Astronaut and Microbiologist

01Houston, we have a podcast.

02Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 165, Astronaut and Microbiologist.

03I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

04If you're new to the show, we bring in NASA experts to talk about all different parts of our space agency, and sometimes we get lucky enough to bring in astronauts to talk about their story.

05So today we're talking with Kathleen Rubens.

06She goes by Kate.

07She's a U.S.

08astronaut who is about to launch to the International Space Station this October 2020 for her second long-duration spaceflight.

09She first launched just four years ago for Expeditions 48 and 49, where she lived and worked in space for 115 days.

10For this podcast, we're going to be talking about her education studying molecular biology, cancer, and virology.

11We talked about her first spaceflight and sequencing DNA in space for the very first time.

12And we talked about her expedition, this upcoming mission where she may have a few extra helping hands joining her after launching from American soil.

13So here's a little bit about astronaut Kate Rubens.

14Enjoy.

15T-minus-five, second-ten, county.

16Mark.

17Launch commit light, search for the red.

18There she goes.

19Is it?

20We have a podcast.

21Kate Rubens, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

22Absolutely.

23Happy to be here.

24This is pretty quick that you're going back to the International Space Station.

25What are your feelings?

26I'm pretty excited about it.

27I gotta say, you know, anytime you get an opportunity to do a long-duration mission, it's pretty exciting.

28Very cool.

29Well, I know we've ran into each other a couple times, but never got to do a podcast, so I did want to start right from the beginning from you.

30Going back to your childhood growing up in Connecticut.

31It says you were born in Connecticut, but consider Napa, California, your hometown?

32Yeah, that's correct.

33Okay.

34How was Napa?

35The only thing I really know about it is wine country.

36It's awesome.

37It's actually, it's a great little area in Northern California.

38California, it was a nice place to grow up, and it's actually got a lot of history as a rural kind of farm town.

39So, it's a neat place, and it was pretty fun to grow up and explore nature in California.

40See, if you go through your interest, it's like all outdoor stuff, running, swimming, and cycling.

41I mean, you must have been outside all the time.

42Yep, absolutely.

43Yeah, and exploring, I guess, a little bit.

44Now, are you really into wine at all?

45Is that a thing?

46I should be, right?

47I'm really not an expert.

48I feel like it's just a natural question growing up in Napa.

49Oh, man, you must be like a total expert, but yeah, I totally get it.

50Now, you're a scientist by heart.

51You truly are a scientist.

52You have spent a lot of time in the lab, virology, molecular biology.

53Starting with your childhood, was there something?

54Was there something that started early on that sparked your interest in science or maybe the microbiology element of things?

55Yeah, absolutely.

56When I was, I was always interested in science.

57When I was about 11, my dad took me to a conference on DNA.

58And so, this was at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

59And I think it was like a legitimate scientific conference.

60I'm not sure why they allowed an 11-year-old in.

61But it was incredible.

62I actually really encouraged people, if they have kids that are old enough, to bring them to a scientific conference sometime.

63You know, who knows what they're going to absorb.

64All I remember thinking is, this is so cool that these people get to do this for their job.

65And they're all really excited about what they're doing.

66I want to go learn about DNA.

67Wow.

68And that's it.

69Yeah.

70And then you were right on that path.

71Amazing.

72Yeah.

73And so, school, you went for molecular biology first.

74You did a lot of cancer research.

75And you spent some time out of the country, too.

76I believe this is in Africa.

77How was that?

78Yeah.

79A lot of the work that we were doing was looking at things like monkeypox and Ebola, which are in places in Africa.

80Some of them, monkeypox, for example, is endemic in some places in Congo.

81And so, to be able to study the virus, we really wanted to understand what was going on, what was influencing outbreaks there, how we could possibly stop them or prevent them.

82And we really wanted to study what we could do in terms of sampling as close to the natural infection as possible.

83So, if you take a sample and you grow it in the lab for many generations, we don't know what that effect has.

84You know, can you introduce some mutations that are unlike the original sample?

85And so, this was an opportunity to both help people during an epidemic and an outbreak situation and then also to get samples for research so we could try to develop some drugs and vaccines to prevent future outbreaks.

86How about that?

87How'd that opportunity come up to, hey, we're going to be in the woods?

88And I don't know if it was in the woods or not, but we're going to be over in Africa studying all this thing.

89And you're like, yep, sign me up.

90How'd that come up?

91Yeah, it was actually the effort was a joint effort between Kinshasa School of Public Health and the National Research Institute there.

92They had a lot of the infrastructure and really the world's experts.

93We also worked with the Army Medical Research Institute, and we had people from my lab at MIT.

94So, it was this really great collaboration of folks that were all interested in preventing disease and epidemics.

