Book Club Edition: Dinner With an Astronaut by Leroy Chiao

Mat Kaplan (0:03)

Pull up a chair for Dinner with an Astronaut, as we welcome Leroy Chiao to this month's Planetary Radio Book Club Edition.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Dinner with an Astronaut? That's the title of Leroy Chiao's great book that takes us course by course through his remarkable life, a life that has taken him from eating peanut butter and spam sandwiches as he watched Aldrin and Armstrong walk on the moon to commanding the International Space Station. His warm and very personal book was just published in June by Harper Collins. After 15 years at NASA and four space missions, Leroy founded One Orbit, providing keynote presentations and training for companies and schools. He also holds an appointment at the Baylor College of Medicine and is an advisor to the Houston Association for Space and Science Education. He was LSU's first Ray-Borne Distinguished Chair Professor, and was on the faculty at Rice University as well. Dr. Chiao is a fellow of the Explorers Club and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics. First and foremost, he is an engineer and loves engineering just about as much as he did orbiting the Earth.

Please welcome Leroy Chiao, ace astronaut, 15 years with NASA, 229 days in space, an entire day and a half of that time outside in his own little personal spaceship doing extravehicular activity. Leroy, thank you so much for joining us.

Leroy Chiao (1:56)

Well, it's my pleasure and hello everyone. Glad to be here.

Mat Kaplan (2:00)

Great pleasure to welcome you to the book club. And also a great pleasure to have enjoyed this book. As a lot of people, a lot of our members have been telling us they did. You're the CEO of your own group that you call One Orbit.

And we can talk a little bit more about it later, but it's really very closely tied to the work that you do nowadays, isn't it?

Leroy Chiao (2:21)

Yes, absolutely. So Jamie Sunkel and I, my fiance now, we started One Orbit about 11 years ago. And we do both corporate events, of course, you know, keynotes for astronaut keynotes for corporate events and workshops. But our passion really is education. So we've been doing educational sponsored educational programs for this whole time. And that's our real passion with, you know, Jamie and I both have kids. Well, they're not so little anymore. They're, they're all in college. But it's been a rewarding and really great thing to do.

Mat Kaplan (2:56)

There's so much more that you've got going on. And you told me a little bit earlier that you are still affiliated with Baylor College, the College of Medicine at the Center for Space Medicine, which is we have talked to people from their own Planetary Radio. You're the first person affiliated with the center that we've had on. But they do some amazing work with preparing humans, particularly for long-duration spaceflight, right?

Leroy Chiao (3:23)

That's correct. And previously, I was also part of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. I was the chairman of what was called the User Panel. And so we had former and current astronauts weighing in on different research proposals on their relevancy to spaceflight and solving the problems that we have to solve before we can send astronauts on longer-duration flights, for example, to Mars. So we worked on something called Biomedical Countermeasures, which we test on the space station for different ways to keep astronauts healthy on a long-duration flight like, for example, to Mars during the surface stay and on the way back. And so NSBRA ended it in 2017, but I continue on as a member of the Center for Space Medicine, and they're all headquartered at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Mat Kaplan (4:14)

And just last month, the book, our book selection, was by somebody that you and I saw at the Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit at Rice University. And that's Scott Solomon, who wrote about that exact topic, getting humans ready for really long-duration spaceflight, going to Mars and back, which, you know, is people who listen to people who are members of the Planetary Society and listening tonight, they know that's probably going to be a two or a three-year trip.

Great to have somebody on who has actually spent as much time out there in low-Earth orbit in microgravity and in that environment as you have. And we should say that you had an affiliation with Rice University yourself before. In addition to being the first LSU, what is it, Rayborn Distinguished Chair Professor?

Leroy Chiao (5:02)

Yes, that's right. Not long after I left NASA, very soon after I left NASA, former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, who became the Chancellor of LSU, invited me to become that professor, the Chair Professor at LSU, where I started my academic career, if you will. I was there for about a year, a year and a half, and then transitioned to Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, where I still teach a course at Rice, and I'm still a member of the Center for Space Medicine. But yes, absolutely.