Retired NASA astronaut Cady Coleman, PhD, connects space exploration to children’s health and reveals what it really takes to thrive on long-duration missions — including playing the flute in orbit. She makes the case for the “A” in STEAM and shares advice for kids daring to dream big.
Featuring:
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut, public speaker and author
Host/Producer: Carol Vassar
Announcer:
Welcome to Well Beyond Medicine, the world’s top-ranked children’s health podcast produced by Nemours Children’s Health. Subscribe on any platform at nemourswellbeyond.org or find us on YouTube.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Each week, we’ll be joined by innovators and experts from around the world, exploring anything and everything related to the 85% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor’s office. I’m your host, Carol Vassar, and now that you are here, let’s go.
MUSIC:
Well Beyond Medicine
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Nemours Well Beyond Medicine podcast. With me, fresh from saving a baby porcupine, is Cady Coleman. She is a retired NASA astronaut, a public speaker, a mom, the author of a book called Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder and Making Change. She spent six months at the ISS on three different missions, I believe. Cady, we are so excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, I am very excited because healthcare, especially in my case, pediatric healthcare, really played a great role in my life. And as somebody who got to go to space, I’m a living and breathing experiment.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Well, let’s talk about your space experience and where it began. You and I are of a similar age. We’re both late baby boomers. We witnessed the exponential growth of space in the sixties and seventies. It wasn’t just seeing it on television; it was in the culture. We watched The Jetsons, and every kid I knew wanted to be an astronaut. What about you actually helped you to get to that place where you became an astronaut?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, everything that you said felt right to me, especially the Jetsons. I really loved that show.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Yeah.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
And so the space programming was everywhere, but the fact that I could be a part of it was completely not clear to me. And I had a dad who was in the diving business in the Navy, and so exploration was very real in our family, but the fact that I could be one of those people, it just wasn’t the world that I saw. It wasn’t the photos that I saw in the newspaper or things that I heard about. And so it wasn’t until I was in college and as a junior, Sally Ride came…Dr. Sally Ride…and gave a talk and I remember the auditorium. I remember sliding into my seat and I remember how I felt to listen to somebody that made me just, she just seemed so real that I just thought maybe I could try to do that. And that had never happened to me before.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. Sally Ride, for those who don’t know, was the first American woman in space.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Correct.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And quite the inspiration for many people, yourself included. What was the path after that? You were in college, you were, I believe it was MIT, you continued on with graduate and postgraduate doctoral work. Then how did you move on from there?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, the first thing I thought about was I don’t think that everybody has to go to MIT. Don’t think it’s that school everyone has to go to, but it was certainly a great place for me, and I think it is a great place, and I thought we have to have some instruments. And so I looked in the alumni database and I contacted some of them to say I was interested and to understand a little bit about what that was like. And at the same time, it seemed early to be calling anybody because I needed to get my bachelor’s degree. And it was clear that you needed, as a scientist, you needed an advanced degree, or you could go with a pilot route and have your value be more in the flying business. I was going to be in the Air Force because they paid for school for me. I was ROTC.
So my path was kind of clear in terms of where I’d be, but not necessarily what I would do and what I should try to make sure I got to do. And grad school turned out coming up earlier than I’d been told. And so I really liked chemistry of things that you can really appreciate. And so I’m a polymer chemist, and our kid actually did have surgery when he was four days old and then at six months old. And it was really interesting and amazing to me to see this was then, I’ve already been an astronaut, and this is he now, 25. So it was in about 2000, and seeing all those small monitoring devices, seeing things that could be disposable, things that were plastic, things that were different kinds of plastic that could be used on very tiny babies. And so it made me proud of being in that materials kind of world.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
It’s interesting that you bring that up because I think people kind of forget that a lot of the innovations that we’ve had since the space program has been in existence is a result of the space program. I think Velcro came from the space program originally, but talk about how you’ve seen that grow in your time with the space program and since you love the space program.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, something that doesn’t seem to change is that fascination that you spoke about, about just that people are going to space. We want to know them and we want to understand what they’re doing. And I think, and not just when people go, but when we send spacecraft so very far away and they send messages back and we learn things, and I mean, there’s some tough news, Pluto, no, that was tough. But I think there’s a sort of hope about the space program that it’s just really compelling, and there’s something very not fair about that. And that if we need a new kind of smaller computer for space, somebody is going to figure that out. And if we need to figure out cooling systems for our spacesuits, somebody’s figuring that out and on and on. So the fact that things could be used for space is still a motivation, and I would say a technology accelerator.
