This Week in Space 209: Astronauts for America

Coming up on this week in space, the Trump administration releases the UFO files. Woo! The Curiosity rover has some wonky wheels and it got its hand caught on a rock. And we get down to business with Astronauts for America, where Rod and I find out from astronauts Steve Lindsay and Garrett Riesman why more than 100 have banded together in a new nonpartisan group to tone down the political talk in our country. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the OutSystems platform. And with good reason, build, run, and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission-critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use OutSystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With OutSystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that's unified, agile, and enterprise-proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. OutSystems. Build your agentic future. Learn more at Outsystems.com slash twit. That's Outsystems.com slash twit. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is This Week in Space, episode number 209, recorded on May 8th, 2026, Astronauts for America. Hello and welcome to another episode of This Week in Space, the Astronauts for America edition. And we're very excited about this one. So hang in there with us for this first section because it's going to be a humdinger. I'm Bob Pyle, editor-in-chief at Astro Magazine. And I'm here with Tarek Malik, who you just heard squeaking of Space.com. Hello, buddy. Squeaking. I was serenading everybody. Hello, Ron. How's it going? Happy Friday. Good. This week, we have the distinct honor of speaking with Garrett Reisman and Steve Lindsay, two astronauts who co-founded Astronauts for America, a group of over 100 retired astronauts whose mission it is to counter political polarization and foster public confidence in democracy, similar to the teamwork required in successful spaceflight. And, you know, if you're going to talk about this stuff, hearing it from people like this really makes a difference. And they come from all political stripes. This is completely nonpartisan. So you don't have to worry about being offended because they're going to play it right down the middle. We're going to skip our space joke today because we've got a lot to cover, and this is pretty serious stuff, but our attempts at Cosmic Mirth will be back next week. So without further ado, let's go to Headline News. Headline News. I got it. Look at that. I got it. Well, what a special day it is because i know oh wait where's my where's my hat the pentagon is going to release more ufo files so we'll get to see more stuff we probably already knew trump called for this a while ago uh questions coming in for people is this a disclosure or a distraction open question former exec of the all domain anomaly resolution office sean kirkpatrick felt it was a distraction and said so in the press, but who knows? Maybe there'll be something different, exciting, unique there. What do you think? It's not that they're going to release it. They did. They built a whole website all for it, John. Oh, that's right. It's got period font and everything, right? It's slash UFO. War.gov slash UFO, which is like a phrase I never thought I'd be saying at all, but it's just like a bunch of pictures of sightings of things so we don't know what they are we don't know and there's like usually some captions and swamp gas it's swamp gas there are images of the of uh from the moonwalks of apollo 12. that's an artist illustration that one that you said that you just put it right there i i saw that too and i'm like what is that and it's basically it's a picture that someone took and then they put in a cg representation of a description of something that someone saw. Thank you for clarifying. There's photos from Apollo 12 where they've got zoom in and enhance of things way on the horizon of the moon and this weird text. You're talking about the three stars, right? Yeah, but it's more than that. There's like five or six different Apollo 12 pictures in there. It's very weird and like you said, the font is very much like 1980s redacted X-Files from the 90s kind of thing. And so, I mean, I just kind of perused it a bit because it literally came out like about four hours before we sat down to record. And so we're going to see what happens. This is something that the Trump administration announced back in February that they were going to do when we saw the Artemis II astronauts with the president last week as we're recording this. He brought it up then, too, that there's like really good stuff in there, he said. That's like a Nixon interpretation. I don't know why I said that. So, but it's out there. If you want to go and see all of this stuff, you know, there's been a lot of people pushing to get like the transparency on all this stuff since they had the Defense Department or the War Department, I guess, investigation into this a couple of years back. And the same thing when NASA had their big panel that ended up coming up with nothing either. People kind of, I guess, don't believe that. So here's all the stuff. We've given this story way more time than it needs. All right, all right. Move on. I'm just saying. The web space telescopes gets personal for the first time. You like this one. Yeah. The JWST, yes, has gotten within social viewing distance, sort of, of an exoplanet. LHS 3844b, which sounds like the destination in a forbidden planet. But it's a super Earth, about 50 years away, about 30% larger than our planet. 50 light years away. I think it'll take you more than 50 years to get there. Yeah, sorry. 50 light years. And they looked at it in infrared because that's what the web does and got measurements from the surface, which is pretty amazing since it's probably, I don't know, half a pixel wide or something. Yeah. But they characterize it as a hot, barren rock devoid of any atmosphere in an 11-hour orbit around a red dwarf and tidally locked, which means there probably aren't creatures there. But what they were really looking for was the existence of water. And apparently it's very much more like Mercury or the moon than it is like Earth. Yeah, yeah. Which is disappointing, I guess. Like you get this first like big direct like image and it ends up being like another rock in space, you know, like being at the beach and like looking out and what's over here? Oh, more sand, you know, more sand. Yeah. You know, if you're of a religious bent, I guess it would cause me to think, you know, why were so many planets created with so little stuff on them? I mean, we have since the 60s learned that the rest of our solar system is kind of a Kentucky trailer park, no offense to Kentucky. And, you know, now we're seeing these other solar systems and it's like, guys, you know, give us some hope here. Give us some water. Give us some tropical, light, misty rainstorms and the smell of Rangapani in the night or something, but no. Well, when we do a Habitable Observatories episode, I think we're going to get into the bulk of that. What's interesting, though, from my perspective of this story is that this is not like a brand new discovery that Webb has done. This is a planet that we've known about since 2019, LHS 3844b. But the fact that they're they're looking at it because you know i know it's just just just like like butter right right um and and and we know that the the it gets pretty hot 1340 degrees in the daytime and so the the part that really stands out to me is