space is a place that very few people will ever get to. That’s what I think fascinates, many of our listeners so if we start at the beginning of your journey, Mike, what prompted you to want to become an astronaut in the first place?

mike: Really, I decided to become an astronaut before I even chose the path to get there. When I was eight years old, growing up in the state of Ohio, I heard so much about our early astronauts. In fact, the state of Ohio had three astronauts in the first two of astronauts NASA ever chose. So there were only 16 astronauts in our space programme here, there were three from the state of Ohio where I was growing up.

And the news media loved the story about them and told it over and over again, updates and things that they were doing, training, flying missions. I think a lot of us from Ohio were inspired hearing so much about it and thinking there’s a couple of guys from Ohio that got to do this. I could get to do it too. I looked into their backgrounds and found out that they were navy pilots and test pilots, and the light went on. Eight years old. I said, that’s the path I’m gonna choose. I already knew that I would like to fly aeroplanes because even at six years old my dad had a private aeroplane and he would fly us around.

He would let me fly a little bit, and I knew I enjoyed that and wanted to do that as a career. So the two things just lined up for me. Hey, Navy pilots get to be astronauts. I want to be a pilot. Let’s do it. that’s why I set myself on that path.

Navy Pilot to NASA

mike: And I went to our US Naval Academy, that graduates students and sent them off to the Navy and the Marine Corps in this country.

And so I there, graduated degree in aerospace engineering, went off to pilot training. And started flying aeroplanes and I loved it and I was doing what I really enjoyed. But, I had these further dreams and eventually I got to go to test pilot school, become a Navy test pilot, and got another degree a master’s degree in engineering as well.

And, all that put together allowed me to apply to NASA. And after only eight times applying to NASA, I got selected. It was a little bit of perseverance required kept at it, didn’t give up, and followed that dream, and that’s what ended up me as an astronaut.

sue: Wow, that’s such a story, Mike. And you just gloss over the fact that I just applied eight times. Most people probably would give up if they got rejected once or maybe even twice. What sort of tenacity do you have to have, where was it deep within you that you just kept going?

mike: Yeah, I guess there was a little bit of grittiness in me and my personality and my character that I said, Hey, I really wanna do this. And yeah, they said, no this time, but I think I can put together a better application next time and add to my resume, add to my experiences. And each time I thought I put together a better application.

And the seventh time, there was a little bit of hope because I actually got called by NASA and went and interviewed for the astronaut job. I just wasn’t selected that time, but they told me I had done a good job. They just had, didn’t have room in that astronaut class. So I applied again two years later.

The problem was that it was every two years. Problem being, it was a long time in between. I started to apply to NASA in 1984 and was selected in 1998. In between two years in between was a long way to wait. But the same time, I was enjoying what I was doing flying aeroplanes . But yeah, I, we all have that little voice that says, oh, this skiing to the North Pole is too hard.

Maybe I just stopped now and say I went part of the way and that was good enough, but no you wanna keep going. And so I fought that voice in my head and said no, I’m gonna, I’m not gonna choose an easier path. I’m gonna keep at this until I die or I’m successful. I’m gonna keep at it.

sue: That, that’s certainly some sort of determination. And you still had a job when you were applying, so it didn’t sound like then there was a downside or were you having to always add in more skills as you say?

mike: I started to get very creative in the applications because of course, in my mind I was a pilot and what I thought I brought to NASA was my flight experience. And then, becoming a test pilot, I had even more things to offer, I thought, then , when I wasn’t getting any traction, I decided maybe I need to put more things in.

Maybe I need to throw things, more things at the wall, see what sticks. And so I started adding in things like my, hobbies of scuba diving. I mentioned, I’m a scuba diver and I like to do that in my spare time. And I like to work with wood and do carpentry projects. And I was a glider pilot also. I wasn’t just a pilot fixed wing aircraft pilot. I was also, I had a glider rating, so I threw that in. And I think eventually once you start throwing a lot of more things in, they see this is a whole person. This isn’t just a pilot with some flight hours and a lot of different aeroplanes this is a person that other interests. And so that, that was part of it, I think was making me a little more successful with the applications, was throwing more things into it to show that I wasn’t just a pilot.

sue: I think that’s an important point for any listener that’s going through any sort of application processes, how do they present themselves, and the sense that there’s more to a job than just the technical skills.

mike: Definitely.