And I’m very proud of the fact that not everything that we do for future exploration, there’s very little that’s only for that. Almost all of it has uses right back down here on Earth. Everything from Chandra is an X-ray telescope, one of the families of great telescopes that we have, and literally tells us, in my words, everything that we’ve ever found out about black holes comes from this telescope as a basis. But it was finding out how to measure X-rays that really allowed us to advance X-ray technology down here on earth for human health.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Let’s talk a little bit about your work on the ISS, three different trips, six months total. There’s technology that’s being developed in research that’s being done there that’s benefiting healthcare down on earth. Did you work with any of that or was that kind of out of your realm?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, we all become sort of Jack and Jill’s of all trades, all the trades in that I’m originally a scientist and I needed to learn how to be an operational pilot-like person that understood, make a plan, and you can change the plan, but then at a certain point you can’t change the plan anymore. And just really understanding what it’s like when everything you’re doing is you’re having a normal day in space, but it’s always on the edge of life and death, I will say. So you have to be ready for what happens next. What do I do here? I felt like my laboratory experience prepared me to some degree from that.
But flying airplanes, I mean, there’s something that when you’re ready, you know, have a checklist and you know what you’re going to do. And for example, as an astronaut, I flew T-38s, which was really, I mean, for a chemist in the Air Force, this was really cool to get to do. They go faster than the speed of sound. But when that gas gauge drops to zero, there’s something that happens to your whole body, your stomach. Everything kind of goes oof, and gives me a little chills just to think about it. And then your job is to think about what you know and recognize what you need to recognize and realize that if the gas gauge goes to zero, should you jump out of the plane? Or is it the gauge that’s broken, and you should communicate with the person in the other cockpit so that together you reach good decisions? And it’s very much a team sport.
So I learned from all those kinds of things. So we do all sorts of things. I actually had two shuttle missions, which I think are very much leading up to being on the space station. And in fact, my first shuttle mission was to go on one of the, it was the longest shuttle mission at the time where the laboratory was in the back of the payload bay, kind of like in the back of the dump truck. We’d go down this tunnel in the morning, I’d bring my lunch, and then I’d have different experiments all time to do protein crystal growth for developing drugs, understanding crystal growth structures so that we can understand in a kind of, if you think of a drug as sort of a key that goes into a lock, you have to understand what the lock looks like. And those experiments are still happening because they’re very, very helpful.
And you fast-forward from being part of that shuttle mission, actually, this patch on my sleeve here, and deploying that X-ray telescope, to then these two patches represent that almost six months up on the space station. And we did do different biological kinds of experiments. And I like to jump ahead from, I mean I did some of the early plant growth growing plants. We’d like to have food on the way to Mars and on Mars, but more importantly, down here on earth, there’s a lot of places where it’s hard to grow food, just no soil, maybe vertical farming in cities or in places where there’s just not enough water.
So in the space program, we learned a lot about those things, but I think that biology, biological chemistry, chemical biology, those by the terms you want to keep an eye on because up on that space station, it is a giant laboratory and a woman named Kate Rubins who’s the first astronaut to sequence DNA up there. And what I’m going to say is might worry you, it worried me a little bit at first where it seems like everything biological happens differently in a microgravity or almost weightless environment and things that it’s like if you’re looking for what is the active part of a disease or I’m not even going to name the correct part of a molecule or whatever, but what is the active part of that that scientists should understand so they can design a vaccine or a drug and up in space what’s active seems to get really more active. And so it’s just easier to plan, easier to measure.
And for skin cells, our skin up in space gets kind of thin, and it’s a little bit like aging skin. And this is a very important barrier for humans, to disease, and for their health, and our mouths with our biofilms in our mouths are also important barriers. And what we’re finding, we meaning people who are studying some of those things up in space, is that the kinds of things that we’re like, I wonder if that’s the reason that skin gets thinner. I wonder if that’s the reason that people are more vulnerable in terms of their immune system when they bring those cells up to space. There’s big differences and they’re measurable even in a few days. So then I thought, well, how come I didn’t come back after six months with three heads?