95See, I feel like there's so much work that goes into these fields.

96You have to be so focused on that.

97But there's got to be some point in here where you think space, where you think astronaut.

98Where did that start folding into the mix?

99Yeah.

100So, that was actually in, you know, 11-year-old me in my list of, you know, I wanted to study DNA and I wanted to be a biologist.

101And I also wanted to be a geologist and an astronaut.

102So, I had three very important careers I was ready to get to.

103A little bit later on, you know, people say, well, you know, astronaut's not a real job.

104This isn't, you can't major in astronaut.

105Like, let's be realistic and pick your actual career path.

106So, I was realistic and I stuck with molecular biology and it was great.

107And then one of my coworkers who actually I was working with on some of these Africa studies said, hey, I saw a job posting.

108NASA's hiring for astronauts and you mentioned at some point you wanted to do this.

109You should apply.

110And I thought, well, what's the worst that could happen?

111So, I put my application in.

112There you go.

113And then they wanted, I guess, what you had to offer.

114They wanted a scientist astronaut.

115I think I got really lucky.

116Yeah, yeah.

117There's a lot of people that end up applying and pursuing this.

118But it turns out that science is a very important thing now in terms of spaceflight.

119There's a lot of active science going on in the International Space Station.

120There absolutely is.

121And it's going to continue to be a really important part.

122As we start exploring more, this is one of the reasons that we are going to the moon and we're going to Mars.

123The amount of science that remains to be done on the lunar surface discovering things about the moon tells us about our solar system and about our own planet.

124And I don't know a single scientist that is not itching to get to Mars.

125This is absolutely, it's going to be one of the most incredible places to do research.

126You have to be one of them because then you'd hit all three.

127You'd hit the...

128There we go.

129I'll put that on my list.

130The geology right there.

131Perfect.

132Okay, so you applied.

133Do you remember that call when you actually were accepted?

134Hey, we want you to come on and be an astronaut.

135I do remember it.

136And it was a little unbelievable.

137You know, I was kind of like, am I sure that I'm talking to Johnson Space Center?

138This isn't one of my friends playing a joke on me.

139So I really did, you know, make sure that I was, in fact, talking to Johnson Space Center.

140I think I asked them, are you sure you want to offer me the job?

141I said yes.

142And I said, well, that's, you know, this sounds great.

143Very calmly.

144And then hung up the phone and was whooping and hollering in my office.

145And it was a big celebration.

146Very good.

147Well, let's jump ahead to your first space flight.

148This is very cool for me because I get to talk to a lot of folks.

149I get them right before they go on their first space flight.

150But you've been there before.

151Tell me about that experience of going on and being an astronaut and a scientist in space and working on all these great things.

152Yeah, it was pretty incredible.

153The fact that we have so much research on the ISS, it's just this incredible time to fly.

154So I feel like, you know, every day up there, you're doing something incredible.

155It's sometimes it's things that would seem mundane on the Earth.

156Fixing the space station toilet, right?

157Like nobody wants to go fix their toilet.

158That doesn't sound like an exciting task.

159It's awesome.

160It's like the most complicated plumbing system you could imagine.

161It's water recycling.

162It's how we can survive in a closed loop environment.

163So you can't get too sad about fixing the toilet if you're thinking about this is the future of understanding how we're going to do water conservation and live in a closed loop.

164Wow.

165Unbelievable.

166Yeah, it's those little things, right?

167And the International Space Station provides that microgravity twist on science.

168It's something you can't get here on Earth.

169And you got to do some of the first things like sequencing DNA.

170That was a big one because you were the first person to sequence DNA.

171And a lot of people, you know, I think if I said, hey, someone sequenced DNA in space.

172They're like, what?

173What is DNA sequencing?

174But it's a big deal.

175So why is it a big deal?

176So it's really a tool.

177It's this was a technology that we were trying to prove if it would work in microgravity.

178We didn't know.

179It was kind of a cool experiment.

180You know, when you send something up and you go, oh, maybe this is going to work and maybe we're going to troubleshoot it a lot.

181So we really were trying to see, would this work?

182Could it be useful?

183And we were able to demonstrate that we could do it.

184And so once that happened, it opened up just through the doors open in terms of what's possible.

185So we really started pushing how much can we sequence?

186How many billions of base pairs can we get to?

187I think we sequenced a little bit over 2 billion base pairs.

188One of the things I'm really excited about for the next set of experiments is how do we expand this even more?

189Can we start doing multiplexing of our sequencing?

190And so that's, bear with me here.

191You take a molecular barcode.

192And so that's like ATCC or ATGC.

193These are the letters of DNA.

194You can make individual molecular barcodes.

195And then you can put those on your sequencing reactions, mix them together, sequence them all, and deconvolute that data.

