From SEAL to Space: Becoming NASA’s Top Astronaut with Chris Cassidy, President & CEO of the National Medal of Honor Museum
Willy Walker: Welcome to another Walker Webcast. I am incredibly honored to have Captain Chris Cassidy joining me today to talk about his career as a Navy SEAL, as an astronaut, and now as the CEO of the Medal of Honor Museum and Foundation. Chris's career is quite honestly one of the most impressive and far-reaching of anyone that I've had on the Walker Webcast. As those people who have been listening to the Walker Webcast for as long as we've had it, I have had some really impressive guests in the past. So Chris, let me jump into your bio for a moment. Then I'm going to dive in with some questions on all sorts of things, from what it's like to travel in space to what it's like to be launched out of a submarine to all the great work you're doing today at the Medal of Honor Museum. Captain Chris Cassidy is a retired NASA astronaut, United States Navy SEAL, and now serves as CEO of the Medal of Honor Museum and Foundation. Captain Cassidy was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and MIT, was the platoon commander of SEAL Team Three, NASA's chief astronaut, and one of only three men to be a SEAL and an astronaut. He has spent almost a year in space, has five children, has competed in the World Triathlon Championships in Kona, Hawaii, and is the recipient of not only the Bronze Star, but as I was getting ready for this, I listed all the awards you've won. Combine the Bronze Star with the Valor Device and Award Star, Combat Action Ribbon, Presidential Unit Citation, NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, NASA Space Flight Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, and Sea Service Deployment Ribbon. I can only imagine that when you are in your uniform, all of those medals take up a big, big part of your left chest. Finally, I would add that, as I said previously, I've had a lot of really impressive people on the Walker Webcast and not to take anything away from them, but I will say Captain Cassidy, it is a true honor to talk to you about your very varied and wildly accomplished life and your service to the United States of America. So welcome and thank you for joining me today.
Chris Cassidy: Thank you, Willy. I'm humbled to be with you and just looking very much forward to this conversation.
Willy Walker: Great. I also have to thank my director, Donna Wells, who's a board member at Walker & Dunlop, for introducing me to you and putting all of this together. I greatly appreciate Donna connecting the two of us. So Chris, if I back up to you growing up in Maine, from what I've listened to you talk about your childhood, you were an accomplished young man in high school who played three sports. You were a good student, but it wasn't as if everyone was sitting there saying that Chris is gonna go turn the world on fire as it relates to either his academic or his athletic performance. You were working the summers mowing lawns and watching your parents manage their restaurant and put in really hard work and time in managing that restaurant to learn that work ethic, which clearly drives you today. But I guess my question, Chris, is when did you realize that your skills were exceptional? When was that moment? Knowing you, you're gonna try and demure on that and say, “No, there was no…”. When was that moment when you suddenly said, “I’ve got something here?“
Chris Cassidy: That's a great question, Willy, and one that makes me think a lot, because you're right. I don't really ever recall that in my SEAL team time, and even my first spaceflight, but I remember probably the time we were training for my second space mission in a big pool at NASA called the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. I was doing pretty well as a spacewalk, kind of a member of the NASA Astronaut Corps. I realized at one point that I was sort of known as one of the better spacewalkers. And that was a little eye-opening to me, like, oh wow. There are 500 people who have gone to space. So it's a very small cohort of people. And now all of a sudden, you're one of the better spacewalkers. There are very few people on the face of the planet who could even say that they're a spacewalker. And even if you were off the planet, right? After my second mission, I was somehow offered the job of chief astronaut. That moment was a little bit like, “Oh, wow, am I equipped to be the chief astronaut?” And I kind of had a little bit of self-doubt, like you said. And at some point after a couple of days of just, “Wow, am I ready for that?,” I realized, “You know what? I am ready.” Life has given me a lot of cool experiences, and those experiences, each one of them, was a different arrow in the quiver. So it was probably when I became Chief Astronaut that I realized, “Oh, geez, I guess I'm regarded as the leader within the Astronaut Corps.”
Willy Walker: It's not surprising to me that in getting to that answer, you jump over multiple moments where you were selected as a leader amongst leaders. I mean, I can go back in your story about forgetting to apply to the Naval Academy and being happy to go on a trip with a friend of yours to Washington, DC. You took the initiative to go to Annapolis, meeting someone in the admissions office who, after you'd found out that your congressman had sent the letter recommending you to the Naval Academy, but you didn't know that you also had to put in an application on your own. And that gentleman called you up. For whatever reason, you struck him in his office that day in Annapolis as someone special enough for him to go and say, “You need to go to Navy Prep for a year, and we'll give you a full ride to Navy Prep. Then you can go on to the Naval Academy.” I mean, at that moment, something had to come to you to say, “I wonder what he saw in me that he didn't see in the other thousands of kids to whom he could have given a scholarship to Navy Prep.”
Chris Cassidy: It's interesting that, as a young, naive 17-year-old from my little bubble in a small town in Maine, I didn't view it through that lens. I thought, “Oh, wow, I'm so lucky that this guy gave me that opportunity.” It wasn't until later in life that I reflected on that moment, that I realized how special that was because he was interacting with, I presume, kids throughout the application cycle that year. I don't know what those interactions were like, but somehow he gave me an opportunity. And I realized as a more adult with some maturity, realized, “Wow, that was pretty special.” For whatever reason, he looked me in my eyes and said,” I'll give it to this guy.” And particularly Willy, like you and I now are in a stage of life where we can be helpful to others. And we've been in that position of looking at the young person saying, “All right, this is one I believe in.”