Life Inside NASA

sue: So then when you had persevered for all of those years and you were told that you were gonna be an astronaut, how did you prepare for that day of heading to lunch?

mike: Becoming an astronaut was probably, five times better than I even thought it was gonna be. I really enjoyed it. I loved the people there. worked in my career in the Navy and, you’ve had jobs where possibly not everybody that’s working with you wants to be there.

Totally opposite of NASA. Everybody wants to be there. Everybody from the people sweeping the floors to the astronauts, the engineers, the scientists, the technicians, they all had similar dreams to me. They wanted to grow up and work at NASA. And so it was just a totally different work environment.

I was really impressed with how much people wanted to be there. And so it was very enjoyable. People were great. The training was great. I think one of NASA’s fortes is they’re really good at training people to be astronauts. We know they have astronauts, but you don’t really it through and go, yeah they really have to be good at training them to, to do a good job.

So they were very good at training astronauts. And I was there for nine years before I launched on my first mission. So I had a lot of that training over that period of time. And, sometimes it’s just a timing issue when an astronaut gets selected to win, he or she’s gonna fly in space is sometimes it’s some classes go in and in two and a half, three years, they’re already ready to go to space.

And my class wasn’t the case. There were more astronauts ahead of us that we had to wait for before they flew their missions because you’d never fly in space at nasa before an astronaut that was selected before you gets an opportunity to fly. So we had to wait our turn. And so I got a lot of training and it was all good.

So waiting for that day, it was just a lot of fun. The time you spend with your crew mates for that year or so, when you’re just all thrown together working together on what you’re gonna do on your mission pretty good too.

How Astronauts Train

sue: That’s a different perspective on NASA than I had thought before, Mike, so how do astronauts get trained on land, for something that’s so out with our normal experience?

mike: Training as you might expect, involves a lot of classroom hours, a lot of time, a lot of time spent listening to the instructor at the chalkboard explaining systems for the space shuttle systems for the space station systems. For the space suit that I wore during my space walks. The space suit that I wore on my space walks was really a one person space ship because we call it a spacesuit and we put it on like a suit, but it gives us everything that we need to know to go outside and live in space for six and a half or seven hours.

So really flying your own little space ship there. They’re just really good at the classroom stuff. And then of course, hands-on. We have simulators, we have training facilities where we go in and everything looks like you’re inside the space shuttle, space station. And you sit with instructors and go through procedures and learn the switches.

The space shuttle cockpit had about 2000 switches, dials, knobs gauges. So it was a lot to learn in there. And so spending time in there, getting to figure out where everything is took a while. And then in the pool, the big pool that we train in for space walks, that was the best training because underwater in that same suit that I was describing, the one person spaceship. And in this huge pool, which is 62 metres long, 31 metres wide and 12 metres deep, world’s largest indoor pool, we have the entire international Space station built life size under there so that we can go down in our suit and climb around on it underwater. And the underwater part makes it feel like we’re weightless.

It simulates that being out in space, weightlessness part. So that is really very analogous to what we’re actually gonna do. So that was probably the best training that I had. And I’ve spent something like 400 hours underwater in that pool, wearing that suit training for all the tasks that I was gonna accomplish.

A lot of days you’re scheduled for training and once you get pretty current on something, then there’s recurrency training. You’re still going and practising and making sure you’ve got the skills kept up

sue: and it’s the idea that it’s second nature therefore, if it’s a stressful environment when you get there, that you’re doing it as almost on autopilot as we would say.

mike: Yes. It really does feel like that.

First Spacewalk Nerves

mike: It’s almost muscle memory I remember my first space walk because of all my time in space. There was never any fear because the fear was pretty well trained out of us doing it so many times down here on Earth before we actually did it in space.

But that first day, going outside on my first spacewalk, I was a little nervous because I’d been in the pool those hundreds of hours in the suit, very comfortable doing that, but never been an orbiting vehicle in space outside the space station, outside the space shuttle. I thought how am I gonna feel? Am I gonna look down at earth and feel like I’m falling? I got out there and muscle memory took over. I went exactly where I was used to going in the pool and grabbing handrails to get to where I needed to go. And it was like second nature. It was like I have done this a million times.

