“People ask me if I was scared in space. Well, I was, but not for myself. I was scared for the planet.”
A conversation with Dutch astronaut André Kuipers, on the thrill of space flight, the future of exploration, and the fragility of “Spaceship Earth”.
Born in 1958, André Kuipers is a Dutch physician and former ESA astronaut, with two space travels to the International Space Station (ISS). In April 2004, he flew as a member of DELTA mission, spending 11 days in space (9 on the ISS) working on various scientific experiments onboard the station.
In December 2011, he returned in a second mission, this time for 6 months, working in over 50 experiments in orbit around the planet. He was there when SpaceX made history, with the first private capsule to dock on the ISS. He came back in July 2012 and since then he is a strong advocate for science, exploration, and protecting our fragile ecosystems.
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Apologies for the cliche question, but do you still miss space?
Yes! I would love to go back. Sometimes I dream about it.
What exactly?
The floating is nice. There are three nice things in space. Floating like a fish in the water — it feels great. And you get to play with things that float, especially fluids. A water bubble with air in it, for example, it’s almost magical. Fluids are beautiful. And the third thing is, of course, the view. The planet is really beautiful. But it’s also a scary perspective, because you see how small the planet is.
The famous overview effect.
Yes. Same thing. I wrote in one of my books about this strong feeling from my first flight, when I thought ‘Wow, this is it. This is everything we have.’ There’s no place where we could go. Space is very hostile. You cannot live there, really, as humankind. Everything we have is this small planet.
There’s a huge ‘motivational’ literature out there, but we found that astronauts’ biographies are some of the best ‘life management’ books ever written. From your experience, what does it take to become an astronaut?
First of all, motivation. It is a long road, so you need motivation. Then you need a lot of perseverance in order not to give up. And patience, because it takes a lot time before you fly. Some people will wait 12–14 years for their ride to orbit.
You also need what I call frustration tolerance because things will go different than you think. There will always be setbacks. For example, I thought I would fly on a Shuttle, then they said ‘no, you will be a co-pilot for a Soyuz’. Then we stopped working because there was an accident.
Of course, you also need a certain amount of intelligence and health, which is important because you have to understand quickly the different sciences and technology that you work with. You don’t have to be a professor, a doctor, or an engineer, or to know everything about a molecule. But you must be able to learn.
You don’t need to be a top athlete, but you need to be in reasonable shape. You also have to be a team player. It’s not an individual thing. Being a team player is important because you are just the hands and eyes of the scientists on the ground, and you have to work with your colleagues on board, from different countries: Japan, Russia, United States, etc.
You have to deal with the public, the management, the scientists, all kinds of different people. And that’s really important, to realise that you are just a member of a team. Everybody looks up to the astronauts, but we are standing on the shoulders of giants. There are thousands of people that make it happen and you are just one in a team. We are the ones that get on a rocket and go to space, but without the people that stay here, it would be impossible.
What was your personal motivation?
Two reasons. Ok, three reasons (laughs). The first one was adventure. That’s how it started. When I was a little boy, rockets, spacesuits, aliens, all this kind of things fascinated me. Then I saw the pictures from the Space Shuttle, I saw how beautiful it was. And I said to myself ‘wow, this is adventurous, but it’s also beautiful.’ And the third thing was that I saw all the research that was being done, I saw how useful it was for the people of Earth.
It was a combination of adventure, beauty, and pragmatism. So I said ok, this is what I want to do. It’s nice for myself, it’s also good for my planet.
How was that feeling of reaching the Space Station, docking your capsule there?
You are very concentrated in that moment. You spend only two days in the Soyuz capsule, but those are the most critical days — launch, docking, undocking, and re-entry. So you train 50% of the time on the Soyuz. The most important part is the docking, so we had a lot of training. If the automated system were to fail, we had to take over, so we had a lot of manual training. If the commander was sick, I had to take over as the co-pilot. So you train a lot in the simulator. That’s how you learn these things.
When the real thing is coming, you are very concentrated at what’s happening: Is everything going according to plan? Do we have to take over? Things like that. The launch and the re-entry are very fast, very hectic, but the docking and undocking are more relaxed. But you have to concentrate and react because there were cases when Soyuz could not dock, so it had to go back. It happens.