Willy Walker: Let's jump through Annapolis for a moment. I would also posit to you that as you sat there in your dress whites at some ceremony, whether it was at the beginning or at the end of being at the Naval Academy, that I mean, everyone who goes to the Naval Academy understands that they are special, that they have been selected from a broad, broad pool of Americans to go and serve at the Naval Academy and then go on and give our country five years of service as an active member of our military and armed services. But let's go through to BUD/S. You decided to take the path towards being a SEAL. What was it? Because as I've heard you say, when you're at Annapolis, you don't necessarily get profiled to go one way or the other—to be a sub-commander or to try and go be a SEAL or all the other varying or be a Marine, what have you. What was it about being a SEAL that made you say, “I wanna go to BUD/S and give this a try?”
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, so I graduated high school in ‘88 and NAPS in ‘89. So that ‘89 to '93 period is when I was at the Naval Academy. If you recall, that was pre-internet, pre-Navy SEAL common word in our nation's talking heads on the various news channels. None of that existed. So I was completely unaware about Navy SEALs when I showed up there. And I saw a couple of the trident pins on a couple of guys in uniform, and they had some mentors on the staff there. I was pretty impressed by those gentlemen, and that initial impression of, “Wow, they kind of look like they're squared away” drew me to start going to the morning PT sessions. That was not because I wanted to be a SEAL; it was just because I was interested to be around those people. They seemed motivating, and there were two of them. That initial spark, I think it was not freshman year, it was sophomore year, that I really kind of got engaged and was doing the morning activities and attending some special invitation things for folks that were interested in being a SEAL. And then I really caught the bug probably junior year. And then between junior and senior year, you can go out to California and do like a one-month session of a BUD/S kind of like a little sampling of what it is for you to decide if it's for you and for them to assess you. Do we want this person to get one of the billets? It was in that process that the fire really got lit. Once I got out there and I was in the environment getting wet and sandy, I realized that I could hang. I was a good runner and decent swimmer. So none of that was stressful for me, and the program gets you physically fit. They don't expect you to do on day one what they expect you to do on graduation day. So it's a steep curve, but they get your body ready. And so I was adaptive and kind of left that summer going, yes, this is for me. I love the environment. I love that camaraderie. I know I can hang physically, just a matter of staying healthy, and off I went.
Willy Walker: On that, two things. First, there were clearly some dark moments. I've been honored to know a number of SEALS and talk to them about the BUD/S and getting through it. There were clearly some dark moments where it's three o'clock in the morning, you're in 52-degree sea water, and you've been in it for four hours, and your whole body is shaking. What was that thought or that place you went to, Chris, that gave you, quite honestly, the fortitude to get through those moments? Was there something in your childhood or someone who had said to you, “You can do anything you put your mind to, Chris,” that was in that loop when things got really dark and hard when you were in BUD/S training?
Chris Cassidy: No, but I think I'm just innately a person that doesn't like to disappoint people who believe in me or love me, or I love them. I just don't want to let folks down. And I remember in Plebe, my first summer at NAPS, when I was 18, it was hard then, not like Navy SEAL training, but for a person coming right out of high school. But I had that, that was the first time I remember thinking, “I don't want to let my family down by not getting through this” and that theme has kind of stuck with me throughout all of life. It’s this fear, not of failure, but fear of letting my teammates down. In BUD/S, you're organized into these things called boat crews. It's usually like six to eight people. You're physically carrying a boat together, usually organized by height because otherwise the boat's pretty crooked if the one guy's really short and the other guy's really tall. So you're with your boat crew. And in those dark moments, like you said, because it does happen, it happens frequently where it's three in the morning and you're cold and every muscle in your body is contracting and you are shivering uncontrollably. It's not wanting to drop the boat so your corner of it falls, or not wanting to let go of the log that you're holding over your head, because it takes every single one of you to hold those monstrous logs. Or just quite simply swimming along on a cold ocean swim, and your buddy's in the kicking and striding and groove, and you don't want the buddy line to go taut as he starts dragging you or vice versa. So it's that moment of team camaraderie, love of shipmates, that has always kept me going.
Willy Walker: So you talk about swimming in the dark ocean off Coronado. First of all, I can't imagine being out in that ocean at two o'clock in the morning with the sharks and the cold and everything else. I'm sure lots of other people watching this can sort of associate with my fear of that.
Chris Cassidy: We call the sharks “the man in the gray suit.”
Willy Walker: Yeah, exactly. Well, I wouldn't be surprised that the Navy actually put someone in a gray suit to freak you out. Nonetheless, as I think about that, I don't want to skip forward here because I want to stay on this. I want to stay to being a SEAL commander and going into combat. But when I think of that, Chris, of you being in the ocean, the big dark ocean in the middle of the night, or you being not only in harm's way, at war in Afghanistan. I think about you being launched out of a submarine into one of those small little subs, which as I listened to you give another interview, you said the two favorite places that you've been on Earth were in that little sub being launched out of a submarine, which would scare the you-know-what out of me. And then also being up in space, looking through the cupola of the International Space Station, and looking back at Earth. Those two places, for me, Willy Walker, would freak me out. I spend I don't know how many hours a year in airplanes flying all over the place. But what is it that has gotten you so relaxed about being in situations that most of us would be petrified to be in?