Earth View Effect

sue: When you did then take a moment to look at earth from space out there on a spacewalk. What went through your mind?

mike: Obviously I’d seen Earth from space through the windows, from inside the Space Station, inside the space shuttle. when you get out there now you’re not just looking through a flat window. You have this full panoramic view because your helmet, visor is covering your face, but you can see your periphery.

Everything is just filled up with space or earth and beneath you. And it is just life changing. When a human being, sees earth from space, it changes you forever. It’s very overwhelming almost. It’s so amazing to see how beautiful our planet is, how fragile it looks, how peaceful it looks, and it’s really did change me, changed my perspective on things forever.

sue: Wow. Was such an amazing experience.

Spacesuit Fit Scare

sue: Now, I know you talked about your one person space suit equivalent. It’s your own little space ship there. I know there was some issue that you had with it. Something changed.

Tell me about.

mike: Ah . I grew, you human body grows in space because our vertebrae which we all have the same number of vertebrae in our spine, are all separated by this discus material. They’re not connected to each other. So in space without gravity crunching us down our vertebrae expand and you grow in space.

My first spacewalk I did with my partner Rick Linehan on that spacewalk. And was a veterinarian before he was an astronaut. So he was a large animal doctor, in fact, he was our crew medical officer on that mission. So if we had any issues, we didn’t have a real doctor. We had a veterinarian to, to treat us.

But we went out on the first base walk, and it was the long one. It was my longest seven hours and eight minutes. And we came back inside and we were taking off the suit. We were taking off the undergarments. And I had my shirt off. I was getting ready to put my, my inside the space station clothes back on, my shirt and shorts.

And said, how’d the suit feel, Mike? And I said it felt snug, but you like to have your spacesuit feel snug when you’re on spacewalk. You don’t wanna be floating around inside the suit. You want it to be pretty tight and snug. I said it felt snug. And he said, did it feel too snug? And I said interesting question. Let me think about it. Why are you asking that? And he said Mike, I’m used to seeing you because we’ve trained for this spacewalk, something like eight or 10 times. And when we train in the pool, we come back outta the suits in the pool, we go back to the locker room and we put our street clothes back on.

And I noticed that the red marks that you have on your chest and shoulders today are brighter, red and larger from where the suit is on you than I normally see in the pool. That’s what makes me think the suit was a little too snug. I said you could be right. So he said, let’s go call NASA. So we got on the radio. We talked to mission control and we said, we want to talk to the suit experts. And so they quickly got the suit experts on the line. And we described what had happened. And one of the suit experts on the ground says, aha. We know what happened here. We had to estimate how much Mike’s Spine was gonna elongate. We don’t really know, it’s person to person, how much you grow and. Course based on a little bit on, on your height to start with. But he said we estimated Mike would grow two inches and we think from your description, he grew about two and a half inches, which is not outside the range. So here’s what we want you to do. And they had us do a couple of corrections to the suit sizing. And after that, the suit was  perfect.

Sue: It sounds like the importance of attention to detail and that buddying that often divers have as well, don’t they, where you’re really looking out for one another. That sounds like it’s really important to be doing that in space.

mike: Yeah, I always give Rick Linehan a little bit of a hard time because of course, having a veterinarian for your crew doctor was a little different. On my second mission, I had a real doctor. We had an orthopaedic surgeon, astronaut, and it was always better to talk to Bobby Satcher because, relate a little better if I told Rick that I wasn’t feeling well on my first mission. Rick would just touch my face and say, Mike, your nose is cold and wet. I think you’re fine. Treating me like a dog, basically.

Sue: You came back alive, so that was a good thing.

mike: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He took good care of us. I tell people when I talk about leadership, Hey, you gotta look out for your people. And let me give you an example of a leader who really looked out for me. And that story I tell him is about Rick noticing that, hey, something wrong with your suit and we need to get it fixed.

sue: Such an important thing.

Spacewalk Work and Fatigue

sue: And after that seven hours space walk, which sounds like a quite a long time to be out of the Space Station, were you exhausted?

mike: You know that you did a pretty good day’s work after a spacewalk. The suit is a little bit bulky. It’s stiff, it’s a little difficult to work in. I move around in and it’s pressurised. So I always remind people the gloves, the fingers in the gloves wanna stick straight out when you pressurise the suit.