You did a lot of science experiments up there.
Pretty much. We were busy with three kinds of experiments: experiments regarding space itself, for example we had to see which materials worked best against the radiation, or to see how we could best cool satellites.
Then you have fundamental experiments for Earth: basic experiments about how plants react to gravity, for example. Or one in which the whole Earth was mimicked in order to see if we can predict earthquakes.
And then you have industrial experiments. For the pharmaceutical industry, the oil industry, and so on. People think that, because my background is in medicine, I only did medical experiments. No! We do all kind of different things. And that’s what you do about half of the time. The other half you do maintenance work: check the air filters, the water quality, see if everything is working. Cleaning, maintenance, repairs, these take a lot of time.
And sport, lots of sport. Like a marathon against sickness.
Oh, yes. The first big problem with weightlessness is that you lose bone. First day, you get a fluid shift, lots of fluid goes to your face and it gets thick. Space sickness also happens. You get back pain in the beginning, because you get a bit taller. Later you have problems with bone loss, muscle loss, and less blood to your heart. That’s why you have to exercise. For the heart we have to exercise a lot on the bike. I didn’t like it very much because you sweat a lot. Then we have the treadmill for running. Actually, that thing is on the wall and you need a harness. And every day we do weightlifting because the best way to strengthen your bones is to apply force. Bone is a living tissue, so the best way to keep your bones strong is to do weightlifting. The problem is that there is no weight, so we have these cylinders that are stuck in vacuum so you work against air pressure. The workout takes two hours a day, with setting up the equipment. And even then you become a bit weaker and lose bone, but that’s just the way it is.
And then the shock of coming back down to Earth.
Yes! It feels like the Earth is pulling you down. First of all, you have been weightless for a few months, or more, and at re-entry you feel like an elephant is on your chest. It’s very hard to breathe. It’s much tougher than at launch.
And when you get on the ground, it’s like a big magnet pulling you down. You get pale, you have problem standing up, and you can faint easily because your blood pressure doesn’t work effectively. Then you get earth sick. The first days you don’t feel that good.
You also drop things, because you think they will float. You stumble, because you don’t pull up your legs enough. You have to be careful with stairs, because you think you can still float down the stairs. For three months I had muscle ache, because I didn’t use them. I felt like I was 100 years old. It’s not pleasant, but you know it’s coming.
But no lasting problems.
No, none that I know of. Bones will be OK. Maybe the structure of the bone is different, I don’t know. Radiation is also an issue in space, because we are not protected by the atmosphere. Sometimes you see it. If your eyes are closed and you see a flash, that is a radioactive particle that hits your retina. But radiation is a statistical thing. We’ll see if astronauts get more cancer in the future. We don’t know. I didn’t have clear health issues afterwards. Looks like there might be some problems with the astronauts’ vision, but we don’t know why. But it’s all worth it! (laughs, in a very serious way)
After your space flights, you engaged in a lot of projects and efforts to promote science — and the need of protecting our world.
Yes, I like it a lot, I want to do the outreach. I like to promote science to the public, especially in public schools! In Holland, we have a big shortage of technical people. So we try to show that science is interesting and fun.
And space flights are a nice platform from which to get the attention of kids. It’s exciting and adventurous, but it’s also science. We like to show how fun science and technology can be. If I can get 1% more children into technology it would be a big success!
Like every space explorer who got to see the world from the ISS’ Cupola, you took a lot of photographs of Earth — searching not only for regions that were visually beautiful, but also for poor and hard hit regions, or endangered parts of the world. And then you started travelling the world to visit them.
That’s right! You are well informed (laughs).
People ask me if I was scared in space. Well, I was, but now for myself. I was scared for the planet. It is so small, with a very thin atmosphere layer! At night, you see all these lights — and you realise it’s not getting bigger. You see all the fishing ships, thousands of fishing ships… You see forest fires and deforestation, air pollution over big cities… And I got scared, I feel I have to tell the people that there are not enough fish, there are not enough forests! One day it will be over.
