YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Mason

lines on the record: 211
first: 2022-05-08
most recent: 2022-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Or did he stop funding all the research? Very grateful. And then I told him, I said, if you have an ex-girlfriend, we could try and name a genital fungus app.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's completely different. So we found one species actually that we named after a donor to Cornell, someone who's donated funds for research. So we named a different species of fungus after him, Naganishia Tolchinskia, because he's Eagor Tolcinsky. So as a thank you for him donating to Cortnell, we said we've named this fungus that we found on the space station for you.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other ones, there's some organisms we've studied in the space station called acinidobacter pity, which is often found in human skin, but we found hundreds of strains in the spaces and that we've brought down and curated and sequenced. And this is with Katsuri Venkatswaran, who's at Jet Propulsion Laboratory working with him. And they have evolved. So they no longer look like any Earth-based acinidobacter. They don't look like basically a new species. So actually there's different species of bacteria and fungi that have now mutated so much in the space station. They're literally a new species. And so we've found some of those that have just evolving as life is always evolving. And we can see it also in the space.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no road. You have to basically fly land nearby and then paddle in. So it's not next to anything. It's hard to get to, but once you get there, it's beautiful.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he emailed us one of the pilots and he said, Hey, guys, I saw you publish this paper. It's not as pink as it used to be because he loves flying over it. And it was like a little bit less pink because they had a bunch of rain in the past few weeks. So it was just a little bit diluted. So we reassured him it'll get more pink as they grow again. But basically, yeah, it's a beautiful pink lake.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great art requires suffering. I mean, so it is a beautiful, you have to get permits to go sample there, but we actually just got an email last week. There's pilots who fly over this in Australia because they love the color.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you walk in the Pink Lake, actually, it's so hypertonic, meaning it's so salty, you can feel it lysing and killing your cells on your foot. So it actually hurts the walking because it's so salty. So, yeah, so, but it won't kill.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's actually Danelia Selena. He's one of these organisms. There's a mixture of bacteria and some algae there that make it bright pink. So they actually make carotenoids, these very orangey and kind of pink molecules when you look at them in the light. So if you get enough of the bacteria, it becomes pink. And it's not just pink. It's like bubblegum pink, the lake. And so that's just an odd, it's a halophile meaning that it grows in 30% salt. And if you go below 10, 15% salt, it doesn't even grow. It actually kills it. Oh, well. Yeah, there it is.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really fun project, XMP, the Extreme Microbiome, which is as it sounds like we look for really odd places, like heavy radiation environments, high salt, higher, low temperature, strange area, the space station, for example, lots of radiation and microgravity, places where organisms can evolve for interesting adaptations, and some of them have been organisms we've seen at a candy pink lake in Australia called Lake Hillier, which we just published a paper on this”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've seen it for the astronauts. We can actually see their immune system respond to the microbiome of the space station. So as soon as you get into that aluminum tube, there's a whole ecosystem that's already up there. And we can actually see, we saw this with Scott Kelly, we've seen this with other astronauts. You can see the T cells in their body. They actually are responding to little peptides, the molecules of the bacteria. The immune system is looking for specific bacteria. And then once it sees new ones, it remembers it. And you can see the body looking for the microbes that are only on the space station that you don't see on Earth. And then when Scott came back, he actually had more of those microbes embedded in his skin and his mouth and stool that weren't there before. So he like picked up new hitchhikers in the space station and brought some of them back down with him.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here, cheaper and faster and easier, but we also have a lot of bacteria in us, on us, and all around us. And even the bacteria on the space station are continually evolving.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I called it just directed evolution in the book, is that you guide the evolution towards what you want. In this case, sometimes you can engineer yourselves to make exactly what you want, but other times you put people on planets and see how they change. Actually, later in the book, I imagine if you have humans on multiple planets, you could have this virtuous cycle where as people adapt and evolve here, you'd sequence their DNA and see how they change and then send the information back to the other planet and then study them with more resources. So you'd be able to then have a continual exchange of what's evolving in which way on different planets and then each planet would learn from the changes that they see at the other planet.