NASA Astronaut Christina Koch on Discovery and Pushing Human Limits

I'm James Manyika, Senior Vice President at Google and Alphabet. In today's Dialogues, I'm so looking forward to my conversation with Christina Koch, astronaut, explorer, scientist, engineer who has reached all the boundaries of human achievement, exploration, and discovery from a time exploring the extremes of our planet Earth at Antarctica and in the Arctic, to spending 328 days on the International Space Station, and most recently, to being a member of the Artemis two crew that went to the far side of the moon, gone further than any crew has ever done before in terms of space exploration. I'm so looking forward to the conversation.

Well, Christina, it's such a pleasure to have the chance to have this conversation with you. Thank you. It's amazing to be here. Thanks for the invitation. The pleasure is all mine. I grew up with a love of science fiction was specifically space, and it's been incredibly inspiring to watch your career trajectory over the years, because it sounds like all the things I have imagined and dreamed about and thought about you've done all of those. So thank you for the inspiration. All of that gives. I feel like people like me stand on the shoulders of people like you

and all the other trailblazers that came before me, so it's just been an honor. Maybe to go back to the start. I'm curious what it was for you. I mean, because when I was growing up, the inspiration was really science fiction. My father in the early 60s that happened to have gone to Cape Canaveral and seen rockets go up in space. So that was a big motivation for me. What was it for you? I think for me it was exploration. It was the idea of these far off places. We got subscriptions to travel magazines in my small hometown of North Carolina, and I would just flip through the pages, and I was just absolutely riveted.

I would cut out maps and pages from those magazines, put them on the walls of my room, and just imagine going to these places, seeing things that were just so foreign to me. And then what I had locally was the night sky and the ocean, and I loved things that made me feel small. What is it about that? Yeah, it is such a fascination for me, and I actually had not put my finger on it until much later in life. What was this through line between love of the mountains, love of the ocean, love of the night sky, and then eventually love of places like Antarctica where you've been, where it's just an expanse of absolutely nothing. And. But humans have made these inroads.

And what does that mean? And eventually the through line came to me. It was things that made me feel small, because that in turn made me ponder the size of the universe and all there was out there, and the perspective of seeing it from different places. The good fortune of going on an expedition to the South Pole and also to Greenland and the Arctic. I remember at the South pole of the Amazon station, feeling a sense that this is the most alien landscape I've ever been in. I spent a year there, and as someone who loves science fiction, I'm sure one of your favorite things was the sun doesn't go up and down.

It goes around the sky like this. So you could be on another planet with three sons or. And seeing that was the first kind of proof of concept that we did absolutely live on a planet that had a pole and that, you know, has all these orbital properties that we always learned about. And there they were. The experiment had been run, and there we were watching it play out. When I was at the South Pole, I remember two particular feelings that I had. It was very quiet. Yes, there was a sense that my senses felt different and I experienced things very differently. The other was that you're so far away from anything, so the idea of a rescue

or somebody coming to get you if something went wrong felt very remote. Both of those sensations. So the first just the sights and sounds. And I remember this crunching of the snow under your massively insulated boots, especially in the winter when it was dark, no one else was out there, and it was this kind of soundtrack of your movement. I remember also being struck by all the science experiments that were going on there. There was an ice cube experiment. Were you involved in any of the science experiments at the South Pole?

I was involved, and the job I had was kind of running all of the physics experiments that were there and in a different station also that I lived at. So I got to see so many different experiments. There was add ons to Ice Cube. There were other telescopes that I ran, and I also ran the cryogenics program there, because the superconductors and all the telescopes needed the ultra cooling. So it was a really neat kind of mishmash of the instrumentation and engineering that supported the science and then some of the science as well. And again, this through line I've tried to pick up on in my life of science at the frontiers, and that's really what it ends up being, because

there are things that are only knowable if we go to those frontiers. So we really just have two choices. Do we go there and learn it, or do we choose not to? Do we declare it's unknowable or not worth knowing? And I love that we go. There's a theme in your career, as best as I can tell from a distance, how there's part of you that's explorer going to all these extreme, extraordinary places, a part of you that's kind of an engineer. You're building things, you're repairing things, you're making things. And then also the scientists where you're running experiments.