that they they are able now to use web to target planets that they think are there or that they know are there like this one and say like we are going to go in and get like the best picture yet of of these exoplanets this cool red dwarf star red dwarf stars are really great targets for potentially life-sustaining planets because their stars are older they think that like life might have had a longer time to take hold you know our sun is is like a bit a bit of a middle of the road type star you know in the middle of its life hopefully it doesn't go through a midlife crisis like uh like i'm sure i'm doing right now you know but but uh um but i think that's really it's really an interesting use of what is the most powerful telescope that we have right now to get these things. And now we can move on. We know, maybe we can say all things that look like this are ones that we're not going to find life on. And if that's our study, we'll look at a different thing now. And I think it really sets some, is that like bars or measurements? Like rail guards for the search for life. Guardrails. Guardrails, there you go. Okay, and next up, fill her up. And I think I'm the last generation that even actually knows what that means. But hey, poor old Curiosity, our Martian rover, JPL released a video clip of six years of wheel wear on the six-wheeled rover, and it's pretty severe, but not as bad as it could be. So when you see these images, or in this case, the video clip, it looks terrifying. It looks like the wheels are completely shredded and ready to go. But if you see the wheel inside, not looking at the surface, you realize that the parts that are all chewed up are the very thin metal between the cleats or the gores, whatever you want to call them. There's a couple of different terms for them, but the gripping part of the surface, which is directly connected to three aluminum rims that go around the inside of the wheel, and those are directly connected to support struts that go to the axle. So even if that wheel basically got shredded and fell off, the thing could still drive. It'd just be like a bicycle going on rims instead of tires yeah but um you know this is 20 miles of driving on a very harsh surface and up the side of a mountain it's a it's a shallow incline but it's still they've been going going upstairs so given that it's not too bad perseverance is doing better because it had a wheel a wheel redesign the gores were much closer together because of this because of curiosity you know that was like one of the big learnings about how to make a rover hardier uh was from watching what happened to curiosity because this this video or this animation it covers 2020 to 2026. well we made it a video time compressed yeah time compressor time lapse time lapse is what it covers 2020 to 2026 but of course curiosity had been on mars since 2012 right and so uh so that's eight other years of it driving around so it's all pitted and that was one of the first big surprises when they're driving around was like wow the rocks on mars are chewing up these aluminum wheels we got to make them better for perseverance and i think curiosity was the one that had the special um morse code message that spelled out jet professional laboratory on the on the wheels or jpl which was a great story i remember talking to to brody about it at the time because because i you know it hadn't really gotten out yet when we were there for landing that that that was morse code for jpl because they'd originally i guess looked at doing a wheel that that said so these are for measuring how many turns of the wheel there's been so you know how much distance you've done so they're going to leave an imprint of jpl in the marsh's soil nasa headquarters went hey that's not cool they said okay so they put these these multiple little square holes in it that instead remorse code for JPL. I don't think they got that cleared. That was the version of the story I got anyway. What did you hear? I just heard that it was a big surprise for all of us, you know? And they didn't do it on Perseverance. So that might tell the tale for you. But it just wasn't the only thing that happened to Curiosity, by the way, this week. This is like a little bit of, okay, it's old and not too busted, but look what Mars does to these wheels and they can use it to design better Rovers in the future. There was something really weird that happened to Perseverance, and it's on the next line, John. And, you know, when you, like, walk into, like, your workplace and you use the restroom and you walk out of the restroom and you've stepped in something like toilet paper and you're dragging it around and it's so embarrassing. Well, that's what happened to the Curiosity rover. Wow. That was a long stroll for that much of a punch, my gosh. It was trying to drill into a rock to sample it, and it picks it up, and it doesn't remove itself from the rock. You can see in this animation, it picks the entire rock up, and it won't get off. In this animation, it looks funny, right? You've got this big rock on the end of the robot arm, and it just seems like it's stuck there. This is like a nearly 30-pound rock on Mars, and it took six days for the rover to shake it off. Can you imagine six days of walking around with like your foot stuck in something or whatever? But it's like only on Mars, man. Only on Mars. Can you find that? Actually, my analogy is more like stepping in dog mess and you're walking into the office shaking your foot the whole way. Yeah, for six days. And friend of the show, Rob Manning, is the guy that installed that drill bit. Yeah, that's right. well well well done you know they could have just put that in this little collector i guess maybe that's a good way to collect rocks in the future just pick it up with a drill and shake it off yeah so it's like it's like poking things on the beach you know to clean up the beachfront so well hopefully trash and not not beach life okay but it's it's a new skill new skill for the rover okay we will be back in just a moment to talk about astronauts for america so don't go anywhere Thanks, guys. This episode of This Week in Space is brought to you by ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker's zero-trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero-trust solutions. They've always protected endpoints. Now they protect endpoints, networks, and the cloud. 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Garrett flew the space shuttle to the ISS twice and served 107 days on the ISS, which is a really long time to be in a big tin can, and spent time in Los Angeles where I live getting his PhD at Caltech, and he has worked at SpaceX and VAST and is a professor at USC. Welcome, Garrett. Yay, fight on, fight on, welcome. there you go stop me before I strike again Steve Lindsey is a retired colonel from the United States Air Force former chief of the astronaut office that's got to be a heck of a job flew five shuttle missions I bet twice as pilot and three times as a commander also a heck of a job and is from Arcadia California represent and perhaps most importantly an Eagle Scout once an Eagle Scout always is and which is a test pilot school. So welcome both of you, and thank you for the bottom of our hearts for joining us. As I think I was mentioning before we started recording, when I saw the announcement for Astronauts for America, it was like a breath of fresh air blowing through my life. It's been a tumultuous few months, year, period of time. and to see a group of