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other ways to think about making your own energy if you're on a really long mission that's far from stars. You could turn on a lamp that would give you some of that essentially exact wavelength of light you need for your chloroplast in your skin. But that's something that I'm hoping would happen in three to four hundred years, but it would be hard because you're taking a plant organelle and putting it into animal cell, which sounds weird, but we have mitochondria inside of us, which basically where our cells capture a bacteria and now it walks around with us all the time. So there's precedent for it and evolution.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you lay them out there, but also that's if you needed all your energy only from your skin. So if you just get a little bit of it, your energy, of course, you could just walk around with your skin as is and you still have to eat, but not as much. And I describe that because”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He could roll it up. It would be, I mean, or you could just lay outside longer. I wanted to think if you just need one hour and how much gambling you need, but if you just went out there for four hours and you need something that's smaller, but instead of a half a tennis court, so you could make”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The chloroplast. So it was just kind of a fun concept in the book of green humans going around absorbing light from the sun, something I've dreamed about since I was a kid.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and then get all their energy that way. Of course, humans don't do this, but I describe in the book in the far future maybe three, four hundred years from now, if we could work on the ways that animals and plants work together, you could embed chloroplasts in human skin. And then if you're hungry, you go outside and you lay out your skin, and then you absorb sunlight, and then you go back in when you get full. If you only wanted to lay outside for just say one hour to get your days fully value of energy, you need about two tennis courts worth of skin that you could lay out and maybe your friends would plan it or something. But if they plan it, then their shadows would block your sun. So maybe you leave your skin out there and you could roll up your skin, go back inside after about one hour, and that's how much skin you would need to have exposed with some reasonable assumptions about the light capture and efficiency of the skin.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“VR, ultra rail, virtuality, because 30 years ago they sounded awful, I think. You'd be stuck in a spacecraft, but now you could bring the totality of all of human history, culture, every music, every bit of music song, every movie, every book can all be on one tablet, basically, right? And also, you'd still get updates from Netflix if you're on the way towards another star. You could still get downloads. But eventually maybe the crew would start to make their own shows. I want to talk about, I'm going to make a drama on this spacecraft. But I think it would have to be big enough so it feels like at least a size of a building. I think people's intuitions about quarantining have really become very immediate because we've all had to experience it to some degree in the past two years. And we've survived, but definitely we've learned that you need a really good internet connection. You need some ability to go somewhere sometimes. And, you know, that might just be as simple as people leading the spacecraft to go to something another thing connected to it or just go out into the vacuum of space for an afternoon.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't want it to be viewed that way. I want to think, wait, this is what an extraordinary gift. And we wouldn't probably just launch one generation ship. We'd probably launch 10 or 20 of them to different the best candidates and hopefully get there.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 generations, maybe they would rebel and say to hell with this, I'm tired of being in this prison. This is a bad idea. We're turning around. Or we're going somewhere else. Or a mutiny happens and they kill each other, right? So we would have to really make sure that the mental health, they structure the society is built so they could sustain that mission. That's a crazy mission. But it's not that much different from spaceship Earth, right? Here we are stuck on one planet. We don't have planetary liberty. We can't go to another planet right now. We can't even really go to another moon that easily. And I love Earth. There's lots of wonderful things here, but it's still just this one planet and we're stuck on it. So everyone that you know and love and live with here will be dead someday. And that's all you'll ever know too. So I think it's a difference of scale, not a difference of type in terms of experience.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have people hibernate and talk about like maybe you need to hibernate instead of just people living their normal life. But I think we don't, the hibernation technology doesn't work that well yet. And I don't know if it might pan out and maybe in 200 years it gets really good. And people can all just sleep in pods. Great. So I think this is the minimum viable product with everything that we have today and nothing else. So if that's the case, which of course I'm sure we'll have more than 500 years, but based on what we know today, you have people live and die on the spacecraft. And that sounds almost like a prison sentence. You say If you were born into a spacecraft and when you got old enough, they just said, yes, you can tell we're on a spacecraft. You will live your whole life on this, let's say something the size of a building. And this is everyone you'll ever know. And then you'll die and then your children will also carry on the mission. Would those people feel proud and excited to say we are the vanguard and hope of humanity? We're going towards a new sun and maybe they'd love it? Or would they, after...”