Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet – and Our Mission to Protect It
Nicole Stott is a retired NASA astronaut who performed two important missions on the International Space Station, where she served as flight engineer for Expeditions 20 and 21. She was a Mission Specialist on Space Shuttle Missions 128 and 133. Nicole began her career as a Structural Design Engineer with Pratt & Whitney. She was the first astronaut to have a picture taken with the SSPI logo from space. In 2020, she appeared in a super bowl commercial with Busy Philipps and Lilly Singh riding the first Olay rocket!
In Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet – and Our Mission to Protect It, Nicole imparts essential lessons in problem-solving, survival and crisis response that each of us can practice to make change. She knows we can overcome differences to address global issues, because she saw this every day on the International Space Station. Nicole shares stories from her spaceflight and insights from scientists, activists and changemakers working to solve our greatest environmental challenges. She learns about the complexities of Earth’s biodiversity from NASA engineers working to enable life in space and from scientists protecting life on Earth for future generations. Click here to learn more about Back to Earth.
Code Blue
In this podcast, SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla speaks with Nicole Stott, author and retired NASA astronaut. Nicole talks about her new book: Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet – and Our Mission to Protect It and how when she first saw Earth from space, she realized how interconnected we are and knew she had to help protect our planetary home.
This podcast is the fifth episode of This Planet’s on Fire, the podcast of the Climate Sense campaign. The series was made possible with the support of SatSure.
Excerpt from Back to Earth
Chapter 1: Act Like Everything Is Local (Because It Is)
Being an astronaut offered me many opportunities to appreciate different perspectives. In preparation for spaceflight, I completed an undersea mission in which my crewmates and I were immersed sixty feet deep in the ocean off Key Largo, Florida. That experience gave me an “inner space” perspective where the planet seemed to engulf me while from outer space I felt as if I was surrounding it. From each of these vantage points, I developed an immediate and visually stunning understanding of our interconnectivity – that all that connects us defines our relationship to and our interdependence upon one another. This understanding of our interconnectivity has become an integral part of who I am and how I feel about my relationship to everyone and everything on Earth – and to the Earth itself. I believe it will remain a powerful influence on all my actions and choices for the rest of my life.
Not only was the opportunity to be immersed in our planet deep beneath the surface of the ocean the absolute best analog to what life would be like on a space station, but it alos opened up for me a whole new understanding of this planet we share. There is so much life down there that we’re not aware of in our day-to-day lives.
As a crew of six, we spent eighteen days on a mission in the undersea habitat called Aquarius.5 This school bus-sized habitat that sits on the ocean floor is about the same size as a single International Space Station module, and it’s the only undersea habitat and laboratory of its kind in the world. Unlike the ISS, all the critical elements we needed to survive (for example, air, electricity, communications) were supplied to us through cables and hoses from a life support buoy on the surface. For us as a crew, however, everything about the experience of life on Aquarius paralleled the way we would live and work on the ISS.
After an hour at depth, our bodies were saturated with nitrogen, so there was no zipping up to the surface in the case of an emergency because a quick “escape” to the surface would mean serious injury, likely death, from the bends. All our mission activities on or in the vicinity of Aquarius were analogs to the kind of work we would do in space, including the science experiments that we performed and some that were performed on us, and scuba dives to test out surface exploration techniques for future use on the Moon or Mars that would emulate a spacewalk. As we would do on the ISS, we lived and worked in isolation in an extreme environment that required us to deal with emergencies as a crew in order to ensure our survival, and we enjoyed a view out the window that was overwhelmingly impressive and difficult to describe.
On the eighteenth and final day of our mission, as we prepared to surface, I sat at the galley porthole with my dear friend and fellow astronaut Ron Garan. As we gazed out the window, we reflected in awe at the time we’d just spent as part of this undersea world, and both of us agreed that even if we never got to space, we already had been blessed to have experienced our planet from this perspective. We never had the chance to fly together in space, but we often talk about the undersea adventure we shared.
While the extreme environments of undersea and outer space provided me with the opportunity to experience our planet with a whole new sense of awe and wonder, they also allowed me to appreciate the very basic challenge associated with both – survival. To live in either of these places is a difficult proposition. Whether scuba diving for recreation or spending eighteen days doing research and training an an undersea habitat, you need special equipment to survive. The same is true for outer space. The experience made me appreciate how perfectly designed our planet is to take care of all this for us. We do our best with our undersea habitats and our spaceships to mimic what Earth does for us naturally. Earth still does it best. Click here to learn more about Back to Earth.