folks like yourselves and the hundred plus other astronauts that have joined with you in this to come forward and talk about their concerns about democratic process and government has really been very gratifying. So thank you from all of us for what you're doing. I'm sure it's a big commitment. So Tarek has a question he always likes to ask before we get rolling. So I'll turn it over to him. Yeah, this is like, I know you've probably heard this like a million times uh uh steven garrett you know that one of the questions that we try to let our readers know kind of who who are who our folks are about how everyone has a a path to space and uh usually we don't have astronauts on on on the podcast so this is like a real special treat um just so normally we hear people say i want to be an astronaut when i was a kid but i couldn't do it today's a little different yeah exactly exactly and so so that's kind of what what I'd like to start with is just kind of ask, you know, if there's a specific turning point that happened on your word of space, if it was something when you were a kid that set that stage up, or if it was something that came up, as with others in the past, where it was an opportunity, you know, later, you know, either after you'd started in the military or and pursued your studies, you know, at Caltech, that sort of thing. Well, I'll go first. I guess or you want to go first Garrett? Go ahead Steve. Okay so for me you know I grew up in the Apollo era. I remember watching you know Neil and Buzz step out on the moon and on a little black and white TV and I think as kids we all wanted to be astronauts because it was so cool but really I went off for me from as long as I can remember I wanted to fly airplanes. I just wanted to fly And my father was an engineer, so I really loved math and science, and I wanted to pursue that. And I got introduced in high school to a place called the Air Force Academy on a field trip, and I'd never heard of it before. And I looked at the school and said, gosh, if I go there and if I can make it through, I can not only get an engineering degree, but then I have an opportunity to maybe be able to be a pilot. And so I went off to the Air Force Academy, did both of those things, ended up a fighter pilot in the Air Force, and then later on a test pilot. And what I really loved was, particularly as a test pilot, was the ability to combine math and science, which I love, with flying. And so as far as the dream of being an astronaut, I wasn't really thinking about it. I was a test pilot for a while. I had a bunch of friends flying, and I got to thinking about it and said, well, what kind of job would that be to be an astronaut? I thought, well, gosh, I could combine math and science, which I love, with flying, combine those together just a little bit faster and a little bit higher is all. And so I decided to apply to become an astronaut, was fortunate enough to get selected. So my path was really about following what I was passionate about, and it led me to the opportunity to become an astronaut. So that's kind of how I ended up where I was. That's awesome. That's awesome. Was it similar for you, Garrett, then? Or is it a different? It was different. It was different. I also was watching films of the Apollo missions and was really captivated. I really want to be an astronaut, just like you said that most of your guests had that same feeling as kids that you want to be an astronaut. But I didn't think it was possible. Because when I was watching those films of those Apollo missions, all those guys were test pilots like Steve, you know, and I had a mom who was scared of flying. And I don't mean like scared of flying on like an X-15 or, or, you know, or an F-35 or something. She was scared of flying on like United. Okay. So there was no way she was going to let me go off and become a test pilot like Steve. It was just not going to happen. So I took that to mean that I can't do this. And I thought, well, I'll be, I'll be an engineer or something and I'll contribute in some way, but I didn't think I was going to fly myself. But what happened was when I was an undergraduate, near the end of my undergraduate years, I got a hold of some of the bios of some of the astronauts that had just been selected for shuttle missions. Actually, I remember seeing Leroy Chow in there and Ellen Ochoa. So it was like about that time frame. And I saw people like Leroy and Ellen that were not test pilots. And I realized that, wow, you know, this might be within the realm of possibility. You could be a scientist, you could be an engineer, you could be a physician. and get to fly. And that's when a little, that was my eureka moment. That's when I realized that, hey, this is possible and I should at a minimum fill out the paperwork and give it a shot. Yeah. Nice. So can I ask just a, this is a personal question, but in 1984, I was invited to go to space camp with the first group of adult journalists to go to space camp. And we slept in little bunks and ate chili Mac and all that kind of stuff. But one of the things they let us do was climb into a Gemini trainer. And so I climbed in there and sat with this instrument panel about a foot and a half away from my face. And if somebody else was next to me, our shoulders would have practically been touching. And I thought two guys sat in this thing for 14 days once without opening the hatches at all. And right at that moment, the handler said, okay, here's what it's like with the hatch closed and put the hatch down. And I instantly panicked because it's very small in there. How, I mean, are astronauts just of a genetic breed that doesn't have claustrophobia, or do you kind of talk yourself out of it? Is there an adaptation? I mean, how does that work? Well, they test us. Yeah, they do. Go ahead, J.R. Yeah. They put us, so they developed this, you guys might know about this, they developed this beach ball-sized thing. I was going to ask, yes. called the personal rescue sphere. And the idea was that if you only had two spacesuits on the shuttle and you had to somehow get the entire crew into a pressurized environment and carry them somehow to safety, I don't know exactly how they thought this was going to work, actually. Just roll you out of the hatch, yeah. Yeah, and then just, like, kick you like a soccer ball over to another space shuttle or something. So they developed these things that have a bladder layer and a restraint layer, and it's about the size of a big beach ball. and what they the only thing they've ever ended up using them for is testing us for claustrophobia so what they do is they stick you in one of those and they give you a headset and a microphone and they have they're monitoring your pulse and they zip you up inside they pressurize it and you're curled up like a little ball in there and they it's inside one of those soundproof rooms like they use for audio testing and then they close the door to that room uh they you're zipped up in the ball, they turn off all the lights and they don't tell you when they're coming back. And they just wait and see what happens with your pulse. And if you start freaking out, well, then that's a problem. But if you don't, then you pass the test. So a little bit more about it. They also put a heart monitor on you. So they're monitoring your heart rate. And, you know, it's like sensory deprivation kind of thing. And I thought it was really interesting because I got out of that after the test. And by the way, I had a nice nap in there. Very