Chris Cassidy: I think I've thought a lot about this, really, about this concept of fear. I think fear is largely driven by unknowns, uncertainties, and things you can't control. The higher the uncertainty, the higher the fear. And at the very basic level, I kind of love this analogy. You look at a kindergartner on day one, never having been to school before, and they're screaming and crying, and mom and dad are dragging their hand to the door. They came back at lunchtime and the kid’s got 20 best new friends. They're smiling. They don't even know mom and dad are at the door because all the anxiety and fear are gone, and you know the environment now. And so that's how I equate training and preparation. You're never going to like in case of a space launch, when you strap yourself to a big pile of fuel, you're never gonna eliminate all the risk, but with the smart engineers and the well-designed spacecraft with redundant systems and emergency ejections and things you can do with a variety of things, you feel a little more comfortable because you know that the team in mission control can respond to certain things. You guys can respond to certain things as a crew, and that drives the anxiety down. You just know, “Okay, we've trained for this; we prepared for this. We can battle our way through whatever those situations are.” Same thing on a combat mission as a SEAL. That's the whole point of detailed mission planning. You assess every single risk and put thought and kind of “what if, what happens if this.” Then, at NASA, we call it the next worst failure. Okay, we're given this scenario. What's the worst thing that can fail that would make our lives miserable? And then do one more; we generally do two “what if, next worst case failures.” I love that concept because then you as an individual and you as a group, feel like, “Okay, there's always risk here, but we know what we're gonna do in a variety of different curve balls.”
Willy Walker: First of all, what I love hearing there as it relates to the preparation and the planning is I've also heard you talk about that you can't control the outcome of something you strive to accomplish, but as long as you have gone and given it your all, you have to take away from that, that you did everything you could to achieve the mission. You may or may not have achieved it, but as long as you gave it your all and did everything in your own power, then you take that failure and you move on from it. And I think a lot of what you're talking about regarding fear is very analogous to the way you look at accomplishment as well. One of the things, Chris, as I hear you talk that through. There's a common trait amongst the handful of Navy SEALs that I've gotten to know over the years. That is what I'd call quiet leadership. I think all of us look at SEALS as these paragons of leadership from a physical standpoint, from a mental standpoint, from just generally sort of saying, “Wow, SEALs are these incredibly talented individuals who have the strength and the mental capacity.” But there's also a sereneness that I think is somewhat contradictory to what we typically would associate with leaders. There are a lot of leaders who have a lot of bravado; they talk a lot rather than listen a lot. They act quickly and take leadership. Whereas most of the SEALs that I have known and in doing background on you and meeting you today, I can clearly tell there's a certain sense of sereneness or quiet leadership. Do you think that's innate, or do you think that's taught through SEAL training?
Chris Cassidy: I think maybe a teaspoon of innateness, but more sort of learned behavior. That's just my opinion, through experiences and life. Where that light bulb really dawned on me, for me, was when I was a very young SEAL officer. I was not in charge of our platoon. I was kind of just a member of it and watching other leaders. I was still an officer, and in military structure, even the junior officer is senior to the most experienced enlisted guy. We were doing training, a couple of weeks of training, doing some land warfare things. They're long days, and you've got a lot of gear to prep as an individual and as a team. And it can kind of consume you, and a well-run unit is always like the evolution starts at 10 a.m. A well-run unit is standing there at 9.55 with all the gear done, all the things ready, and the instructor shows up and says, “Okay, let's go.” Ones that don’t quite have their act together, people are straggling in at 10:03, 10:04. All the gear's not prepped. I remember learning a little bit of that in BUD/S, but then, seeing it now, I'm in a real unit and watching the senior enlisted guys exhibit it. They were always squared away. They always had their gear perfectly done. And so I started to emulate that. Then, when I became in charge of my own SEAL platoon, that behavior was there, and I always tried to just have my own act together and be five minutes early with all the stuff done and just helping make sure that the team did too. I remember once at one point, one of the guys came up and said, “Hey, sir, we appreciate you always being on time.” One of the instructors actually said, "We appreciate it.” No, he said, “Hey, Cassidy, why are you here five minutes early?” And I said, “Well, I'm trying to lead by example.” And he goes, “You are.” And, that coming from a senior enlisted Navy SEAL—that there was a training guy looking up to that that I looked up to meant a lot. You can really model good behavior, and the unit will adapt, and we'll do that too.
Willy Walker: SEAL Team 3 was ready to be deployed in November of 2001 when, tragically, 9/11 happened. You were in Coronado and saw 9/11 happen and didn't know whether you were gonna be deployed that day or the next day or a week later, but you knew it was coming. One of the things, Chris, as I heard you talk about how SEAL teams are named as it relates to regions around the globe, I was interested that SEAL Team Three corresponded to the Middle East. I was just curious, how come SEAL Team Six? Is SEAL Team Six the East Coast Middle East team, and SEAL Team Three the West Coast Middle East team? Because it seems like in the history of warfare, the war against terror, that SEAL Team Six is the one that's always referenced, while SEAL Team Three also had the geographic region of being the Middle East Team. What am I missing there as it released SEAL Team 3 versus SEAL Team 6?
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, that's an insightful question. So just SEAL Team 101: there are East Coast SEAL Teams and West Coast SEAL Teams, Norfolk, Virginia and Coronado, California. On the East Coast, SEAL Teams 2, 4, 8, and 10 are the SEAL team there in Norfolk, and SEAL Teams 1, 3, 5, and 7 are out in Coronado. So you noticed I didn't say 6. The team that at that point was known as SEAL Team 6 has a different name. Common in the world, people still refer to it as SEAL Team 6 and such, but it's really a Naval Special Warfare Development Group. And that is a separate chain of command. It's under the Joint Special Operations Command along with Delta Force. So the Naval Special Warfare Development Group and Delta Force are our nation's tier-one response units to anywhere in the world. So they are not sort of under this same geographic spread that the numbered SEAL teams are.