And what I learned is that because I’m part of a system and we do, because everything is weightless, there’s a lot of water weight and fluid that’s down on the bottom part of your body. And if you look at people in space, even just today, you’ll notice that they have sort of bigger cheeks if you know them well, kind of a little bit. And it’s because there’s a fluid shift that happens right away, and it’s the same fluid shift that happens to all of us when we lay down in bed or read a book and then suddenly go, I guess I’m going to have to go to the bathroom before I. And so it’s because you’re going to actually lose that fluid. And so our naturally hydrated state is less up there. Our heart muscles don’t have to work as hard to move fluid around in our body because they’re not fighting against gravity. So our heart muscles can act like aging hearts up there.
And so there’s a lot that we can learn. And I really think some of the work that I’ve been hearing about lately is that we’re actually taking stem cells up there, growing, I want to say, organs, and then testing drugs on them. Drugs that take many weeks to understand whether they’re being effective down here on the ground, they can actually see those results more like in a week or two. And so learning early that a drug doesn’t work to any of the researchers out there. I mean that’s invaluable to know that path, know what can we learn from it.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
It’s interesting to get some insights into what’s actually happening on the Space Station because I think people maybe are aware it’s out there and it’s floating around, it’s going around the earth, and maybe aren’t sure what’s actually happening. So thank you for those insights. I want to ask about, not the science, but the human element. You were there for a long time, separated from family.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Not long enough.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Not long enough. You’d love to go back, I’ve read.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
I would’ve stayed. It’s easy. Actually, I can actually say that because we had a situation where it was a possibility, and I was like, sheesh.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
But there was family on the ground. You had a young son at the time, actually, you have two sons, one was a little bit younger. And the movie that you did, which was a Sundance movie, the name is Space: The Longest Goodbye. You’re featured with your son talking about that separation. And I would love for you to share what that separation was like, and having some sort of support system from the earth. How did that help you do your work, continue on the space station for the time that you did, and how can that inform people today as we head apparently towards Mars manned missions to Mars?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, it’s hard. I said I’d stay longer if I could, and I would’ve, partly because once you get up there, it takes about a month to get good at the work up there. And then you just want to feel like, I felt like every data point moves somebody’s work so much closer to understanding things. And so I really felt like it was the right thing to stay if that was offered or requested. And at the same time, I did have a 10-year-old waiting on the ground, as well as a husband and a 27-year-old as well, who was probably doing just fine without me. And actually, we missed each other greatly. And what we ended up doing was establishing a different way of having a relationship. And we’d had some practice at that, in that Jamie’s dad lived in Massachusetts, he’s a glass artist, and I lived in Houston, and we went back and forth for many years.
And then after we had a son, my other son is my stepson, and then our son thought that it was really normal to have two homes, two schools, two after-schools, and some of their parents’ friends who were really helpful. I mean, without that support system, I probably would not have gone and, but I really felt that we’d had some practice in doing this. And I think a lot of people have experience in these feelings of what it would be like to be on a spaceship and not be able to be with your family, as we all went through COVID.
And I think you could actually even make the smaller comparison to somebody whose child needs to be in the hospital for an extended period of time. How do you bring the world to them, and how do you establish a way to have a relationship? And for my son Jamie and I, part of that came through reading. He loved these stories by a guy named Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson called Peter and the Starcatchers. And I loved them because they had smart girls, smart boys, fairy dust, sword fights. Everything that boys and girls would like to read in those books, and by reading those books, we don’t have to have the conversation. How was your day, Mom? How was your day, Jamie?
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
It was good.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
I think that that can feel that way in a hospital room, or I actually gave a graduation speech a couple of years ago to the one graduate from a high school on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. And I said, you people here, you understand what it’s like to live on a space station, and we’ll need to understand those things going to Mars. And you can see that movie, it’s actually a PBS Independent Lens production, and it’s the most-streamed. And I think it’s because it puts the human back into human space flight. And you meet Kayla Barron. She’s a submariner who lived on the space station. You meet all sorts of weird and strange theories of how you might make up for not being able to have a conversation with our family. I’m not so sure about some of them, but I think I’d have to change. You just have to work with what you have.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I watched the movie. I highly recommend getting it. It’s on YouTube; you can rent it for about $3.99. It was wonderful and brought some real insights into the idea that three years going to Mars is a long trip, and the psychological effects of that are going to be enormous. I want to … Go ahead.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Oh, can I just jump in? There’s one of the measures where it’s basically an avatar and I call him husband guy, and then you can’t really talk to your spouse without having 20 minutes each way or some delay. And then there was this weird-looking virtual reality person, and they’re like, you could have this person. And I’m like, yeah, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m a verbal person, clearly, and I partly figured things out by talking them through. And I think I probably would get something out of talking them through with substitute husband guy. So you have to be open-minded.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Watch the movie, you’ll understand what we’re talking about. You’re also a musical person. You brought your flute to space. You played a duet with Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull. To what degree do you think it’s essential to have music? I’m a musician, too, readily available to you on the ISS. And how does that help create a creative personality that helps you sustain health and emotional well-being?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Everybody has their own way. I have crewmates who painted, I have crewmates t read books. I had crewmates that would be on the ham radio talking with groups on the ground. Everyone has their own way of coming back to themselves in a day where you’re constantly doing what’s on the timeline and more, and it’s just very busy, and you really agree. You’re basically agreeing to be an operator all day long and everybody has their own way. I do love music, and I think it’s universal. I know it’s universal. It’s unstoppable, I think. And there’s something about it, and I get more comments about the flute playing, and I think it’s because people are like, that could be an I play and I’m an improvisational amateur flute player, but I love to play with people, and it’s also a way to bring people with you up to the station.