comfortable. It's nice and cool. And I woke up when they were unzipping the thing and I was coming out. And I asked the people giving the test. I said, well, how long have you been doing this test? And they said, we've done it for every selection group, you know, basically since the shuttle program, since they selected the first shuttle class. And I said, well, how many people have you eliminated based on this test? And they said none. So I thought that was really interesting. Back to your comment about the Gemini. So they were locked in there for 14 days, very small space. Well, one thing that people don't often realize about space is, and, you know, the shuttle cockpit was small too. Space station is huge, but the shuttle cockpit was also small. If you fly in a Soyuz, it's very small too. But what people don't realize is that once you get into zero G, once you get into space, you no longer measure your space like we think of on Earth in terms of square footage. You're now measuring your space in volume. And if you watch the Artemis crew that just flew the moon back, they were in a small capsule. But once you're in zero G, you have the ceiling and the walls and all of that space in between. So actually the space in space, can I say that, actually gets bigger. in your perception because you realize now you can move in three dimensions and you couldn't before so i've heard that many times but tarik and i were at johnson for the artemis 2 mission and we got a look at that at the orion capsule and you know the wide-angle camera makes it look pretty big but by the time you get this the spacesuits stowed away and the seats stowed away and all that it's still not very big so i appreciate what you're saying you're right you're Right. The special people. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go to break and then we'll come back and get to the meat of it. We'll be right back. So stand by. This episode of This Week in Space is brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. Spring, it's the season for tidying up closets, garages. Oh, and your customer data. Because, you know, in most organizations, data just doesn't stay clean for long. Inputs constantly change, pipelines get fragile, and technical teams end up spending more time fixing data problems and building new systems. So that's the challenge Melissa set out to solve with Unison, their new data quality platform. Unison bridges the gap between automation and flexibility, giving data stewards the tools to manage and improve data quality, freeing technical teams to focus on core systems. For more than 40 years, Melissa has been the data quality partner, helping organizations keep businesses' data clean, complete, and up-to-date. 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But it's also unusual for astronauts to step forward in a political fashion. So maybe you guys could talk about the mission of your group and the motivations and what it took to make this happen. Why don't we start with Garrett? Okay, well, so Astronauts for America is a nonpartisan group of over 100 former NASA astronauts that have come together at this moment in time to speak out about the state of our constitutional democracy. And, you know, for a lot of us, we've had concerns about how things have been going for quite a long time now. So this isn't just about what's happening in the immediate time frame, but something that goes back over decades. And as we started talking amongst each other, what we found was that a lot of us had very similar concerns. and we decided to come together as a group now to speak out about it because we were worried about the direction our country was going in. It was really the foundational values of our country that create this land of opportunity that all of us as astronauts benefited from. I mean, in one form or another, we all got to live the American dream. And so we want that to continue, and we're afraid that it might not continue. But we want that for our kids and our grandkids, And that's what motivated us to come together, find common ground and and and talk about what's going on with our country with regard to constitutional values and the rule of law. That's our primary focus. But we're also are concerned about just how we are dealing with each other and how our politicians, how our leaders deal with each other with with a lack of civil discourse, with a lack of respect. And, you know, as astronauts, if we had that mode of communication, we would never accomplish our mission. Right. That's very divisive. So we want to see what we can do about that. And then finally, just as astronauts, as engineers and scientists and pilots, we respect data and science and the scientific method. And we see that drifting away. And so we want to call attention to just the benefits of looking at the data and following the evidence and using that to make your decisions. Steve, before you answer, I just wanted to add to the question. I mean, when you're an astronaut, there's a certain level of decorum when you're an active astronaut that you need to display. And certain topics that I assume are things that are sort of not addressed in public. But in addition to that, you're a military man. So was there this additional level when you were considering how to get involved and how to engage here? Was there an additional level sort of a, hmm, you know, I have to think this through or was it just a snap decision for you? Well, let me give you my own story on it. Obviously, you know, flying missions and executing complex and sometimes dangerous missions, there's no place for politics in the cockpit. We all had different have different views on issues. And we from you know all the different parties different political spectrums But we brought our differences together to get things done And we learned at NASA that if you didn do that as part of teams we could not accomplish our mission And so we learned to put aside those differences or bring those differences together to get things done. One of the things we have common, both military and as NASA astronauts, is we all took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And we believe that oath still applies to us today, even though we're, you know, I'm no longer in the military and we're no longer working at NASA. So that, that, that principle holds for us. But my own personal story, what, how I, I've been, I've been worried about this for probably 30 years now. And where it started was, believe it or not, I was on my second flight in space shuttle. I was a pilot on STS-95. That was a mission where John Glenn went back up into space. And so I got to fly with John, which was a great experience, a great american um so i was in a long simulator uh like an on-robit simulator with john almost 30 years ago now and we were talking during the during the sim and and i and i said to john and he'd been he was 24 years in the senate he was getting ready to retire and i said so john why are you retiring you know you've you've served your country you've done a great job in the senate and Why are you choosing now to leave? And he said, he gave me some reasons, but one of the reasons that really stuck out with me was he said, Steve, I cannot take the polarization anymore, the partisanship. He said, when I first joined the Senate, which I think was in 1974, even though we would fight for our positions and our party positions and what we wanted to do with policy, we could work across the aisles to get things done. He said, we can no longer