Willy Walker: Got it. Super helpful, and it makes a lot of sense then on why SEAL Team Six, for instance, was the one to go into the compound after Osama bin Laden, while the Middle East corresponded to SEAL Team Three. You've seen a lot during that period, as far as being a Navy SEAL, two tours over in Afghanistan, leading your platoon, and successfully leading. I guess the question I have for you is, you'd been so successful there, and were at the precipice of being deployed abroad again, when someone mentioned to you potentially becoming an astronaut. And one of the things that surprised me, Chris, was, I had always thought, as you had, that you needed to be a pilot to be an astronaut. And you actually don't need to be a pilot to be an astronaut. Because of that you were able to go and apply to be an astronaut and I heard you tell the story in a very self-deprecating way of having gone down to Houston. You're competing with these wildly talented people, and you sort of called your wife and said, “Don't jump on the realty site quite yet I'm not exactly sure I'm gonna get through. There's 16 people around me who are amazingly talented, and then there's all these other groups that are competing for these spaces.” Not surprising to those people watching and to me studying you, you were selected to become an astronaut. What was it at that moment that said to you, “I want to step away from my SEAL career being a SEAL leader and, if you will, combat warfare, to go into an equally as important but much less sort of, if you will, critical role?” And then also wrapped up in that a little bit, Chris, was this. In my SEAL friends, one of the big things that I have seen them all struggle with is the adrenaline rush that comes from being a SEAL, being called up and sent to the most dangerous places on earth, and defending our country, defending our democracy, and that adrenaline keeps them going. And as much as it produces significant problems from a family standpoint and from a lifestyle standpoint, there's something about that adrenaline that's almost addictive to them. How did you put that aside to go and move into your career as an astronaut?
Chris Cassidy: Well, the first part of that, I didn't feel like, “OK, I don't want to be a SEAL anymore, so I'm going to look for something else.” It was not that I realized, like you correctly said, “Oh, you don't have to be a pilot to be an astronaut. Well, what the h*ck? Let me just apply and see what happens if I get selected. That would be so freaking cool. And if I don't, no big deal.” I love what I'm doing as a SEAL, and I probably would have stayed for 20 years as a career doing that, remaining in the Navy. I just really liked being in the Navy, and I really liked the job as a SEAL. So it wasn't an effort to try to be done with either one of those two things. And as for the adrenaline rush, I never really thought about it in that context because I think it's healthy to be a new guy periodically in life and push yourself to learn new things. When you get too comfortable in what you're doing, it’s almost easy to be complacent, and you don't push your capacities as much. So I was at a point where I don't say I was the best SEAL in the whole world, but I felt comfortable doing it, and I felt comfort in that world. When I became an astronaut, it was all sudden, “Oh my gosh, I got a lot to learn. I've never studied line drawings of valves and electrical systems of vehicles. I've never had to speak publicly to schools and communities. That's a whole other thing about the job of an astronaut. I've never had to do a spacewalk. I don't know how to put a suit on.” So all of those things were learning curves. It just kept me engaged, and because I think with all that, my brain was constantly going with “How do I become the best astronaut I can be?” I never really felt this void where adrenaline was, because as soon as you get assigned to a mission, you know that that big day is coming where you're going to have the adrenaline rush.
Willy Walker: I was just going to say, as I think about all the training you did, and then also literally, as you said previously, being strapped to a fuel tank and launched into space, no lack of either fear, adrenaline, or danger.
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, no, absolutely. And everybody always thinks of launch day as the scary day, but reentry is equally so. All the conservation of energy that is real, all that energy that you see, that you're dealing with on launch day, is behind you. All the energy that you have to deal with on reentry day is right in front of your bottom, and you've got to go through all that heat. So it's equally as intense coming home.
Willy Walker: In many interviews that I watch of yours, lots of people wanna be like, “What's it like to be in space?” And I'm gonna skip over that. And if anybody wants to hear Chris's response to what it's like to be in space, there are lots of videos out there of him talking about that. I do love the analogy you put, though, Chris, is that you act like a five-year-old, even though you're 50 years old, out in space, and that the fun of being there never sort of subsides. But I wanna back up to your first space mission when you were in the shuttle. Is there anything that you had done previously, or is there training they give you to give your body the sense of what it's going to be on launch day? Everything from the film that I've seen, it's incredibly loud. The vibrations are just shaking your body. And I think about the launch, and I get freaked out when we bounce around in the clouds with a little bit of turbulence. I can't imagine the amount of turbulence that you feel as you're getting launched off of the launch pad. Is there anything that prepares you for that feeling?