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get to that state, we have to actually have you know I describe a number of options either we have to all have people survive in multiple generations live and die on the same spacecraft towards another starion technology you need to have that in place I assume we don't have dramatic improvements I describe ways it could happen like antimatter drives or things that could make it possible to go faster But since it's a book of non-fiction, I just make no big leaps other than what we know of today that's possible And if that's the case, you'd need probably 20 generations to live and die on one spacecraft to make it towards what is our known closest habitable exoplanet. Now that sounds you know so you need to have the life support self-reliance, self-sustainability all in that one. It'd be a large spacecraft. You'd have to grow your own food probably still have some areas with gravity. It would be complicated, but I think after 500 years we could actually have the technology and the means and the understanding of biology to enable that. And so with that as a backdrop you can”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has, at least in the past 100 years, the number of wars, number of military actions, casualties have all decreased. I don't know if it's going to stay that way for humanity. I think... The trajectory is there. I think the warmongering is less tolerated by the international community. It's more scrutinized. It still happens. Right now there's an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. You've spoken a lot about it. And it's, you know, but there sometimes will be small military actions, but I think And even there's a large military action across most of the country, but not all of it, actually, right? So I think you'll see less over time of large-scale multi-country invasions like we've seen in the past. I think maybe that won't happen ever again, but you might see country-to-country battles happening, which has always happened, I think, but hopefully less of that as well.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Currently, you can't own, you're not supposed to be able to own. I mean, people have tried to sell bits of the moon, for example, or sell names of stars, which is pretty harmless. But you're not supposed to be able to own any part of the moon, or an asteroid for that matter, but you're allowed to mine the resources from it. So in theory, you could go catch an asteroid, hollow out the whole thing like you eat an orange, and leave the shell and say, okay, I'm done. I never owned it, but I just extracted everything inside of it, and now I'm done with it, and then”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's basically 1967. It was the first large scale agreement between major international parties, particularly the US and Russia, but also many others, to say that space should be a place for humanities to not militarize it, to not weaponize it, to not militarize it, also establishing the basic sharing principles between countries who are going into space. And there was a plan to make an additional act in the 90s, the lunar actually I'm blanking on the name of what, but there hasn't been any significant legislation that has been universally accepted since the Space Act.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, vacation spots basically. Yes, I'd say that. Well, so they probably have a lot of rare earth minerals that you could use for manufacturing, which is why part of the space economy that's being built up now is people really wanted to go and hollow out asteroids and bring back all the resources from it. So this legally is very possible because even though the Space Act prevents people from militarizing space or owning all of it, if you get the resources out of an asteroid, but you don't actually say you own it, that's perfectly legal.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“under the surface so that'd be a great candidate The asteroids of Ceres would be good, or Eros, or big enough, you get a little bit of gravity. It would be interesting, you could have maybe a habitable place there. And they just may be big enough that you could get there, survive, and even have a tiny bit of gravity, but not much.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe actually with all that carbon and all this hydrocarbons, it is very possible that some microbial life could be there and hanging out waiting for us to dip our toes into the methane and find it. But we don't know yet, but I think that's one place I'd like to see an outpost. I would like to see other outposts near Jupiter, but Jupiter has extremely high radiation, actually. So even places like Io, which are volcanically active and quite amazing, we probably couldn't survive that long or that close to Jupiter, though it has because it's such a giant planet. It emits back out a lot of radiation that it's collecting from other parts of the universe and it juts back out. So if you get too close to Jupiter, it actually almost certainly not be able to survive. Depending on which part of it, but that's one risk about Jupiter. But it'd be cool to see the giant red spot up close. Maybe have some spots there.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a favorite. It's this kind of eerie green hued moon that's around Saturn that is, to our knowledge, this large, it has like, you know, so cold, it has these methane lakes where the methane normally is a gas, but there it actually be so cold. It's like a lake of methane. You could go swimming in it potentially. There might be some degree of rocks or maybe mountains there, but they might also be made of frozen methane. So no one's no person's obviously been there, but it is have enough satellite imagery and some data that you could actually potentially survive untitan. So I think that'd be one place where I'm hoping that we would at least have a bit of an outpost. It might not be a luxurious retreat because it's really cold.