So every time I squeeze my hand to grab a tool or a handrail, it feels like I’m squeezing a tennis ball. So you get a pretty good workout. And that’s why we never did spacewalks back to back days. We always took a day off because that’s gonna do two space walks back to back, you need a day off to let your body rest up a little bit before the next one.

sue: And what were you doing out on your spacewalk?

mike: That particular spacewalk we were putting together Dextre, which is a short name for special purpose Dextre manipulator, which was part of the space station’s robotic arm. And all of our space, robotic arms are provided by the country of Canada as a partner. That’s their contribution. Dextre was built and designed in Canada, but they had to send it up in 11 pieces because if you put the whole thing together, Dexter ends up being like this body two arms, two hands at the end of the big robotic arm, the big space station, robotic arm can grab it and move it around and then Dexter can do things, manipulate bolts on the outside of Space Station and do other things. So they couldn’t launch it all put together. So it came up on a pallet with 11 pieces. Rick and I, and then two other space walks also were centred around putting Dexter together. So I always say there was some assembly required in space by that. So that’s what we did on that spacewalk on, other spacewalk,

we took up a new oxygen tank, installed a new oxygen tank on the outside of Space Station. I did some repairs to pieces on the outside Space Station. By the time I was up there, it was getting up to 6, 7, 8 years old. So some of the pieces were requiring a little maintenance on the outside.

So I used some wire ties to put the Space Station pieces back together a little bit. But a lot of different tasks that we’re always ready for anything. But we train for a lot of specific tasks that we do and go up there.

Returning to Gravity

sue: What happens to your muscles then when you come back to Earth? Do, did you feel any different for the first few days?

mike: I didn’t feel any difference with muscle atrophy. My longest mission was 16 days. We certainly have to be concerned about it. With the astronauts that are spending six months or more in space now, they have to focus more on really exercising every day to make sure they’re utilising all their muscles and their heart, doing some cardiovascular things.

So I didn’t have to deal with that. Because it was a shorter mission, I came back feeling pretty good. I just came back feeling like, wow, I’m not used to gravity. And getting used to gravity again, when you come back after being weightless for two weeks is bit, I know, gets your attention for sure.

You, it doesn’t take very long. It takes about an hour and you get up and you walk around, I lose that two and a half inches of additional height and just a couple of minutes as soon as I stand up, I think gravity just compresses me down, so not even enough time to go to the wall and get measured, for height. But come back, get used to gravity in about an hour, walking around, feel pretty good. Your sense of balance is the one thing that doesn’t come back immediately. Say my sense of balance after landing was at about 85% of normal. Meaning was aware that hey, my sense of balance is not all there, but if I was careful I wasn’t falling down.

I didn’t have a problem with that. I just was careful walking around and not making a quick turn down the hallway or something thinking, Hey, I might just fall over. But that’s because your neuro vestibular system in your inner ear, which everybody has, is telling our brains where down is right now, it’s just giving our brain a reference point that it helps with balance.

And when you go to space and there’s no gravity, because the neuro vestibular system, all it does is react to the pull of gravity and tell your brain where that pull is pulling you. There’s no gravity in space, so the neuro vestibular system kind of shuts down. It have an input, so there’s no output to your brain. And then you come back and it’s getting spooled back up. It’s trying to reboot itself is the way I describe it as an engineer to send that signal back to your brain. And my first mission landed, two and a half days later, I woke up and my sense of balance, I could tell, was back to a hundred percent.

I just felt normal again. And the second mission, I went through all that same thing. I came back after 11 days on the second mission, around for about an hour, got used to gravity, and then spent only 24 hours until my neuro vestibular system and my sense of balance was back to a hundred percent. So I always am amazed at how adaptable our human bodies are. We throw them into these, crazy environments that they’re not used to and our bodies adapt

sue: it’s, it is amazing what the human body can do to adapt itself to the environment

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Life After Space

sue: We’ve talked about the physical changes and how quick that was on your second mission. I’m wondering about the psychological changes, having had such a unique experience having seen Earth from space and as you mentioned, how you can get a different perspective on Earth from there how did you then find a way to adapt?

mike: I think for me it was just a matter of, oh, okay, what’s my next what’s my next goal? What’s my next achievement in life that I want to pursue? Is it more travel? Which of course it is, that we both like to travel. Is it becoming the mayor of the town where I live, which is crazy. It really wasn’t a goal of mine. But here I am now as the mayor of this town here in Texas. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed working as the mayor here and it for eight years now. And I think, yeah, you’ve achieved something tremendous, extraordinary, but then life goes on and you continue to enjoy life and do things that are rewarding.