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, not really. Actually, that's a great question because, for the simulator, we have a variety of different ones, some that are just stagnant in the room all the way up to full motion ones that have great graphics and the whole cabin is moving on hydraulic gimbals. Those give you a fantastic understanding and appreciation and anticipation of the displays and the visuals out the window and, slightly, the movement of things. But there's no simulator in the shuttle, or my other two missions that were in a Soyuz. There's no simulator that shakes your molar teeth. You gotta wait until the real launch happens. In fact, in the case of the shuttle, the two white solid rocket motors on the side are solid fuel. It looks and feels like a pencil eraser, and the orange tank has liquid fuel. In the first two minutes, the thrust is largely coming from the solid rocket motors. And at least in the case of shuttle Endeavour, those burns were very bumpy. And right off the launch pad, in those first two minutes, it was alarming to me, like how violent it was. In my mind's eye, it wasn't going to be that crazy. And I remember looking over at the commander and I was like, “Well, if he's cool with this, then so am I.” And he's just like the Houston Endeavour–Roll Program. He's very calm as a cucumber. I'm like, “OK, I guess this is normal.” And then the two minutes went by and the solids came off and it was just silky smooth. After that, the liquid engines burned smoothly. And it was almost like driving down the highway at 100 miles an hour. You know you're going fast, but other than the G forces, you couldn't tell.
Willy Walker: Do you ever hit any turbulence in space? I mean, as you were up on the International Space Station for six months, is there ever any, none? You're just, it's cool as a cucumber.
Chris Cassidy: You're just zipping along. The only sort of things in the atmosphere that you have to deal with are, we call it, micrometeor debris. So small particles that can be tracked on the ground. They put some ellipse of probability of where it's going to be. And when your ellipse intersects with that ellipse, then they have you maneuver the space station to a different altitude. And you don't even hardly feel those maneuvers. The space station is so massive. My favorite instrument on board the space station is a peanut butter plastic jar with the wrapper peeled off of it so you can see, and Skittles or M&Ms inside it. And they're just kind of moving around normally. And when the engine fires, they all kind of slowly go to one side of the jar. It's the best G-meter we have because it's very visual and you can't feel it usually in your body, but you know that the M&Ms are doing a certain thing and it's indicating that you're moving.
Willy Walker: And you're 250 to 300 miles above Earth. That's way too far out for you to have to worry about running into satellites. All satellites are inside of that.
Chris Cassidy: All satellites are above that.
Willy Walker: All satellites are above that. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, interesting. Even the new close Earth satellites that are going up that Elon Musk has put out there for his network.
Chris Cassidy: I believe so. I don't want to say all satellites and categorically say something that might get me in trouble.
Willy Walker: Yeah, no, no. I got it.
Chris Cassidy: But we are beneath, especially, geosynchronous satellites that are always in the same spot over Earth because as Earth rotates, they're way up there. And then the infrastructure of communication satellites and navigation satellites is below that, but above this space station's altitude.
Willy Walker: So it won't surprise listeners to the Walker Webcast that I want to talk about fitness for a moment and fitness in space. Your whole allure to being a Navy SEAL was going and doing that early morning workout, and seeing what it was like from a physical standpoint to be able to be a Navy SEAL. Exercise and physical strength has been part of your DNA for your entire professional career. But I was fascinated about what you need to do in space to maintain bone density. And so the exercise you do up there is not necessarily to keep off the pounds; it's actually to maintain bone density. Talk about that for a second.
Chris Cassidy: Yeah. So we have three exercise devices on the space station. One is a treadmill, one is a bicycle, and one is a weight machine. I'll talk briefly about each of those. And NASA dedicates about two hours per crew member per day to exercise. And without context, you don't understand how big of a deal that is. Astronaut time. So every minute of an astronaut on board the space station is a valuable resource like oxygen, food, water, or gas that is monitored and managed by the mission control team. So for them to allot two hours to anything is a big, big deal. And just like you correctly said, Willy, it's not because they want us to come back with beach biceps; it's all about bone health. If we did nothing, in terms of exercise, our bones would rapidly decay in their bone density, and you'd be like a very serious osteoporosis patient pretty rapidly within a couple of weeks of getting up there. And so we've learned over several decades of manned crew time on board the space station that weighted exercise mitigates it to zero—you come back with the same bone density that you launched with. If you do the weight program, which takes about an hour per day to do, it's a whole body workout, but it's a bias toward your big muscle groups. Your hips, your back, your butt, your thigh muscles really make a difference. It's not so much about upper-body things. The treadmill is a normal treadmill. It's actually, I think a belt, not belt weight, wood weight, wood weight treadmill. Oh yeah, the best. Yeah, it's a good one. But they modified the sides and stuff and the push button interface is a little bit different. But the big thing is, if you weren't fixed to it somehow, you’d float away as you ran. So we wear a backpack harness without the backpack. So like shoulder straps and waist thing. And bungee cords hooking from your hips down to the floor. And so just like you can vary the intensity of your workout on a treadmill here at home, you can incline or you can speed the belt up. We, of course, can speed up the belt, but our version of incline is tightening the bungee cords or loosening them. So that's how you can kind of vary the intensity of your workout. The bicycle is interesting. There's no seat. You don't need a seat. You just clip your feet in, kind of hold on to some side things and pedal away.
Willy Walker: That is so cool. That redefines clip-on. That redefines the idea of clipping into a bike because quickly you're seated, and you don't even need a seat.
Chris Cassidy: You don't even need a seat. Then the weight machine is because people go, “How in the world do you lift weights in weightlessness?” It's actually these big cylinders, air cylinders, and you crank a piston up and down in those cylinders. And it gives you different pneumatic resistance, and then the piston is connected to the bar. In that bar, you can adjust to do squats or deadlifts, or put a bench in there and do some other exercises. So that's how we get the load on our bones.
Willy Walker: What was it like coming back to earth and getting on a treadmill for the first time and not having to strap on that shoulder strap to keep you down? You have to be like, “This is the greatest thing in the world. I could actually run without being strapped down to the thing.”