Do you think of yourself that way? Well, yes. And that did not help me pick a career field at all. It definitely made things difficult because I do love all those things. I've always been fascinated by the theoretical relativity, quantum and the night sky. I've been described as a free spirit. I love to travel. I love gaining new perspectives. And then, of course, the tinkering. I love tools in my hands. My dad and I named his workshop shed Heaven.

It's led to a lot of different paths, and sometimes they come together just beautifully. And sometimes I end up focusing on one over another. But luckily there's been a lot of room at the frontiers to bring them all together. Your time in Antarctica led you to eventually to join the Space Corps and the space program. So was that a planned trajectory? Well, I knew I wanted to, but I also knew that whatever conventional most likely path to becoming an astronaut was that wasn't going to work for me because I never really had the means or overly desire

to get a private pilot's license on my own or go into the military. Great respect for all of those things, but they weren't what called me. I was called by what we just talked about a little bit more. And I remember going to Space Camp one year, and they were actually teaching a class on how to become an astronaut, and everyone was writing down this checklist that they had put on the board. And I just looked around like, well, this is definitely not going to happen for me because all these people around me are just as excited.

I'm surrounded by space geeks, and so I really decided to live more according to what had meaning and fulfillment for me, and then made the decision that if I looked back on my career and I could make the case to myself, that maybe I could contribute to this thing that I held in such high regard, human spaceflight, that only then would I apply and tell them what I've got and see if they thought I could join the team. But I never in a million years thought it would happen. With all my interest in space and space travel, the closest I ever came to that was when I worked at their propulsion lab. That's the closest I ever came to this. But when you did get to go to space, there's so many firsts

that you are involved in that year and one could go on forever. Talk about all your various firsts. But one of the first thing that struck me was you spent the longest period that any woman had ever spent on the International Space Station, what, 328 days? Yes. What was that like? So I found out for sure about six weeks in that I would be staying for almost 11 months. Oh, well, what did you think? How long do you think you're going. To be? About six months. A standard mission, yes. And in the end, I would have been devastated to leave after six months.

It was just I was so happy there. I loved the work, I loved the views, I love the teamwork. My crews and I'm so happy it lasted so long. One interesting thing was, you know, all along in the space program, you're sitting on the rocket. This is intimidating, but you can always tell yourself, so many people have done this before, so many people. This is going to be fine. This is routine. Losing bone after six months, all routine. And then I got to about 8 or 9 months. And I was trying to use that same logic to, you know, this is fine. And I realized, actually, no, no one's done this before.

And that was just an interesting inflection point where I realized that this is what a trailblazing thing means. Getting to one of your next first because you got so many was the I think you've done six EVAs extravehicular activity, and you did the first one, which is an old woman, EVA. What was that like? It was an incredible honor. We didn't even realize there hadn't been an all female EVA at the time that I graduated from my EVA spacewalk training. So all this was new. And as a first, your only hope is that you won't be an only. And I'm so happy to say that there's been several pairs of all female EVAs since then. And we're just we're part of teams, of teams, of women in space, and that's just phenomenal.

The thing I remember from that particular EVA, because I remember watching on TV and reports of it, was you did the first repair of one of the setups, I think for the battery beside the unit had actually broken down or something yet to go outside and fix it. That's 100% right. It was the battery charging unit. Yes, it had broken. They had never anticipated having to make that particular repair. This is by far the coolest thing about the spacewalks. I'm so glad you brought it up. We worked with the teams over the course of a week and figured out how we would fix this.

I got to ride on the robotic arm. We had to carry this gigantic thing that actually was too big to go on our standard carrier of hardware, so we had to shepherd it all the way down the trust to the farthest possible place from the airlock. That week of teamwork, getting on video calls with folks, throwing out ideas, hearing their ideas, seeing the procedures developed so quickly, going through the motions in the airlock every choreographed move, but then knowing that it could change on the fly because it had not been practiced, it was awesome. Normally those kinds of procedures are planned months, if not years in advance. And you had, what, 6 or 7 days?

A week. Normally it's a multi-month, if not year process where all of the timelines are adjusted. Several teams have ran them before, and it's almost like a memorized choreography. And you're outside the spacecraft for how long at a time? That one was about 7.5 hours. Oh, this is neat. So, you know, as you're doing a spacewalk, the main thing you hear on the loops in Mission Control is what is our limiting consumable and forever and ever. The limiting consumable had been CO2 removal capacity. It was the first time I've ever heard on the loops. The limiting consumable is battery life.