do that. Our parties don't let us work with each other to get things done. He said, I'm tired of the divisiveness and I'm tired of the polarization. And that's one of the big reasons that I'm leaving. Well, that stuck with me for 30 years. And for 30 years, I've been thinking about it. And I've been watching us again over decades get more and more polarized to the point where we've reached point where Congress doesn't get anything done because they can't work across the aisles to get anything done, even though our country is more or less 50-50 Republican, Democrat, you know, maybe 52-48, but it goes back and forth. And so I've been looking for 30 years, how can I get involved in watching the polarization increase dramatically? And Garrett and a couple other folks started thinking about this last fall. They wrote me in pretty quickly. And I thought, wow, why don't we approach this from a nonpartisan perspective, since we all have different views anyway, and focus on those things that we have in common, which is the constitution, the rule of law, and work to support leaders in the future that can actually work across their differences to get things done, just as we had to do working for NASA and executing missions. And so that's why I'm involved and uh i felt strongly about this for a long time and now's the time to act so right if i can add um one thing we should point out is that that i'm a registered democrat steve's a registered republican and inside our membership of astronauts for america we have republicans we have democrats we have independents and you know if you if we talk uh amongst ourselves we'd realize that on specific issues, we have wide disagreements about what we should do with immigration, about abortion, about these specific issues. But what we have in common is much more important. And then the more we talk to each other across these differences, we realize that we all love this country. We all are patriots. We all believe in this idea of America as a beacon of democracy, as a place where you have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as guarantees. And we are all concerned about losing that. So that commonality, our ability to put these differences aside on individual issues and come together for the common good, is exactly what our founders wanted our government to do. And it's also something that is innately obvious to all of us who are astronauts, who have been up in space and have looked back at the Earth and realize that all those things that unite us are so much more important than what divides us. And if we just focus on what we have in common, then we could do a lot. And that's exactly what we hope to encourage our leaders to do. You know, I wanted to ask about, like, the ability to kind of form a group like Astronauts for America now, because I would assume that, you know, as an active astronaut or even like a member of Congress, like Senator Mark Kelly is right now, like there's things you can get involved in as a private citizen, but there's things that you probably can't say because you're an employee of the federal government there. And I'm curious what types of freedoms, you know, you two and your colleagues as former astronauts have now to be able to kind of combine your efforts in that civil space now, that civilian space, I think is what I mean, sorry, to be able to kind of bring these ideas to the public in such a transparent way there. Yeah, well, you know, Tarek, as you know, we have the freedom of speech. And when you are in civil service or when you're in the military, you can't really advocate for a political group or do anything like that, you are bound because you're supposed to be nonpartisan working your job. You can't go out. But once we leave NASA or once you leave the military, then you have the freedom to do that. So the other thing that's important to know is that within our group, there are no active astronauts. Active astronauts that are under the oath that they took are not part of this and nor are nor any former astronauts that are either seeking political office or currently in political office because we're really really serious we are non-partisan we're going to focus on that we're not supporting one party or the other in fact we will support leaders from any party who support the constitution the rule of law and the freedoms for all Americans. To add on what Garrett said about why we're doing that, focusing on things we have in common, we believe that probably the majority, or no doubt, the majority of Americans think the same way we do, and they're looking for a way to get involved and to, this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and it should be serving them. It should not be serving political parties. It should be serving them, and there is nothing wrong with being partisan and having your own views and supporting your views and fighting for your views. But we should all want to work together to make this a better place. And we're doing this for our kids and our grandkids. We are not doing this for us. But we want, you know, we're at our 250th anniversary of this republic. We want to see it go another 250 years. And that's not going to happen unless we continue to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Garrett, do you have anything you want to add? Yeah, just to say that, you know, as Steve pointed out, these concerns go back a long way. Steve told the story about his conversation with Senator John Glenn. I've been worried about the state of our democracy and whether or not we really are achieving the consent of the governed that our founders thought was so important. And in particular, in the role of money in politics. I remember when I was at SpaceX, I would have to go occasionally and spend a day or two as a lobbyist. And I'd walk around the halls of Congress and talk to people. And I remember going to a debt reduction dinner for Marco Rubio. So when he was elected senator from Florida, you need so much money to run a campaign, especially for statewide office, that that you you spend more than you have. And then you have to have fundraisers after it's over to pay up the difference. So I went to one of those representing SpaceX and Marco Rubio listened to everything I had to say. He we had a long conversation, just the two of us. And he took notes. He promised to follow up. He followed up with our legislative affairs people. And and I walked out of there realizing he did all that because I was walking in there with a big fat check. But if you're just a normal citizen of the United States, you don't have that access. This is a representative democracy, but it's not necessarily representing the common person. It's representing the people who can write those big checks. And that disturbed me. But we also have to acknowledge, you know, so that was a long time ago, right? So these issues, these structural issues have been there for a long time. But I think we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is the fact that it has gotten much worse. And this rate of erosion of our foundational principles has really accelerated over the past couple of years. And, you know, we can give you specific examples, but it has gotten much worse. And that is the impetus for why we formed Astronauts for America now. Well, this is great. I'm really enjoying this. We're going to go to a quick break and we'll be right back. So stay tuned. Well, I feel, Garrett, that you've kind of teed up what my next question should be. And that is kind of