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, the space treadmill is really good. But the one thing is, now all of that load, like your body weight, is all coming through your shoulders, kind of like wearing a heavy backpack. So if you ever tried to run with heavy backpacks, it's a little bit like a lumbering kind of awkward thing. So you don't have the same kind of gait that you would on Earth. So that's the really nice part, is you come back and you're not encumbered on your shoulders with that. It's really nice. The interesting thing is really, when you come back, although our muscles are strong and fit, all of them are not used to being coordinated together and tied into your eyeballs and your inner ear and your nerve, what do you call that thing, neural vestibular system. And so you're very wobbly; you're very unstable. So those first couple treadmill runs, you've got your strength and conditioning person right there on your elbow because you're going to fall, and you're just kind of like a wrangly newborn deer.
Willy Walker: How long does it take to get back to a sense of, does it just take a week?
Chris Cassidy: I generally say, normally, I could go play three-on-three basketball in about a month. This is the other thing I typically say. If you saw me in the grocery store in two weeks, you probably can't tell, but I can still tell. There's still a little bit of awe. But the bulk of the recovery…Our brains are kind of like riding a bicycle, right? The more you come back from space and the more you go up and adapt to space and come back on your second, third, fourth missions, you just get a little better at it, I think. I don't think there's data that shows that, but anecdotally, for me, each subsequent mission was a little bit faster to readapt.
Willy Walker: So, a couple of things. One, you do talk about looking through the cupola back at Earth as just one of those experiences that you carry with you for your entire life and you kind of pinch yourself when you're sitting there looking through that window in the International Space Station back down at Earth. I also heard you talk, Chris, about the fact that the food in space is better than the food as a SEAL, which I thought was interesting that you eat quite well. The other thing is that I watched a video that actually showed one of your colleagues running on the treadmill, which to anybody who wants to see it, is really quite fascinating how they get strapped in there. But the reason that your colleague running on a treadmill was shown was on a video that you did to show people how you actually go to the bathroom in space. I have to tell you, I was at the real estate roundtable in Washington on Tuesday morning. Senator Mark Kelly, who is a former astronaut, was sitting there, and there are these questions about the economy and about this and that and what's happening in Washington. And then there was a lull in the questions. And Senator Kelly's sitting there, and he goes, look, I mean, doesn't anyone have a question? I mean don't you want to know what it's like to go to the bathroom in space? And everyone in the room starts laughing hysterically. Like I get this idea of what it's like to go to the bathroom in space. His comment was, “Carefully.” And then it was your video that I got to go watch that actually shows you exactly how you do it in space, which I will say to anybody who really wants to see how it is done, Chris does a fantastic video that walks you through all the processes and to anyone who's had a kid, it's basically like you're using a diaper genie for adults is really sort of the way to go about that. What was the other, as you think about being in space, what's the other thing that people just don't get? You're up there for six months. Do you have any private time? Like you're in this capsule with three, I mean, you were up there in space with 13 people, well, you and 12 other people, which is the most that have been in space simultaneously ever. So you were there with the most people that have ever been up there. What's it like to either be with 12 other people or just with the two other people inside of the International Space Station? That, to those of us who are on Earth just can never sort of understand how unique it is.
Chris Cassidy: Well, I'm a generally quiet person, so for me, the less people, the better. I love all my crewmates, but yeah, the normal steady state shuttle or space station crew is six. It's now seven because there's one Soyuz, which is three seats, and a SpaceX craft, which is four seats. So those two make seven. But at the time when I was there, the shuttle had seven seats. There were six people up there. We can't arrive at seven. That was the 13 for two weeks. My other two missions were where I lived there for six months. One, I had six people by myself and five for the whole time. And then in 2020, most of the time was just myself and two Russian guys, which was great because then there was no line for the bathroom, the exercise machines, you could use them whenever you want. There's a couple kind of key places where your sweaty t-shirts dry really quickly by the air conditioner. You don't have to fight for who gets that prime spot. Your toothbrush is always right where you can get it. You don't have to put everything away. So anyways, there's a lot of benefits to having fewer folks, but how do you get your private time? Each person has their crew quarters, which is about the size of a refrigerator sort of. It sounds small, but you can use the whole three-dimensional volume when you're floating. So your sleeping bag goes on one wall. Your bags with your clothes and your underwear and your socks and your workout things are one place. We always have like one nice, collared shirt for whenever we get to be on TV and then pictures of your family, a computer and a mirror and stuff like that. So whenever you need space, you can get it. The beauty of myself and two Russian guys, just three people is not seeing each other, and we'd come together to eat at lunch and dinner and get our social fill and check in and see how your day was and that sort of thing. But it was really fun to have the whole place to kind of yourself. I enjoyed that very much.
Willy Walker: Two final things on that and then I want to go to Mars and then want to come back to your current job. You were married as an astronaut. I was just curious, are single astronauts allowed to fraternize in space, or is there a strict rule against men and women up in space? I've been to certain retreats where they're just sort of like… I went to a program called Hoffman out in California. You're there for a week, and they lock you down, and they say, “There's nothing going on here, folks.” So whether you're married or single, there's none of that stuff. Is that an explicit rule by NASA or is that left to people's own discretion?
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, nobody talks about that, but pretty much most folks are married, and there's a handful of single astronauts. But you're up there, it's been a long day, you're working. I never really, really thought that there was any chance of that stuff going on. Even on the shuttle when you're there, it's only two weeks long. It's such a confined space. If you really had the will, you couldn't find the place to have it anywhere onboard.