And so I brought flutes for an Irish band called the Chieftains. I brought Ian Anderson’s flute and my own from the Powell Company down here in Massachusetts. And the flute, I don’t know the flute, I don’t know. Are you a flute player?
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
No, I’m a singer.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
And I cannot do that. So together we could maybe, we should maybe get together. I really can’t. But the flute comes in three pieces: the mouthpiece and then the rest. And so I took the flute company’s mouthpiece, and the rest of it was my flute, so I have a part that’s mine. And I gave that part back to them, and they can, even beginners, put that mouthpiece in their flute and play the flute that went to space. And so we talked about how the space program was compelling, and I think it’s really only fair to try to get as many ripples out of that advantage that space has as we can. And one of those things is singing. I think having people sing along with you in space is what I would recommend.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Okay. If I were to go to space. I don’t know if there’s enough Dramamine in the world that could get me on a rocket.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
I am a seasick person.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Really? Because I’m a carsick person.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, I would say 75% of us don’t feel well when we first get to space.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Okay.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
And it depends on what your job is, whether you’re going to take some drugs. I believe in science, I believe in medicine, and when I fly and do experiments, they’re really other people’s experiments on that zero-gravity airplane. And they have some great medicine for that. And I do it because I’m not going to be as good a data point if I don’t. And I believe in those things.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
So there’s hope for me yet?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Totally. And three-quarters of the people do not feel well or worse when they’re up there.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
That’s something. I thought that would disqualify me immediately. So that’s good to know.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
And you try all those things on the ground, you try them out. But it’s hard to predict. But it really does, you sort of adapt to this world, and flying from place to place becomes just what people do.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And as people fly into space, again, SpaceX is going to the moon again, going to Mars at some point, children are hearing about this like we did as children. To bring that full circle, how are you looking at STEAM education, which is science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics as it currently stands, what maybe do you think could be improved?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Well, adding that A into STEM is essential and making it STEAM. And that is because you could have the best idea in the whole world, but you’re probably not going to have all the resources that you need. And that’s money. It’s people to do some of the things that you can’t do or shouldn’t do. Once those things are easy. I mean, nobody’s going to do big things alone. They’re just not. And to recruit the other players, you have to be able to tell them a story that makes them understand where they fit or could fit in that story. And I wrote my book with another writer we wrote together, and I did that because I mean, there’s an art to writing, and I wanted my book to really bring people to space with me. And I learned a lot from that writer, Alan Daly. And so the arts are essential. And my husband is a glass artist, and he actually did space-related art a dozen years before we ever met.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Really?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
It got very expensive, so I had to get married. It’s true. But everybody explores in different ways. And when people imagine, well, okay, so maybe it’s going to look like this, or I wonder what people will be doing down there. And the moon is coming sooner, soon. The next Artemis mission, the first one, went around the moon. And on its little wings, on solar rays, it had cameras looking at the spacecraft and then at the earth. And when you see all those and one thing, and when a person sees that, it will change them, and they will come back, and they will change others. And the people that are on that mission are unimaginably wonderful. I’m not just saying that. They’re just really wonderful folks. They’re launch date, I think, is February 6th at this point. And when everything’s ready, that’s when they’ll go. It’s every step for itself. And I think Mars is in that picture too.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I hope that happens in my lifetime, that we get to Mars.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
I think it will. Can I say one more thing about the Mars part?