what are some of the catalyst specific examples that the group, you know, really, you know, kind of used to say, you know, this is the time now that we want to get together to create a voice and, you know, and not activate and work towards, you know, these issues for rule of law, etc. because I understand a lot of the structural stuff that just takes so much long to just, I guess, build up over time. But just objectively, things have gotten a lot worse. And I'm curious if there are real specific kind of lines over either liberties or if it's freedom of speech that we were talking about earlier that you've really pointed to in some of the discussion to try to, I guess, bring the temperature level down through this project and get a bit more of a common sense approach out there as part of the mission. Well, for me personally, there definitely was a particular moment, and that was back in the fall. I went to get my car washed in my town, just down the street from my house. And when I pulled into the car wash, I came across the tail end of an ice raid. So these men were wearing masks, carrying guns, had these kind of nondescript uniforms, and they were just grabbing people that worked in the car wash and hauling them away and just disappearing them. And to me, it felt distinctly un-American that I thought we had a constitutional bill of rights. We're guaranteed due process. And that's not what I saw happening. It looked like something I would expect to see maybe in Russia because we all spent some time over there. And that's a very different place. But it didn't seem American. And that disturbed me. And that led me to get together with Danny Olivas, another astronaut who lives near me. And we started talking about, you know, what we can do about it. So that for me was a particular incident. But I think all of us also not that long thereafter were shocked at what happened with Charlie Kirk and seeing a political violence and an assassination was was was an indication to all of us that we have gone off the rails here. And we have created this environment where that that kind of thing can happen. And obviously, the state of civil discourse was not unacceptable. Yeah, let me add on to what Gerhard said, because what he observed has to do with the immigration, right? And as a group, we're not going to come out with a position on the current immigration law, whether it should be changed or whether it's right or whether it's wrong. If we have a law in the books, we have to enforce that law in the books. But when you have a law in the books and you have to enforce it, you also have to respect people's rights when you do it. You have the rule of law, things like due process, illegal searches, things like that. And if you don't apply that part of the law when enforcing a law, then it becomes against our constitution and against our values. And so it's not so much about the law. I mean, if you don't like the law, then we work to change the law. We should, leaders should enforce the laws. They don't get to unilaterally decide whether a law is constitutional or not, that's the Supreme Court's job. But also, but when you do enforce the law, you have to respect the rights of people. And whenever you overreach and you don't respect those rights of people, that's fine if it's not happening to you. But what if it does happen to you? How would you feel about it then? And so back to another thing Garrett said about, you know, the polarization and things like that between the two sides and talked about the money. In like Columbia, let's take the Columbia accident, for example, we did a mishap investigation. When we have hardware failures, we do mishap investigations. And what we do is we drill down to root cause. And as an example, another example is Congress right now has about a 15% approval rating. And they've had approval rating in the 20% or, you know, low 20s for years and years and years. And you've got to ask yourself why. And if you talk to an individual, they may say, well, I don't like it because Congress doesn't get anything done. But I really like my person, my representative, because they agree with my views. But if your representative agrees with your views and then goes to Congress and refuses to work with the other side to get anything done, are they really helping you or not? They're not. They're not doing anything for you. And so when you look at this congressional 15% approval rating, the key is to do root cause. Why does Congress have a 15% approval rating? Well, they don't work together. They don't get anything done. Why is that? Well, is their first, second, and third priority to get reelected? And if that's the case, then it makes sense that they would be focused on fundraising to do that because it takes a lot of money to get reelected. So you look at that, and that's one of the things we're going to be doing, we're actually doing now, we're looking at these issues, these big issues, rule of law, separation of powers. We're going to define those issues, what they are, and we're going to delve down into root cause. And once we have root cause, we're going to recommend solutions to those. And so an example of Congress, it might be, well, we need to do away with super PACs or, you know, or dark money, the role of money in politics. Maybe we need term limits on Congress. I I don't know that we're going to recommend that because we haven't decided because we'll decide as a group what we're going to do. But maybe your first, second, and third priority as a member of Congress shouldn't be to get reelected because it's your serving. Just like we served at NASA in the military, their job is to serve the people, their constituents, the people that enabled them that they are representing, not serving their party to achieve their party's goals. Because their party's goals are not necessarily their constituent's goals. Yeah. I tell you, it feels like a breath of fresh air that people are talking about stuff that just makes common sense. And I remember when the announcement for the organization came out on the 21st or so of last month, how like to me, I was like this, like it's finally people are, you know, kind of coming together across, you know, different organizations to really, you know, elevate, I guess, what the discussion should be. And then I was crestfallen that like the first big blast that I get from the group is a commentary on kind of what, Garrett, you were just saying. It was the shooting at the White House Correspondence Dinner, and having to be in that position to say, obviously, that you're condemning political violence. I mean, it's a bit of like a sad state of where things are and it makes it really clear at least from the outside out of my point of view about why an organization like this really uh should come together to to get a i guess that not a question i was just very i just i think i can i can still answer it i was i was i was sad that it like it like this here's this great thing but now they have to talk about this yeah i just you know what i want to say about that is is that um just to put it into historical context you know we're astronauts we're scientists engineers pilots we're not historians i didn't graduate with a liberal arts degree, but we're getting smart on this stuff. And it's been fascinating for me personally to, to learn about a lot of these things. And the thing you realize when you talk to historians and constitutional law scholars like we have is that we've been through this before as a country. We've, you