You can stay out there for eight hours. Oh, wow. And so we had a 7.5 hour spacewalk. And yeah, it was awesome. Your most recent extraordinary first, which is, you know, the first woman to go beyond low Earth orbit to the other side of the moon on the Artemis II mission. It was an incredible dream come true mission. I, I can't even begin to process how much of a just, life changing thing it is to see something else in the solar system that you cannot see from this planet. How does it feel as the woman? Honestly, I don't think of it as an individual accomplishment whatsoever. To me, there is something to celebrate about these firsts, but it's more about

what we've decided as society, as NASA, that we're more successful when we go together, when we take anyone with a talent, hard work, ability, or desire to apply their gifts to a mission. And that's really the only way we can explore for all and by all, and answer humanity's call to do it. I can't imagine the teamwork and the work that goes into accomplishing these missions and all the people involved, and how all of you extraordinarily accomplished and prepared. There's something about that which hopefully will inspire generations of young girls and others to say, they can do this too.

The idea that if I can inspire the future explorers, no matter who they are or what they look like, but yes, in particular, if they find strength and joy in seeing someone that looks like them, that is amazing. I mean, I would be nothing without Katherine Johnson, and if I can be that for someone. I had the chance to meet Sally Ride once and it was a quick encounter. She shook my hand, but she looked into my eyes and I felt like what she said with her eyes was, I see your dreams and they're worth something. And so I carry that. And every time I shake a little girl a little boy's hand,

I just remember that's what I have to do. One of the things I've heard you talk about is how. I mean, obviously you had the experience of being on International Space Station and then on Artemis, which is when much further away, how the view of the Earth was different. A lot has been written about the overview effect. Talk about the difference in the vantage points, both when you're close to Earth in lower orbit, and then when you're in on Artemis II mission much further away.

Yeah, I didn't know what to expect in that regard. I mean, how am I going to feel when I can cover up the entire Earth with my thumb? I don't know. Is that the right way to think about it? I mean, that's what it was. It was that small out the window that could cover it up quarter million miles away. When I was on board the space station, we were always so close to Earth. You could go to the cupola, the bay window of the space station anytime. Look out on Earth. But you always saw one thing the thin line of the atmosphere.

Even at night. It was this really thin green line always outlining the atmosphere. And it reminded you that Earth was fragile, that it was this delicate ecosystem barely held together, obviously something to cherish. But the fragility was there, seeing the earth from far away. I didn't experience that same fragility. I experienced it like this gorgeous lifeboat. It was bright electric blue. It was calling our name. I like to say, if I had been cruising by through the solar system and saw that one, I'd be like, let's go there, let's go. That's a cool one. And it was just it made me feel lucky.

It made me feel like I have a home planet and that's it. And it's just powerful. It's there was also a lot of blackness around it. So that's something else. You don't see the full circle from the space station. You don't see how much more emptiness there is than a place that can harbor us. And that safe harbor lifeboat feeling was just so much more strong in this mission. As somebody was watching your mission from back on Earth. And, you know, with the nightly broadcast, there are two views that always stayed with you.

One was the four of you on the spacecraft. It was incredible sight to see the four of you with all the diversity at the same time. Also see the view out of the window. It also spoke to humanity and all of us. I mean, how did that make you feel when you thought about the four of you? And yes, we talked about that. If there's anything astronauts. Is it is the junks tapasya of the mundane and the majestic? I mean, just right there, you know. Excuse me. Can you move your foot? I need to go into the toilet versus.

Oh, the earth just came into view over here, and now it's a crescent. It's putting the human in exploration. And the four of us just packed into a little spot together, representing, we hope, the planet that we're seeing out the window. That I think is the part that's just a little bit magic. Let me go back on the window view from the and looking back on Earth, maybe from your time on ES, did you see any of the places you've visited from up in space? Yes, and that was another amazing set of views. The biggest surprise was how profound it was to look at your home. I grew up in coastal North Carolina with this iconic coastline, the Outer Banks, and I was in the cupola once,

and it just came into view slowly off of like a very askew view on the horizon. And when I realized I was looking at the Outer Banks of North Carolina on this planet, it literally took my breath away. Well, you've been to Ghana. Do you see Ghana's face? I absolutely did, and that's another one of them was amazing. Ecological changes that you can see from space is the blending from the Sahara into the way more lush West African, southern, West African coast. And that demarcation is one of the most profound things to see on planet Earth, but I did. I spent time in Ghana, I studied abroad there, and so to see that was awesome.