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of 500 years, I'm hoping we make the big launch towards another solar system really driven by the fact that we now actually have exoplanets that we know we might be able to get to and survive on, whereas 20 years ago, we really had almost none, certainly none that we knew were habitable. And exoplanets even just discovered in certain 89 and really early 90s for the real validated ones. I'm hoping over the next 500 years we go from thousands of possible habitable planets to hundreds of thousands or millions, especially with some of the recent telescopes launched. We'll find them. But before we get there, I have a whole section I really describe about the magic of Titan because it has all this methane, which is a great hydrocarbon you can use to make fuel. You can use it. It's cold as all bejesus on Titan. But...”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of electronics, so a lot of its tablets, there's laptops up there. There are, you know, the whole space station is running and humming on electronics. Actually, it's one of the biggest complaints astronauts have is sleeping up there as hard, not only because you're in zero gravity, but there's a consistent, loud hum of the space station. There's so many things active and humming and moving that are keeping the station alive, the CO2 scrubbers, all the instrumentation. It's allowed. So I think it is a very well-powered lab basically in flight, but the future space stations, I think, will be very different because they're being built more for pleasure than business or a little bit of both, but they're built for, we want people to, at least when you talk to Axiom, when you talk to the other industry partners, they want to make it space more fun and engaging and open to new ideas.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I mean, there are some things you can't say. I want to send a nuclear bomb up there. I'm curious. I don't think that would fly, but you.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for NASA, you have to go to the group, but I think for private spaceflight, you could have the reason is I'm curious, and that could just be I've got a private funder, or I've got your own money.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The robots question, and also the big question. So, what's interesting about this for Axiom and for these commercial spaceflight areas, if you can fund it, you could fly it, right? So if you have, say, like, I want to fly these series of robots up because I think they could help build something or they could help measure or repair the spacecraft”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good questions. So far, it's almost all manual because the robots have to all undergo the destructive fire and vibrational testing. So, if you have a million dollar, so excited. So, if you can get that thing.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you can see that viral reactivation is one of the biggest kind of mysteries in spaceflight where the immune system seems to be responding a lot as active, the body's really perturbed, but viruses start shedding again. And it's really, this happens clinically. Again, we see this for, for example, hepatitis C or hepatitis B, you can get infected with it and it can stain your body for decades and still kind of be hiding in the body. And in this case, we see it in spaceflight. Herpes comes back. So we want to figure out, is it there, first of all, and then when is it happening and characterize it better? But have the astronauts do it themselves rather than collecting it and bring it back to Earth and figuring out later, we could see in real time how it's happening and then also look at their blood. We'll see what is changing in their blood in real time with these new sequencers. So I'm excited about the genomics in space, if you will.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are happening out there. Some of them were doing a lot of the direct training for the cruise saying how do you do a modern genetics experiment? The Axiom one, for the Inspiration 4 and Axiom 1, were also collaborating with Trish, which is the translational research arm for NASA. That's in Houston. And there it's a lot of sharing of samples and data for all these missions, basically for all the commercial spaceflight missions, there'll be a repository where you can look at the data from the astronauts. You can look at some of the genetic information, some of the molecular changes. So that's being built up with Trish, which has been fabulous collaboration between Cornell and Trish. But the other thing we're doing is for Axiom 2 is training them. How do you, for example, if you want to look at a virus, you can take a swab of something, extract it, sequence it, and say, do I have Omicron or do I have a different virus? And we're going to do something the exact same work in flight, but we're having the astronauts do the extraction, the sequencing. And the analysis of all the molecules. And so one common occurrence is herpes is reactivated often in spaceflight.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're doing several studies on autism risk for fathers and sperm. It's really easy to get sperm, I'll just tell you. People say you're helping us with it. That's right.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Genetics? Yep, for now, but we also want to do some of the experiments that have been discussed in the lab have been and some that are being planned as well, but I think the most controversial one that's come up in our planning gets back to sex and space is, you know, can human embryos divide and actually begin to develop in space? But then if we do that experiment, that means you're taking viable human embryos, watching them develop in space, then you could freeze them and bring them down and characterize them to see. But to answer that question, because we actually don't know, can the human embryo actually develop well in zero gravity? We just don't know. But to find that out, that means we'd have to literally sacrifice embryos probably. Which itself has, of course, a lot of complications, ethical considerations. Some people just wouldn't, it's a non-starter for lots of people.