I went to Brazil to talk about deforestation. I also went to Greenland to talk about the melting of the glaciers. We went to Indonesia, and it was so full of pollution, it was plastic everywhere in the ocean…
I hope that people get a bit more aware that these resources are not endless. We have to be smart. I believe in the new technologies. As soon as people realise you can still make money with a sustainable kind of technology, like electric cars, things will start to change. I hope I can help a little with that change.
Too bad not everybody gets to go in space to change their perspective!
Not yet. But I will not be surprised if in 10–20 years you will fly in space. There will be tourism in space. It’s a slow process, but like with aviation, first it’s experimental, then it’s military, and then you get to transport people and tourism. There will be accidents, like with ships and planes, but we must continue. One day, we will have hotels in orbit, mining on the Moon, cities on Mars. But not tomorrow, of course.
It will come slowly. Technology never stops. The future will look very different than what we think of it now — if we don’t get killed by an asteroid. We should do something about that as well.
How do you see the rise of the private sector, led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX?
That’s a very good thing. That’s a normal process. We saw this with all the kinds of transportation in history. All this new technology is first experimental — and things go wrong, and people make mistakes, and people die. That happens. With planes, and ships, whatever. Then it often becomes military. And then it becomes commercial — it becomes cargo, postal services, all this kinds of things. And then you also have transport of people, and tourism. Because it’s a lot of money in tourism. This is a normal process. It happened in aviation, and it will happen in spaceflight, as well. So, in order to start, you have to take a risk. That’s why it’s governments that start space exploration, because it’s too big a venture for a company. But as soon as it works, it’s better to leave it to companies, because they are more efficient, they can do things faster, because now that a thing works they can get investors. If something works, if a certain rocket is developed and tested by governments, if travel to space is tested, then commercial companies take over, they can do the commercial part.
It’s up to the agencies to do the new things, to go to an asteroid and catch it, or to go mining on the Moon, or launch an expedition to Mars. Near Earth orbits will become available for companies, not only for Elon Musk and SpaceX.
I was the one who docked the first spacecraft from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the Dragon, I got it to the station. It was the start of a new era. I controlled the Dragon, I grabbed it, I controlled the arm, and I connected it to the spacecraft. It was the first time a commercial company arrived at the ISS. Now we start to have others. It’s a normal process, the process of commercial companies getting into human spaceflight.
We kind of got used to the idea of people flying to space and living and working there for months, years.
It’s still a small group! You need all the technology, you need the oxygen, you need the water, etc. We humans are made for 1G, 1 ‘atmosphere’ of pressure, 5 km per hour, on our own legs, and say 25 degrees Celsius (77F). These are our specifications.
That means we don’t belong in this strange place. We can go there because we have brains, we can adapt, we can build spaceships, we can bring our oxygen, etc. But the only place that we have for a home, for everybody, is Earth. That’s it. You cannot just go to Mars, or Venus. We have to do with this one planet.
I’m optimistic we’re gonna colonize the solar system. But it takes a lot of time. It’s not for us (laughs). Now we try, we make mistakes, and maybe in 100 years, in 200 years we will be on Mars, and do these things. It will come. But not yet. Technology is getting better and better, space medicine is the new frontier.
I said we, humans, are not meant to live in space. But we’re gonna do it. Like we are not meant to be under water, or very high on the mountains, on top of Everest, or to fly. But we can. We build ships, we can build equipment, we can survive in cold, very high, under pressure, or in space. We have brains, so that’s why we can survive.
And we are interested in going to these places. I mean, why do we want to go to a desert? Why do we want to go high in the mountains? Because we’re curious, because we want to find something that brings money, oil, or certain minerals, that’s why we explore. We want to be first, we dot it for national prestige, and things like that.
But we also want to get knowledge. We do it for the science. We’re science explorers.
Hi there! I’m Vasile Decu, science journalist, amateur astronomer, professional bookworm. And I need your help:
If you enjoyed this interview, help me launch Modern Explorers magazine, a new monthly science publication that will arrive in your email inbox in the shape of an ebook (ePub file and different PDFs), specially designed so you can enjoy it on your phone, tablet, or laptop.
For 5$, you’ll get a 6 month subscription (6 issues);
For 10$, you’ll get a full year (12 issues);
And 50$ will make you a lifetime member!