196So that's what I really want to do next time.

197And what is the significance of that?

198Why do you want to do that?

199So that allows you to do a lot more with your single sequencing reaction.

200So if you can multiplex, then you can do 100 different kinds of experiments at once in one sequencing reaction.

201Wow.

202And you disentangle the data afterwards.

203So you mix it all together.

204You do the sequencer.

205And you worry about the data analysis later.

206Huh.

207Okay.

208Now there was a lot of other, you know, there's a lot of science on Space Station.

209You know, biology is just one of those things.

210There's physics.

211And I'm sure you're very interested in the biology things.

212And you already mentioned, like, yes, this is, I'm so excited to do this when I'm back.

213I'm sure you're excited to do more when you're back.

214Yeah, absolutely.

215The material science experiments are really fun.

216I didn't know I would be super interested in material science.

217But I've been following those a lot.

218And it's a way to look at how materials form or melt or change their properties without that effect of gravity.

219So when you take away gravity, when you perform your experiments in microgravity, you don't have things like buoyancy-driven convection, which is actually really strong in a lot of the Earth-based experiments.

220You obviously are pretty much completely subtracting the effect of gravity.

221And you can do things that wouldn't be possible with Earth-based equipment.

222So we can do electromagnetic or electrostatic levitation with larger sample sizes that it just wouldn't be possible because gravity would cause that experiment to collapse.

223The whole thing would fall down in the chamber.

224There's also some really interesting particle physics experiments.

225And I'm going to get myself in trouble here because I'm a biologist.

226But the Cold Atom Lab just published.

227They had an incredible paper in Nature.

228And this is ways that we're using microgravity to push the boundaries of things we weren't able to see before.

229So if we're interested in studying fundamental particle types of behavior, we can do this because we have the special properties of microgravity on the space station.

230It's that facility that gets unbelievably cold.

231It's marketed as the coldest place in the universe.

232Yep, absolutely.

233Yeah, wonderful, wonderful.

234You spent 115 days on your first space flight.

235You came back.

236And you got involved in a few other projects when you came back.

237I believe Human Health and Performance, maybe Human Research Program.

238So you were in the scientific community for a while.

239How was that?

240Yeah, that was great.

241So I worked for some time in the Human Health and Performance group here at NASA.

242And these are the folks that are studying everything from the microbiology folks all the way up to human physiology.

243How can we use these humans on space stations?

244Sometimes we are the experiment.

245So we're doing the experiments.

246And then sometimes we're donating blood or we're taking samples.

247And we serve as the experimental artifact or the thing that we're observing in the space station.

248I also spent some time after that working on development of new spacesuits.

249So I was the EVA branch chief or the spacewalk and robotics branch chief.

250And we're developing new suits that we're going to use on the lunar surface.

251So there's a lot of incredible engineering work that's being done at Johnson Space Center to develop these suits.

252They've been working on it for a long time.

253And I think everybody is going to be so excited to see their suit first on the International Space Station.

254And then eventually that is going to be the boot that puts a footprint in Mars.

255That's right.

256And in the moon.

257I had a chance on this podcast to talk to Chris Hansen about the XEMU.

258And he was quoting you in the pool because you went into the XEMU, this new suit, and you went and you're like, oh, this is awesome.

259What was so awesome about it when you took it in the pool?

260It's pretty incredible.

261They've worked a lot to improve the mobility.

262Mobility.

263So the spacesuits are big.

264I mean, they have a big job to do.

265They have to protect the astronaut from extreme temperature variations.

266So you're going 200 degrees in either direction.

267The vacuum of space.

268You have to protect against radiation.

269You have to protect against micrometeoroids hitting you.

270Then you've got to keep the astronaut at a physiologic temperature.

271So you can't have them heat up.

272You have to be able to reject all of that heat.

273Has to be able to scrub your atmosphere.

274Provide oxygen.

275Get rid of that CO2.

276Humans, you know, we're terrible.

277We live in a really narrow band of physiologic parameters.

278Yeah.

279It's quite incompatible with space.

280Yeah.

281So it takes a lot of engineering to be able to survive these extremes of space.

282And the suits have to be pretty heavy to accommodate that.

283One of the things when you're moving around outside the space station on a spacewalk, you're really confined by how much you can move your arms.

284Sometimes you can't really see.

285You can see right in front of you.

286But if you want to look down the length of the truss or along where you're translating, where you're moving, you have to move your whole body.

287And that's actually really hard when you've got this 400-pound mass that you have to orient.

288And so the XEMU does a lot to provide us with more mobility, the kind of mobility we're going to need on the lunar surface to do long traverses and geology experiments.