Fame and Being Ordinary

sue: And so given that coming back down to Earth and back to other opportunities, you’ve got a new perspective. You’ve been to space. Did your experience as an astronaut change the way then people engage with you?

mike: You witnessed this for yourself. You saw I’m just an ordinary guy. I can walk into a room and people treat me like I’m just another person. And then somebody says he’s an astronaut. And then, oh my gosh, the whole tenor of the environment changes. And I understand that.

I I tell people all the time, Hey, I’m just an ordinary guy. I got to do some extraordinary things. So please don’t let this overwhelming. Wow, this guy is so amazing. I, get to know me for five minutes. And you realise, you, you can tell people, Sue, that, Hey, this is just an ordinary guy.

I’ve known him and he’s done some great things. Yes, obviously. But when it comes down to it people it, yeah, people treat me differently. I try to go into new environments without leading with, Hey, I’m an astronaut. because I know that as soon as they find out it’s gonna change the way I’m treated, I like to just be the ordinary guy.

sue: Yeah, so you’re not gonna wear your space jacket everywhere you go.

mike: I’m definitely not, one of the worst situations I’ve been in is flying a NASA jet. And when we fly the NASA jets around the country we we wear our NASA flight suit. So it looks like this jacket, it’s it’s a full flight suit. This is just a jacket comes down to my waist because you’re only seeing me from waist up. Worst situation is we get somewhere and the jet breaks, that, maintenance problem with the aircraft and now we have to fly home on a commercial airline. We have to go into an airport walking around and oh my gosh, you are just a magnet, you got a big target now. And people say, are you an astronaut? Yes I am. And they wanna your ear off sometimes, which is good, but still you’d rather just be incognito in those situations.

How Many Astronauts

sue: It is such a unique experience. H how many people in the world have been astronauts? Have you got any idea of that?

mike: I know that about 750 human beings have been to space. And if you’ve been to space, we call you an astronaut. We call Katie Perry an astronaut because she’s been to space. only about 650 people have or orbited the earth. So a lot of the other a hundred people of the seven 50 have done suborbital missions, which is launch into space and come right back down or come down before you’ve actually orbited the earth.

One hold, rotation. 650 of us from around the world have orbited the earth. Maybe 350 Americans in our history. A lot of Russian cosmonauts, a lot of other countries. So uk of course, Tim Peak, my good friend Tim, if you’re listening to this, you need to gimme a call ’cause I haven’t heard from you in a.

sue: So yes, what you’re really saying is it’s a very small proportion of the global population that I’ve ever had that opportunity. So no wonder people want to speak to you at the airport with your outfit on.

mike: Sure. What’s it like? And I love talking about it. Don’t get me wrong.

sue: Yeah, what a special privilege.

Mars and Artemis Future

sue: So thinking then longer term, obviously space travel’s been in the news of late. As we’re recording this, just a couple of months ago, Artemis two, a whole project was happening. What’s your view on heading to Mars and that ambition that the world seems to have?

Mike: Yes. That is an ambition that we as humans have, and I tell people we’re going to Mars for one reason. I know for sure we’re going because humans want to go to Mars. So human beings accomplish things when they decide to do it. They achieve these things. We’re not going to Mars next week. We’re not going to Mars next year, probably. But I think in my lifetime, and I don’t mind telling you, I’m 69 years old, I think in my lifetime, hopefully I have a good 20 years left that I will see humans on Mars, and I’m pretty confident of that. And we’re not talking about a one way trip. We’re talking about NASA and other multinational countries, putting together a project that actually takes humans to Mars. And we start to explore Mars. We’re going to the moon. You saw Artemis two, the tests for Artemis two, or for the Artemis project was to get Artemis two around the moon and back. And successful. I know every time I turn on the tv now, I see my friends from Artemis two. They’re talking at late night, they’re talking early morning. They’re on all the shows. They’re at the White House. They’re probably coming to see King Charles, I don’t know. But they’re everywhere and it’s great. And next year we’re gonna do Artemis three, and then Artemis four, we’ll actually land people back on the moon again. And Artemis five is out there.

So I’m waiting right now, what the news I’m waiting for is to hear what are the astronauts that are gonna be assigned to Artemis three, four, and five? Because they have these missions set up. They have timelines, but they don’t have the astronauts yet selected in training. So I’m waiting to see which ones of my friends will get to go do that, and I’ll just be jealous.

sue: Yeah, it’d be such a special opportunity for them, won’t it?