Willy Walker: That's great. The other thing that I think is interesting, given where US and global relations are today and the trade wars that are going on and the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia, is that the US space program has been in partnership with Russia for decades and you actually spent almost two years outside of Moscow in the Russian training facility, working with cosmonauts in partnership. And I saw the trade-off in command from, I believe it was your 63rd mission to the 64th mission, I think it was, you were handing it off to a Russian cosmonaut who was the lead Sergey, who was going to be the lead of the next mission coming in. It's interesting to look at that and the partnership that has been forged between the United States and Russia in space, and it's endured even though we have more of a Cold War happening back on the face of the earth.
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, it's really interesting because now I've been out of NASA for four years and kind of viewing it more as a civilian. And it surprises me that we're still able to cooperate and do it. But I think it's a great example of technical challenges where you're trying to do a risky endeavor together, whether it's climbing Mount Everest or launching to space. The sort of political sides of it aren't factored into what we got to do to execute this mission safely. Now, it is interesting to live over there for many, many months in Star City and have very close Russian cosmonaut friends and Russian engineer friends and instructor friends. They're people too. So they just like here in America. We've got left-leaning folks and right-leaning folks, and you've got friends who are probably all those. On the Gagarin Space Center, it's the same thing. They’ve got people that really support Putin, and they’ve got people who are really skeptical of Putin's agenda. And it's just a matter of comfort level in those conversations. On my second mission in 2013, one of my crew-mate cosmonauts was 60 years old. He got selected as a cosmonaut in the Soviet Union timeframe. And now he was a Russian cosmonaut when it switched over. The other gentleman was 34 at the time, and he had only ever been a Russian citizen his whole life. It was fascinating for me, Willy, to see how the two of them processed the same situation. The three of us would be sitting where there was a training thing or a public affairs thing or walking into the Kremlin. The differences in how the two of them acted and responded to certain situations was enlightening to me. All of their mindset. And I was very comfortable having open conversations with the young guy. And I just knew it wasn't wise to have any deep, deep conversations with the older gentleman.
Willy Walker: It's also amazing that you were up in space when the COVID pandemic hit and came back to, if you will, a very changed world from when you left and went up to space to coming back in the midst of COVID. I've heard you talk about Mars and your belief that we'll get to Mars in the next 20 to 30 years. One of the things that I was fascinated by as I did a little bit of research on that, Chris, was that it will take about nine months for us to get to Mars, but then it'll take three years for the return trip. Can you explain why you can get out there so much quicker than you can get back?
Chris Cassidy: Well, the planets are moving, right? So you launch when it's to your favor and to make the trip the shortest trip out there. And then you spend some period of time and when you return, and I'm not an astro-physicist or anything, so there's people that know much more than I do about this. You stay there for some period of time. When you're ready to leave and the mission is done, the planets are rotating in such a way where it's not going to be the same trip to get back. I don't know if it's exactly three years and nine months, but your ratios are right. It's longer. Or you can opt to stay on the surface longer and wait for the planets to be again aligned in a position that is favorable for your journey and return that way. But the total duration of the mission would be the same. One of the things that's super fascinating because those times are with existing rocket technology, where you fire a big engine for some number of minutes, and then you coast for the rest of the months. But there's advanced research and, what do we call it, technical readiness levels of rockets that give low thrust, but continuous thrust. So you're accelerating. Every second you're accelerating for half the trip, and then you flip around and decelerate to the point where when you get to the Mars gravitational pull, you can enter the orbit and that cuts the trip down substantially on the order of like a month.
Willy Walker: That's fascinating. So let's transition to your current work and the museum. You raised $285 million to build the Medal of Honor Museum. Talk for a moment about the museum, the genesis of the museum, I guess. Since the Civil War, 40 million Americans have served in the armed forces and 3,500 of them have won the Medal of Honor. It is the highest medal to be received by members of the United States military. What's the genesis of the museum? And I'm gonna put up a couple pictures here in a moment, Chris, as we just talk about it to give people a sense of the beauty of it and how you have set it up. But talk for a moment about, I guess, what attracted you to it, beyond the fact of being an incredibly decorated and honorable person yourself and what you're trying to achieve by the building of the museum and establishment of the foundation.
Chris Cassidy: The first part about what attracted me to it, it's interesting in life. You don't know about opportunities until you know about opportunities. And so when I was wrapping up my NASA career in 2021, I was thinking I was going to go work for one of these commercial space companies. And I had kind of feelers out in that direction, when a buddy of mine who's affiliated with this project called and said, “Hey, would you be interested in coming up and checking out the Medal of Honor Museum?” Of course I knew about the Medal of Honor, but when I got to Dallas and kind of saw where it was going to be, what the vision for it was, the sketches of the building and realized this is a special project for the country and how cool would be to be part of it, that's what drew me to it. I was naive to how hard it is to raise $285 million. So that, luckily for me, didn't deter me because if I had known at the beginning, by the way, what does that mean? I'm like, “Oh boy, that's a tall order.” But when you get a great team, you can get a lot of stuff done. What does it mean? The concept of a National Museum for the Medal of Honor is not new. It's been around for a couple of decades, I've learned from some of the more senior Medal of Honor recipients. And it just kind of, for whatever various reasons in those years, never was able to get the momentum and the funding and the right site in, and when the city of Arlington, Texas, which is the center of the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, was selected in 2019. Then the project began in earnest in kind of basically COVID starting is when fundraising sort of started, then it was the right spot, middle of the country, a lot of support here in Texas and, and the right people were on board, amazing architect. We got the support from the Texas Rangers ownership and the Dallas Cowboys ownership, which was right where the museum is nestled between those stadiums. And it had all the right ingredients for it to be successful.