know, these ice raids were not the first time we denied people due process. We, we interned, interned Japanese Americans during World War II right here in California and put them in camps and completely deny them due process. We've done this before. We did it in Guantanamo not that long ago. And political violence, you know, when we look back to the 60s, and there are so many parallels between what's happening now and what was happening in the late 60s. But, you know, we had multiple assassinations, Martin Luther King, uh rfk junior or jfk um and and so we we managed as a country to pull out of those those depths and what we want to do is just try to get us on a trajectory of pulling out as soon as possible and not and not let the sink any further yeah and and you mentioned the internment camps and where steve and i both grew up You could drive by Santa Anita racetrack and still see the stables that were used for their transition from the L.A. area up to Manzanar, wherever they were headed. And it's still very sobering to see that. Every time we've deviated from our foundational principles, it turns out to be a dark stain in the annals of our history. And, you know, you'd think we would learn. Let's not do that. Let's stay true to the American principles that this country was founded on. Education of the body politic is a difficult topic. But we're going to go to a friendly topic in a quick break, and we'll be right back. So go nowhere. So one of your tenets is talking about truth and data relating to science and how that, I'm not phrasing this well, but how that affects our country and the people in it. And we've seen, I think it's fair to say we've seen an erosion of trust in science, in fact, very dramatically in the last year, but certainly for decades leading up to that, and a distrust of higher education as well. So I don't want to spread the question too wide, but whichever one of you would like to talk about this first, I would love for you to address the idea that science matters. And it matters a lot in how we live our lives and move ahead in the 21st century. Yeah, I'll start. In our jobs, whether I was a, you know, when I was a test pilot, certainly as an engineer and as an astronaut. And later on, when I was working in the corporate world and aerospace, we depended on data and science for everything we did. And there's a famous saying that's up in Mission Control in Houston. And it's by Ed Deming, if you know who Ed Deming was. He's kind of the father of quality management and things like that. But it was a quote that was up in Mission Control that said, in God we trust, all others bring data. and it was really true when we're making decisions critical decisions all we really have is data and science to go on particularly in the technical world we we we live in so there has been an erosion of trust in science and and but without it's kind of like you know I hate to go off on conspiracy theories but I guess I will so everybody says you know this this and that conspiracy theory. Well, it's not really a theory. A theory is a hypothesis that's been proven through science and data and research and things like that. If there's no data behind it, all it is is a hypothesis, which is nothing more than an opinion. And if I'm making a decision, let's say a health decision for one of my children's, I'm going to go on the data and the science. Otherwise, I'll be making a decision about my child's health and well-being based on somebody's opinion with no data behind it. It doesn't make any sense to do that. So why we politicize science and data is beyond me. But you've got to look at the data because that's the best thing we have. And depending on what you want to believe, it needs to be studied. And scientists are the first ones to call out another scientist if they got something wrong. And so I think we have to trust that. And we have to make informed decisions. And what we're asking is for our leaders, quit going off of somebody's opinion. Go off the data and science. If you want to make an accusation about something or make a statement about something, you need to have something backing it up. If you don't have anything backing it up, it is nothing more than your opinion. so garrett maybe we need to have peer-reviewed leadership what do you think yeah that would be interesting um i was just i was just glad there when steve started bringing up conspiracy theories i thought he was about to come out as a flat earther i got very nervous well the ufo files are all getting dumped online today right that's right that's today uh wow uh yeah no i'm glad you didn't go there so um But, you know, getting back to this issue of data and science, you know, if you we also got to get out of the resist a tendency to if you don't like what the data is telling you to dismiss it or undermine it or or or or ignore it. You know, we fell into that trap with both Challenger and Columbia, I would say, where we had data that told us that there was a problem. And we didn't want to believe that there was a problem. We had reasons that it was inconvenient for us to believe that that data was true. So we dismissed it. And it led to horrible tragedies. And that's what happens if you don't remain objective. And so now we have the situation where we're politicizing the science. And that's very dangerous because you have to be objective. You have to look at the data and listen to what it's telling you. You can't just ignore it. And especially if you're doing things that are very risky. And I'll just go and talk about one particular example, which is, you know, the climate science. We're making the decision as a nation right now to burn more fossil fuels and deprioritize sustainable energies like wind and solar. and if you're going to do that and take the gamble that the repercussions for the planet are not going to be significant you really should be if anything doing more studying of what's happening collecting more data doing more investigation and i liken it to like if you are flying in an airplane and you're going on a particular cross-country and you're not sure if you have enough fuel depending on the winds and how it goes, you're not you're right on the border of having enough fuel to make it to your destination. And then you decide to take the fuel gauges out of the airplane because you just don't want to know if you're not going to make it. I mean, that's essentially what we're doing here. And and and so I think that that kind of disregard for the data is extremely dangerous. And it's something that we certainly don't agree with. Yeah. And to add something to what Garrett just said, it's something I've been thinking a lot about lately is, you know, every one of us that's currently on this podcast, we all have a worldview, right? How we view the world, how we think about things. And all of our worldviews are different, right? And the only thing that I can say for certain about my worldview and everybody else's worldview is there are portions of our worldview that are wrong. We may not know it, but they're wrong because we're humans. We're not perfect. The challenge with that, if you have a worldview, and you are confronted with data or science or information that says this part of your worldview is wrong, then you're faced with two choices. Either you can ignore that data and say, no, I'm not changing my worldview and I'm going to reject this data because it disagrees with my worldview. Or you're going to look at that data objectively and that science