Why Explore Mars

sue: What do you think is the, the benefit for this further space travel you talk about, yes, of course, humans want to get there, so we are likely to get there. What do you think it will give society?

mike: One big benefit I think that we gain by exploring and actually colonising Mars, is that we become a no longer a single planet species. Don’t see dinosaurs roaming around anymore because we know millions of years ago, there were dinosaurs that were all wiped out by a cataclysmic event, some asteroid meteor hitting the earth and causing, changes in the weather that lasted so long that the dinosaurs were all wiped out.

We don’t want that to happen humans. When we established bases on Mars and people start living there, being born on Mars, living there their entire lives on Mars, we will be able to say, okay, now we are a dual planet species, so it’s gonna take more than just a huge rock hitting one of those planets and wiping us out to, to kill off human beings.

That’s one benefit. Now that seems crazy and we hope of course that never happens. And we’re doing things now to learn how to redirect asteroids. If something’s ever coming towards us, we can hopefully take care of that, but we have to be prepared. I think just a base on Mars will actually obviously allow us to Mars.

We know that there’s water there, there’s evidence of ice, so we want to find out maybe in the past has there ever been life on Mars? We don’t believe there’s life there now, but we will find out if there’s ever been, if we see evidence of past life there. Part of it is our exploration, our DNA piece that wants us to continue to explore. So I think we learn a lot of things. We’re benefited by the International Space Station that’s been up there now with people doing experiments for 25 years, learning things about how to design better medicines for people down here on earth, how to uh, uh, plants that grow in space and we can learn how to maybe bring those back to earth.

And all kinds of things that thousands and thousands of experiments where we’ve learned things. And people sometimes say, why are we spending money in space? And I tell ’em, you can’t spend money in space. There is no cash register in space. If you want to spend money to go to space, then you’re spending that money in this country, in Europe, in Japan, and Canada and Russia, and all the other countries that are participants paying people to rockets, build experiments, build missions. A great industry. I think that benefits a lot of people and we learn from it.

sue: And listener. We do have two earlier episodes in the Access to Inspiration podcast. Just as a reminder where in episode 9, JD Bartoe talked about some of the experiments that have been going on in space, one of your other American colleagues, and Robert Thirsk, the Canadian astronaut in episode 120. Talked about his time there as well. So you’re now our third astronaut on the podcast. We are privileged to say, Mike

mike: yeah I’m honoured to be in such a great group. JD is a good friend of mine, and he shared with you his experiences being a payload specialist on a earlier shuttle missions. And then Bob Thirsk I actually was in space with Bob Thirsk my second mission. He was on the space station. I was on the space shuttle, but we joined up in space and I worked on a piece of equipment on the space station with him. One day we were tasked to fix something, and so I was there, just handing him tools, but he was also in my astronaut class. So Bob Thirsk a good friend.

sue: I’ve had a fantastic time having this conversation with you to today, and I hope that our listener has got a better insight just of how some of the practicalities of life here on Earth actually replicate themselves in space in terms of the tasks that you have to do and it’s been really a great honour to hear your experiences in space today. So thank you so much.

mike: It’s been a lot of fun. Sue

sue: I will tell you listener, just on the point about learning things from astronauts Mike asked me to take a photograph of him and his wife when we were on a day out on our travels recently, and I said, 1, 2, 3, smile. Of course, Mike corrected me and said, no astronauts. So we say 3, 2, 1, which I remember even to today.

mike: Yes. Another bit of trivia for your listeners. In United States we have area codes in our phone numbers. you know what the area code at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, where we launch from is 2, 1. So isn’t that, appropriate? our government up with clever ideas,

sue: it’s certainly memorable and as I said, it’s been a memorable conversation today. I wish you well and who knows? Maybe your name will be on the list for the next Artemis missions. Mike, you might get a call up.

mike: If they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, my phone number is available. My phone’s always on, so I’m ready. I’m staying in shape.

sue: Fantastic. Thank you, Mike.

mike: All right, Sue.

sue: Well, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Astronaut Mike Foreman, and if you did, please follow the podcast, leave a review and share it with someone who also would appreciate the conversation. Until next time, I’m Sue Stockdale and this is Access to Inspiration.