I flew a Ghanaian flag on the mission. So I took pictures and we actually saw Ghana on the Artemis two mission as well. Another first in this mission was this incredible hybrid trajectory return trajectory. How did the math of that actually work? Some of my favorite classes, I'm telling you. So we learned so many fascinating things, the constraints that they use to solve these trajectory problems. Because really ultimately what you need to tell the spacecraft is which direction to point the engine and how. What's your delta V, how long to have the engine on? You can control to all kinds of things height above the earth angle at which you intersect the Earth.

Parallel how high you are on the far side of the moon where you how close? I mean, just a million different parameters. Or you can put multiple parameters in, but the more you constrain the problem, the more difficult it is exactly to solve. So then we start talking with the teams. Well, what if we end up without communication with the ground teams is called PCL permanent comm loss. We always had to account for it. And then we asked the computer to solve the trajectory and it didn't converge. So we had this whole procedure where if that happened, we would take constraints of the math problem one by one, try to converge until we got it.

And so you're accepting a little more risk because you're putting the spacecraft in a less precise trajectory, potentially, or with fewer constraints, but you at least have a solution. And how much wiggle room did you have in the burn to get it just right, because you landed pretty close to where you hoped to land? Yes. And that was by design because there's so many things perturbative our trajectory mainly venting the life support system, venting of our CO2, and those errors added up to an error. At what a critical point that we call EAI entry interface 400,000ft up, about 75 miles up. And that's where you appreciably start to hit the atmosphere. That was probably the most critical part of it was hitting AI at the right angle, speed and location

to make sure that the trajectory through the atmosphere was one that our heat shield could handle, and it had to be very precise. Well, I guess as I say, the math masked. The math masked, thank goodness. Yes. All of you as a crew were just working together in an inspiring way. And, you know, in one of the most touching moments was when in fact, you did the dedication for the names of the craters on the other side. Did you plan that in advance? Well, we only planned it slightly in advance, actually, in our very last scientific training, someone made a kind of offhand comment

about naming craters, and one famous one is Mount Marilyn. Jim Lovell named that for his wife. For a second I thought, I'm going to name one for the first husband, my husband. And then instantly it just came to me. Reid needs to dedicate one to his late wife, Carol. And so a few days before the mission, I talked it over with my other two crewmates, Jeremy and Victor. They loved the idea, and Jeremy, since he's closest to read, they were in the same astronaut class and he knew Carol very well.

He approached Reed. Reed was very moved and he said, I can agree to that, but I can't make the speech. I can't be the one to do it. And so Jeremy said, I can do it. But the rules are you have to see it and be sure you see it. And it's just a fascinating thing to name a crater. We named one after her, one after our spacecraft. So there's also an integrity crater, and just everything melted away except for us in that moment. For me. One of the things I know you've spent a lot of time working on is the science that happens on these missions. ES what a platform where you can hold gravity as one of your variables.

How cool. I loved kind of upgrading some of their apparatus and getting out the tools and doing that with cold Atom Labs, creating Bose-Einstein condensates by the coldest places on Earth, and combustion experiments, and just so many amazing things in that fundamental physics realm. But the neatest thing I did was completely out of my realm in biology. I actually got to get out a microscope on the space station and look at proteins crystallizing that had never been seen before, because without gravity, they don't collapse on themselves, or they just have more degrees of freedom to form their crystals.

This leads to drug discovery. And that felt really exciting. That's fascinating because we spent my colleagues got a Nobel Prize for this, spend time trying to understand structure of proteins. And I think what they got to was all the proteins known to science. And so your work suggests that probably even more proteins. That's the. Hope for me as somebody who works on AI and robotics and those kinds of things. In fact, the work that I did when I, when I, when I was a visiting scientist at JPL was, as shown, the man machine systems

for autonomous systems for the Mars missions in the late 90s. What do you see as the possibilities of AI and robotics in space? Well, it's funny because oftentimes robotics and astronauts are kind of pitted against each other, but astronauts don't feel that way. We 100% think that it's a partnership. And if there's a robotics or AI that can augment this human mind in place, that is even better.