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Yeah.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
And that is that I know you have people out there that are doing research that other people have not envisioned that changes our lives. And I really value that research so much. And I’m actually somebody who’s good at the more incremental, okay, if you know this and we have this, maybe we could do that. But the people who take the really big leaps and think of something so futuristic that the people just think, yeah, there’s so many things wrong with that. I can’t even start. We need those people who take big leaps.
And SpaceX as a company, which is run by a woman named Gwen Shotwell. That company takes big leaps. And I think something, if you took from this podcast, is that most spacecraft are about, I don’t know, 20 feet in diameter. And this spacecraft is, boy, I just got this wrong. It’s Mars. It’s so big. And I want to say it’s nine meters, so it’s 27 feet in diameter. Whereas other spacecraft are really more like in the early twenties.
But when you make it so much bigger, so huge, I mean, just adding another pound or two, or can we have an exercise machine on the capsules we have now, those are big questions. And do we all have to really go on a diet? Those are big questions. But now they’re launching spacecraft that are so big, you could put 100 people in them. Right now, the spacecraft we have can take four, maybe six. And so when you scale like that and you bring all those different perspectives to space, that’s how you really get ahead. So those things where you think they’re impossible, your ideas that are big leaps ahead, just hire those artists and storytellers to tell the stories and keep going.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
You sound like a Renaissance woman, the way I’m hearing. You’ve got the science, you’ve got the arts, you’ve got the saving porcupines, caring for others, and caring for humankind and animal kind, and you’ve broken a lot of barriers throughout your career. What advice, as we close out today, do you have for young people who might’ve been told, Hey, this is not your path, even though they want to pursue it?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Listen to that voice inside of you, the voice that just tells you, you don’t even have to know what it is. You just need to know that there’s something that you’re supposed to be doing. And just realize that it’s still a world. For whatever reason, communication has made it a lot easier to have information and see others like yourself.
And at the same time, it’s still a world whereas adults and people and who’ve gone to graduate school and go to be in academia with their ideas, realize that they’re the only woman or one of very few, or the only person of color or different things about you, you may feel alone. And realize that just look harder for company, because company is out there. And the world believes in you and your value and what you bring to the equation.
Unfortunately, I think it is still harder than we’d like for everyone to be recognized for their capabilities, but that means that those of us that have been recognized, there’s so many stories in my book that involve other people, not women, other people that looked and realized management is not seeing what Cady brings, and I am going to help them do that. We all have those people, and we need to be those people.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Final question: What excites you most about the future of space exploration today? And how can that inspire today’s kids to dream about their own futures, whether it’s science, arts, advocacy, wherever they end up going?
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
It’s the optimism involved. We’re now launching these giant spaceships. We have people living on a space station and doing research that can’t be done on the ground, and who thought that that could be possible. So realize that the impossible really is possible. And that’s really exciting to me because I think of diseases that there was no hope for, and medical researchers have found paths to make improvements or cure them. It’s exciting to me in a personal way, in a professional way, and so I’m just very optimistic. And I think space reminds us that those wild things that used to be cartoons, like the Jetsons, Star Trek, or Star Wars. They’re happening, and you could be a part of it, and your ideas are important.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I couldn’t say it any better myself. Cady Coleman, retired NASA astronaut, author of Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change. You have been a wonderful guest. Thanks for being here today.
Cady Coleman, PhD, retired NASA astronaut:
Thanks very much.
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Well Beyond Medicine
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
What a delightful guest, Cady Coleman. Thank you again for sharing your time and experiences here on the Well Beyond Medicine Podcast. And as always, thank you for listening. From our website, nemourswellbeyond.org, to our monthly E-newsletter, to your subscription to the podcast on your favorite podcast app, you will be well-informed on any and all topics related to the 85% of factors that happen outside a doctor’s office and affect children’s health. That’s what we talk about here all the time. Have an episode idea, reach out to us via voicemail at nemourswellbeyond.org or send an email to [email protected]. Don’t forget, you can listen, watch, and subscribe to the podcast on the Nemours YouTube channel, too.
Our production team for this episode includes Lauren Teta, Alex Wall, Susan Masucci, and Cheryl Munn. Video production by Britt Moore, audio production by yours truly. Be sure to listen and watch next time as we explore imagination, creativity, connection, and play as the foundations of youth mental health. Our guest will be Dr. Wizdom Powell. Please join us. I’m Carol Vassar. Until then, remember, we can change children’s health for good, well beyond medicine.