Willy Walker: So one of the keys, and I think they're putting up, is the picture up there. So there's a photograph of the museum. Describe for a moment, Chris, can you see the photograph that we have there? And describe for a moment, the portion that sits up above it. Is that just an architectural design or is there something that is emblematic, or is that a symbol there on the top of the Museum of that concrete area that's lifted in the air?
Chris Cassidy: Yeah, that's the actual museum exhibit deck and the architect's vision, which is really brilliant. He picked up a heavy piece of metal one day and was in his lab and thought, wow, this is forged by steel. This is a heavy burden to hold. What if we kind of support this heavy burden figuratively with the five branches of the military, which allow us to have the freedoms that we have? And that's the symbolism of those five columns that you see—these giant columns supporting the whole structure. As a real estate guy, you'll appreciate this. It's 40,000 square feet. That's a 200 by 200 box. And each of those five points is two and a half square feet, so roughly 12 square feet holding up 40,000 square feet every bit of building services, water, power, toilet supply and return, data cables, all of it goes through those five points. The only other thing that penetrates there are the staircases, which are these amazing spiral staircases and very impressive when you see them. And other than that, it's all supported by those five points.
Willy Walker: It's cool. Reminds me of you and BUD/S training and not wanting to let your side of the boat come down.
Chris Cassidy: I'm gonna steal that because one of those five pillars breaks the whole thing falls.
Willy Walker: You got it. So that's another angle of it. Let's go to the next one if we can. So that shows where it is in relation to the ballpark in Arlington, correct?
Chris Cassidy: Exactly, yep.
Willy Walker: So it's right near there. Let's go to the next one. There are a number of exhibits there. I thought of one of them, and if you see the helicopter there, let's go to the one because the next one also shows us talking for a moment, Chris, about how you tried to bring something. Either war incidents, or areas where a number of Medal of Honor recipients received it, to try and give people a sense of the service over self, and what defined why so many people got Medals of Honor, given what they were facing at that moment.
Chris Cassidy: Absolutely. So it's actually a hard problem when you have 38 or 3,500 stories to tell. How do you pick? Certainly can't tell that in one exhibit. People couldn't get through them all. So, how do you choose what you're going to tell? We wanted to make sure there was a broad spectrum across civil war to global war on terror across all five service branches, geographically represented around our country. There's one woman Medal of Honor recipient there. So, there are a number of stories that we knew we wanted to tell. Like you said correctly, there are certain places, certain events in our military history where there were a significant number of medals of honor. Guadalcanal that you see here, Iwo Jima, Vietnam, of course, and now present day in GWOT. Civil War, it was the only medal. Like now we have a sort of tiered system Medal of Honor being at the apex, all the way down to lesser levels, medals for other activities to be recognized. But in the Civil War, it was either the Medal of Honor or you didn't have anything. And so there's a predominant number of those 3,500 who are from the Civil War timeframe. And we also wanted to incorporate technology. You can't build a museum anymore. And I'm sort of a basic museum goer. If it's all plaques and text panels, I'll check out after a few of those and I'll meet you in the cafe. So we wanted to keep it engaging for all ages and not just the military buff of the family, but for everybody to enjoy. And so that example that you saw there is a wall that you can walk up, and there's sensors that know that you're approaching, and it illuminates and populates some things, and sound happens. It's really cool.
Willy Walker: Chris, there are 60 Medal of Honor recipients still alive today. And the way you get the Medal of Honor is that it must be a nomination within three years of the act. And then it must be awarded to you within the subsequent two years. So if it's beyond five years of when the incident happens, there's no ability to go back and award one either posthumously or just after that five-year period of time, am I correct on that?
Chris Cassidy: Well, it's not that it's not possible. It just takes more. It takes Congress to get involved and in that there's a few more steps because this does happen where DOD will review an award, say a Navy Cross, for example, that happened years ago or decades ago. And through a review panel say, “Wow, that's commensurate with this other one that's a Medal of Honor. Like we should elevate this one to also be a Medal of Honor.” So that's why sometimes you'll see an award ceremony in the White House with a very elderly gentleman getting it. He didn't do his action five years ago. And that's what it is. You typically have an upgrade to the medal, to a previous medal.
Willy Walker: I could keep on going for another couple of hours. I'm so fascinated by all you have done and all of the experience you've had in your life, and also being the father of five kids, and what it's taken for you to be able to be both a Navy SEAL and an astronaut and those enduring times of being away from your wife, Peggy. I wanted to go into that, but we're not going to have time today. Maybe you and I can talk about that at some time, because Peggy has endured you waking up one day and being deployed with the SEAL team, where she doesn't know where you're going and when you're coming home. And she's also seen you go up into space for six months and cross your fingers that you were gonna always come back, but that was not always guaranteed in that line of work. You are a true national treasure. I am super, super thankful to you for taking the time to share your insights with us today, Chris. And I very much look forward to coming down, visiting the museum, and spending some time with you one-on-one.
Chris Cassidy: Likewise, Willy, thank you for your time.
Willy Walker: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We'll be back next week with another Walker Webcast, and thanks again, Captain Cassidy.