objectively and say, maybe my worldview is wrong. That's why it's so important to listen to each other and to look at the data and the science and surround yourselves with people who don't think like you do, that will challenge your views so that you can think critically about those. And I think all Americans, as Americans, we all need to do that as we're thinking about our country and our future and and our leaders. You know, one thing that struck me when we were preparing for the call, largely because I got a big test ballot in the mail yesterday, is the fact that having that informed public is really important, especially in a year like this year where there will be elections in the fall and the primaries are all underway right now. And there are people looking to get involved in kind of all of that. And I'm very curious, and I know it's still kind of early for the group, like where you're looking at in terms of like either people being informed and to get outside of that worldview if it matters for their specific election, be it city council or state representative for Congress, You know, how you're seeing that need to preserve, not just preserve, obviously, the ability for free and fair elections, but also that when you go vote, that you go in knowing kind of what's at stake, I suppose. Yeah. So let me, I'll try to answer that and let Garrett follow up. But so one of the specific things we're working on right now is creating what we call scorecards for candidates and incumbent officials, whether it be at the local state or national level. And these scorecards, though, are not going to be based on a candidate's positions. They're going to be based on the candidate's adherence to the Constitution and the rule and law, the ability to work together despite differences to get things done. and the ability to have civil discourse with people they don't agree with. And we're going to publish these scorecards for the members that sign up on our site to use as well to look at your candidates or your incumbent in elections from a different lens. Instead of looking at the candidate in terms of how do they align with policy positions or whatever you believe about various policies, look at them from the lens of the Constitution, the rule of law, and all those values and look at it from terms of your rights and how they conform to that. And if we start looking through our politicians and holding our politicians accountable through this different lens, then maybe we can get them to change and start behaving in the way that we want them to behave to represent us and to protect our rights as Americans. Great. So being informed, an informed electorate is extremely important. It was something that the founders were really concerned about. And that's one thing. But we have to also ensure that our elections remain free and fair. Otherwise, you know, you can be as informed as you want and it's not going to help. So one of the things that we're doing right now, Astronauts for America, is looking for partner groups that we could join up with. because we don't need to reinvent the wheel. There's a lot of groups out there that are also nonpartisan doing great work. And in the area of election integrity, there are organizations that are also nonpartisan that we will partner with. And that will be a focus of ours as we go forward. And so the one thing I want to do is encourage all your listeners to join us and help us out with this. We need help. We need help from partners and other organizations, but we need help from all of you. and I would like to encourage you to come to our website, was it astronautsforamerica.org, and sign up there. There's a space on our website where you could join the crew, become a crewmate of ours, and yep, there it is right there. Join the crew is up there just next to the logo on the right. There we go. And we'll be there. You guys are good. John is on it. He's on it. But we will, if you put your name and email in there, we're going to keep you informed. We're going to have a monthly newsletter to let you know which issues, how we're doing on identifying the issues and then drilling down what are the root causes and what you could do to help us help ensure election integrity in the midterms. So, you know, we want this to be a two way street. We want to hear from everybody that joins the crew what they're thinking and call us out if you think that we're doing something wrong and hold us to that that principle that Steve just mentioned, which is as leaders. you need to be open to dissenting views and and you need to replan if you see the data is not what you thought it was. So please help us out with that and join up and be a part of this. Yeah. As you know, 100 astronauts by ourselves, if we're just doing this, we're not going to accomplish that much. But if we can get Americans, citizens to join us and help us and look at these things, One of the things we'll do in the newsletter is give you ideas of where you can get involved. Maybe you want to be a worker at the polls or something like that or, you know, going out and voting. I know that's kind of an overplayed term, but it really is important. I mean, there are so many elections that are decided by just a couple of votes that it's absolutely critical. Your vote is critical. And just get as citizens to get involved, to understand civics, to talk about civics, to talk to your friends about it and get involved. And let's remember who this government is for. This government is for us. It's not for the politicians that are running it. They are our elected representatives. They're supposed to represent us. And we want them to work together. We work together with our neighbors. Everybody does across this country. They should be able to work together too. Well, gentlemen, I want to thank you both for joining us for episode 209 that we're calling Astronauts for America. The pressing question I have is, when I go back to the website, I was there earlier today and yesterday, is there a place where I can donate? Because I plan to. Thanks for bringing that up, Ron. Yes, you can. There is a donate button on the website, and it'll take you to, you can donate by credit card right there. You can donate with PayPal, with crypto. I don't really, I don't have crypto. I don't know how that works. But anyway, there's all kinds of options. And yeah, we can use your help there too. So thank you. Fabulous. And once again, that's astronautsforamerica.org. No periods, no hyphens, just the big word, Astronauts for America. You can find Tarek at space.com and myself at adastromagazine.com. Don't be shy. We do welcome your comments, suggestions, and feedback. and just, I know it's only been a few seconds, but you're hearing from us. We recommend you make a donation to this wonderful cross the aisle cause because this is important work and it couldn't be more timely. New episodes of this podcast publish every Friday on your favorite podcatcher. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends to give us reviews and tell your friends about this episode because it's a particularly important one and we'll take whatever form of reviews you wish to give us. You can also follow the Twit Tech Podcast Network at twit on twitter and on facebook at twit.tv on instagram gentlemen thank you it's been a real pleasure and best of luck in in this endeavor this very worthy endeavor thank you thank you for having us it was awesome yes thank you right thank you tariki we really appreciate it thank you thank you