Let's leverage both. And in fact, when something does break in the space station, the first thing they do is analyze whether it can be fixed robotically and if ultimately it can't. That's when they try to design a spacewalk. One of the projects one of my teams is working on is we call it Project Sun Catcher, which is an ambitious effort. Moonshot, if you like, to someday in the future to be able to do compute in space. But if we're going to do that, we're going to have to build these structures and arrays. And so one of the key questions, how do you do maintenance? How do you think about that.

You have all the physical ingredients you need. You have an energy source. You have space. And from the energy you can create whatever radiators are there to dissipate the heat that's created. If there's processing. And then of course, the communication is getting pounded into low-Earth orbit has been made wildly less cost prohibitive. So all the technological hurdles are just ready to be solved. So whether you build in a failure rate in your design or you have some kind of preventative maintenance robotics, that's also, again, just tailor made. I think in many respects, for us, the key motivating idea is the fact that, you know, the energy problem is kind of solved by definition,

the sun is 110 times more powerful than as an energy source. So we're very excited about that. Space has always conjured up the big questions. It's all inspiring and all of that, but questions of exploration and discovery. And recently I was edited this volume of deadness, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And this is what I in science. And one of the contributors to it, young LeCun, is, you know, well-known computer scientists and AI researcher, said the big questions come down to questions about what's origin of the universe.

You know, what is this thing called life and how does the brain work? And I remember thinking, as somebody who loves space, I think he left one out, which is are we alone? What exactly? This is my question. I always say, because, you know, it is a big resource. Ask at this time to do deep space exploration. And so what necessitates that resource expenditure. And it has to be something that's big. The greatest philosophical question of our time, because there are tons of benefits. There's industrial benefits, there's technology, there's building up our manufacturing sector, there's inspiration.

I love those, but they don't answer the mail for me, I, I need something more fundamental to motivate and to justify this expenditure. And for me, it's it's are we alone? It changes everything about how we see ourselves in the universe. If we can answer that. Session now that we're discovering all of these Earth like planets everywhere, and one has to wonder about the paradox, which is, yeah, if all these habitable, potentially habitable places are all there, how come we haven't seen them and haven't seen us? Yes.

I always think about the signal from an intelligent civilization as kind of like a 3D donut of radio frequencies, EMI that goes out into the universe, but it has a start and an end. If our 3D bubble happens to intersect that 3D bubble that's growing. And again, it's like a tour. It's not a solid, it's a donut. And when I think about it that way, I actually think some miracle if we do figure out, because time is another infinity, the inner and outer diameter of those communication donuts, I'll, I really should come up with a better word. I think we have to keep looking, but I'm not worried that we haven't seen it yet.

What I do think, and I learned this from Artemis, is that if we ever do find another intelligent species, it won't be because they were super intelligent or even invented AGI. It will be because they were cooperative. What do you say to young aspiring explorers? Scientists? What do you say to them as you think about the future discovery? Exploration? One of the first things I say is do what scares you. And my crew has always put forth this idea that being scared is not bad.

Everyone feels fear, but the idea is can you operate within that? Can you focus within that? But also on life's, you know, forks in the road. Oftentimes there's a path this way and a path this way. This way might seem scary. This way might seem easy. Which one do I take? More than likely. You got to take the scary one. Find fulfillment. It doesn't necessarily have to be a flash in the pan. Passion. Find something you can do the slowest for the longest and you will be happier for the longest. And the last one, if I may.

I keep going is support the people around you. There was a great quote I heard recently that if your dreams are only about yourself, you're not dreaming big enough. You made one of the most memorable images that anybody's ever going to make of the US. When you got that photograph of the Earth's rise from the other side of the moon, I want to get a poster of that. By the way you find it. That image is so meaningful to me. That was one of the images I had up on my wall from the Apollo eight mission. And the fact that there's another one now taken by this Artemis generation that's going back.

And in a time when we can stay and take all the benefits, keeping them, that's what that represents to me. It's powerful, and I love that. NASA is very committed to the exact photo that I took or our crew took. That's the photo of the world sees. Wow. Well thank. You, thank you. This is a fun conversation. So fun. Do we have to stop?