289And there's a lot of things that just make it more user-friendly so we can be more efficient on our spacewalks.

290All of our lunar sorties, every time we go do something on the surface of the moon, is going to be a spacewalk.

291That's exciting.

292Yep.

293A bunch of moonwalkers in the not-too-distant future.

294Very, very cool.

295You also spent some time in Russia.

296I remember being on the trip, the landing trip, where you were actively deciding, I wonder if I should do this, because you would be in Russia for a long time.

297And then you ended up doing that.

298What is that job, and how was your experience?

299Yeah, so we have a really strong partnership.

300We have an international partnership.

301And that's not just with Russia, but that's also with ESA, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency.

302And then there's many other countries that contribute different science experiments or payloads on the space station.

303And our partnership with Russia has been going on for quite some time.

304We work together for pretty much all aspects of the space station functioning.

305So we have U.S.

306modules, Russian modules, and European and Japanese modules, and the Canadian arm.

307And so all of those pieces have to work together.

308As part of that, we have a huge collaboration and cooperation on the ground to get all of these agencies working together.

309And some of the work over in Russia was to support the crews that are training out there.

310We do training at all these partner sites, and then to support the launches and the landings in Kazakhstan.

311Okay, yeah.

312So you spent a year there.

313And how was life in Moscow?

314Were you in Star City, maybe?

315Yeah, I was in Star City.

316So Star City feels a lot like JSC.

317It's a space campus, essentially.

318There's a lot of engineers there.

319There's a lot of people who train astronauts and cosmonauts for space flight.

320And it was a really neat experience for me to be able to live in the home country of one of our partner agencies and really understand how they function, how they get their cosmonauts prepared for space flight, and how their agency works to support the International Space Station every day.

321Okay, wonderful.

322And you're going back here soon.

323You're on the accelerated course right now.

324I am.

325You are actively training, but you're not here for very long.

326You're going right back to Russia because that's where you're going to be until, I guess, until you're in the stuff.

327Yeah, I launch in October.

328Yeah, very, very soon.

329Now, what's interesting about your flight is, yes, you're launching in October.

330Yes, you're launching from a Soyuz again.

331But there's a chance that you're going to have some extra helping hands on board.

332Yes, I am almost certain of it.

333So the current crew that's up there, this is our incredibly exciting, our first crew in the commercial crew programs.

334They're on board right now.

335And when they come home, we're going to continue this commercial crew program.

336So we're going to have additional launches.

337And I'm really hoping to be joined by some of our SpaceX or our Boeing friends.

338They'll be NASA astronauts, but they are training on these vehicles.

339And when they come up, we'll be all together as a space station crew.

340Doing a heck of a lot of science.

341We hope so.

342Well, that is going to be awesome.

343Kate, I wish you the best in your travels.

344And you go to Russia here soon and then on your liftoff not too far after that.

345So I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today.

346Thanks.

347And hopefully I'll talk to you again at landing.

348I hope so.

349I hope so.

350Roger.

351Zero.

352Jay and I have the on-line.

353The game and the game for all mankind.

354Actually, it's a huge honor to bring your ex-links.

355Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

356Never keep stupid.

357Welcome to space.

358Hey, thanks for sticking around.

359I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kate Rubins today.

360Godspeed to her launching this month, October 2020, with her crewmates, Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kudzvichkov.

361They're launching for Expeditions 63 and 64.

362You can watch her launch live at our website, nasa.gov.

363We have NASA TV up at the top.

364You can also find our stream on YouTube.

365If you want to watch Kate throughout her mission, she's going to be tweeting at her Twitter handle at astro underscore Kate 7.

366You can follow her there.

367If you want to listen to more podcasts, we have a lot of them at nasa.gov slash podcasts.

368We're there, too.

369Houston, we have a podcast.

370You can listen to any one of our episodes in no particular order.

371If you want to know more about what's happening aboard the International Space Station during Kate's mission, that's at nasa.gov slash ISS.

372She's having some crew join her from the SpaceX Dragon.

373That's the Crew 1 mission.

374If you want to know more about that mission and that program, that's at nasa.gov slash commercial crew.

375If you want to talk to us at Houston, we have a podcast.

376We're on the Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

377Just use the hashtag AskNASA on your favorite platform.

378Submit an idea for the show and just make sure to mention it's for us at Houston, we have a podcast.

379This episode was recorded on June 18th, 2020.

380Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norm Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Dez John Streeter, Kelly Humphries, and Brandi Dean.

381Thanks again to Kate Rubins for coming on the show.

382Godspeed on your mission.

383We'll be back next week.

384We'll be back next week.

385Thank you.

386Thank you.

387Thank you.

388Thank you.

389Thank you.

390Thank you.

391Thank you.

392Thank you.

393Thank you.