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is very exciting. And the director testing is just often it can be something as simple as a hammer. It's really how does it shatter? You want to question are there glass components?”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aaron Burton might still have some of the videos. We're in the middle of doing some testing for the new sequencer called the Mark 1C. So I will make videos of that.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's flames and heat, but it's not like a kiln or anything like that. You don't want to know how it burns into kiln. It's more, is it flammable is the first big question. Like, does it just start on fire? If it gets a little bit of flammable on it, does it just light up a crystal stream?”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like just large shakers. So that's actually mostly to simulate launch. They have a lot of machinery at NASA and at SpaceX to make sure they completely fall apart. Fire testing is just to simulate what would happen if there was a normal fire. That something that gets up to fire temperatures several hundred degrees Celsius.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's extraordinary is what you have to do if you want to get a piece of machinery up there, you have to do destructive testing, so you have to destroy it and see what happens. How does it destroy it? Do pieces, little pieces of glass break everywhere. If so, that's a problem. So you have to redesign it and do fire testing. How does it burn? How does your device explode in a fire, or doesn't it? You have to test that and then you do vibration testing. So you have to basically, if you want to fly one thing into space, you need to make four of them and destroy at least three of them to know how they destroy it.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the ones we worked on actually with Kate Rubens was putting the first DNA sequencer in space called the biomolecular sequencer mission. Also with Aaron Burton and Sarah Castro Wallace. But there the interesting thing is we had to prepare this tiny little sequencer. It sequences DNA. You can do it really quickly within really minutes.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if you have anything you need to do your experiment that's a liquid or a solid, whatever that is, it has to go through toxicity testing. And the big question is, if this thing, whatever you want to use, gets in someone's eye, will they lose their vision or be really injured? And if the answer is yes, it doesn't mean you can't use it. It just means if the answer is yes, you have to then go through multiple levels of containment. There's a glove box on the space station where you can actually do experiments that have triple layers of containment. So you can still use some harsh reagents, but you have to do them in that glove box. But you can propose almost anything. The biggest challenge is the weight. If it's a heavy, it's $10,000 per kilogram to get something up into space. So if you have a big, heavy object, there's some cost you have to consider.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest constraint is what do you need for reagents or materials, the liquids that you might use for any experiment? What if it floats away? What if it gets in someone's eye? Because things always float away in space. There's notoriously panels in the space station where you don't want to look behind because it's got a little fungus or if food has gotten stuck there and sometimes found months and months or years later. So things float around. The little things.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four people, and the axiom 2 will also likely be four people. The two that have been announced are John Schauffner and Peggy Witson. Peggy Witson's already prior NASA astronaut has been up many times done many experiments. He knows the space station like our own house. And we recently did a training with Peggy and John in my lab at Cornell to get ready for some other genomics experiments that we'll do on that mission.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Axiom one is the first private crew to go to the space station. So Inspiration 4 was the first commercial private crew to just go into space. They went into space and actually did an orbital mission for just about three days. But Axiom 1 is the first, you know, again, on the SpaceX rockets, but launched up docked to the space station, and they're up there for about 10 days to do experiments, to work with staff, actually just take some pictures. But it's a mission. Actually, doing a lot of experiments, there's doing almost 80 different experiments. So it's a lot of, it's very science heavy, which I love as a scientist. But it's the ability to show that you can fundraise and launch up a crew that's all privately funded and then go to the space station.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the axiom space is a private spaceflight company that's building the first private space station. They actually have seen the videos and footage and hardware being put together. So they're in the process of constructing it. The hope is that by 2024, one of the first modules will be up and connected to the ISS. Eventually it'll be expanded. And then by 2028, the plan is that it'll be completely detached and free-floating. And it will be maybe even a little bit sooner depending on how fast it goes, but they're building the world's first private space station. So if you want to have a wedding up there, you just have to multiply the number of guest times the number of nights, and you could have a wedding up there. It'd be very expensive, but if you want to do it, you can do it. You can have a lab up there. If you want to do experiments, you can do experiments, you can figure out the cost. You want to have beer up there. You can make your own brewer and beer. And so this is the first beer made in space. For some reason, you want to do it. You can pay for it. So it's opened up this space where if you can...”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source