Terry Virts F-16 Fighter Pilot to NASA Astronaut & 200 Days in Space

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Colonel Terry Virts has flown an F-16 over Iraq at night, laser-guiding bombs, with simulated MiG-29s on his tail and a wingman who nearly ran dry over enemy territory. He has sat in an Orion capsule on top of a rocket while a man with a red button could have blown him up. He has floated outside the International Space Station at five miles per second while watching the sun rise sixteen times a day — and nearly drowned inside his own helmet.

Two spaceflights. Three spacewalks. Commander of the ISS. 200 days in orbit. 300,000 photographs. And he learned to cut Italian women's hair before he was allowed to launch.

Chris sits down with Terry to go inside the life few humans have ever lived — from the single-seat, single-engine mentality of the F-16 cockpit to the profound silence of looking down at a border lit up in red at night and realising you're watching a war.

Chapters:

00:00 From fighter jets to the final frontier — who is Terry Virts?
01:33 F-16s, Korea, and the limits of human busyness
03:59 Low on fuel over Iraq — and a wingman who barely made it
05:49 A bird strike in Texas and 0.1 hours of flight time
07:52 The astronaut dream — applying when your classmates wouldn't
09:29 Sir Alex Ferguson at Harvard and a conversation about football
12:41 Shuttle vs. F-16 — Mach 2 to Mach 25
15:20 The STA — flying a Gulfstream like a space shuttle
18:00 Docking with the ISS and seeing Earth for the first time
20:12 The politics of the International Space Station
22:46 The view from space — borders, lights, and what wealth looks like from orbit
27:05 Squid boats and green fishing lights in the Andaman Sea
29:51 Daily life on the ISS — hair cuts, zero-gravity digestion and computer networks
36:28 Installing the Cupola — bats or moles?
44:15 Three spacewalks and nearly 20 hours outside
45:28 Seeing God's view of creation — between greasing the bolts
47:53 The water in the helmet and the near-drowning that changed spacewalking
50:01 Ammonia leak — when we thought the station was going to die
53:50 The Russians, the Duma and watching war from orbit
57:59 The future of space — Artemis, Starship and the road to Mars
01:04:40 One More Orbit — Guinness World Record and Hamish Harding
01:06:46 Books, Call to Adventure (sea kayaking in Alaska), and Pay It Forward

What You'll Learn:
• What it actually feels like to pilot a space shuttle — why pulling the nose up during landing first makes you descend, and why your brain has to stay several steps ahead of the vehicle
• The real story behind the ammonia leak that made NASA tell the crew the space station was going to die — and why it turned out to be a false alarm
• What Terry saw from orbit over eastern Ukraine in January 2015 — red flashes in the dark — and what became of the cosmonaut who was standing beside him
• Why the International Space Station is one of America's greatest foreign policy achievements, and how it passed Congress by a single vote
• The night Luca Parmitano almost drowned in his spacesuit — and the snorkel system NASA installed in response that Terry put to the test on his second spacewalk
• Why Terry believes the only path to Mars is a public-private partnership, what the real cost of SLS is per launch, and what Elon Musk's Starship lander has to do before humans walk on the Moon

TERRY VIRTS | NASA Astronaut, Author & Filmmaker
Website: terryvirts.com
Instagram: @astro_terry
Twitter/X: @AstroTerry
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/terry-virts-146a5939
Books: How to Astronaut; View From Above (National Geographic); An Astronaut's Guide to Leaving the Planet
Pay It Forward: Guide Dogs for the Blind — documentary Pick of the Litter tells the story; guidedogs.org

ABOUT TERRY VIRTS
Colonel Terry Virts (USAF, retired) is a former F-16 fighter pilot, test pilot and NASA astronaut. He piloted the Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-130, where he installed the Cupola module and took his first photographs of Earth. He returned to the ISS on Expedition 42/43, commanding the station for 200 days, conducting three spacewalks totalling nearly 20 hours, and shooting approximately 300,000 photographs — many of which became the National Geographic book View From Above and the IMAX film A Beautiful Planet. After leaving NASA he co-directed the feature documentary One More Orbit, circumnavigating Earth over both poles in a Gulfstream jet and setting a Guinness World Record. He speaks and consults internationally on leadership, exploration and decision-making under pressure.


For full show notes and links, visit: adventurediaries.com/go

#astronaut #spacetravel

Transcript

[CHAPTER: From Fighter Jets to the Final Frontier — Terry Virts — 00:00]

[00:00] CHRIS: Welcome to Adventure Diaries, Colonel Terry Virts. How are you?

[00:07] TERRY: Good, thanks for having me. I wish I was there in person.

[00:10] CHRIS: Likewise — it would be great to meet in person one day. Thanks so much for your time; I really appreciate it. I know you're a very busy man, so I'll dive straight in. You're a fighter pilot at heart — Colonel with the US military, flew F-16s, then on to NASA, a couple of missions up to the International Space Station, one of which you commanded. You flew the shuttle Endeavour as well as the Russian Soyuz, undertaking a host of experiments and spacewalks. I think we're approaching something of a golden age of space travel again, with everything going on around the Artemis programme, Musk versus Bezos and so on. Hopefully through this conversation we can ignite a little more interest and passion for what's happening.

[CHAPTER: F-16s, Korea, and the Limits of Human Busyness — 01:33]

[01:33] CHRIS: I'd like to roll back to your military career and what you've done as a fighter pilot. Listening to your audiobook in preparation for this, what struck me is that you said some of your training was the hardest experience you'd had. Is that right?

[01:55] TERRY: It was very different. I started my professional career as an F-16 pilot, and then about a decade later I ended up at NASA for sixteen years. They both have their own challenges. As an F-16 pilot, I was single-seat, single-engine. When you show up at F-16 school, there's this giant wall saying "single-seat, single-engine" — to get you into the mindset that there's nobody else in the jet. Either you get it done or you die, and there's only one engine. Most aeroplanes have two or four; we had one. There's a mentality that comes with that. I remember one check-ride in Korea: we flew at night, low altitude, with a special system called LANTIRN, dropping laser-guided bombs. We had Red Air — simulated MiG-29s and surface-to-air missiles — and I was leading four F-16s. After that flight I thought, this is the busiest a human being can be. Then I got to NASA and flew the shuttle in a simulator. It's a very complicated aeroplane; you actually have to fly it. I remember after one simulator session thinking, that's as busy as a human being can possibly be. The training was different in both cases, but pretty challenging in its own way.

[03:59] CHRIS: In your book you mention flying through Iraq and having an engine failure. I think you also mentioned setting off low on fuel in the fighter jets — what's the logic behind that?

[04:21] TERRY: The T-38, which is a supersonic trainer the US Air Force has used since the sixties — NASA still uses it to train astronauts — is probably the most important training astronauts do. It's a long, skinny aeroplane with very stubby wings, so there's almost nowhere to put fuel. We joke that we take off low on gas and by the time we get where we're going, we're really, really low. That's not entirely a joke. The F-16 had a bit more fuel. The incident in the book was over Iraq when Saddam was still in charge — not a place you wanted to be on the ground. My wingman lost his engine; long story short, he barely made it to an airfield in Turkey with seconds to spare.

[05:32] CHRIS: Did you ever have to eject during your time as a fighter pilot?

[05:36] TERRY: I'm knocking on my table — no, I haven't had to eject yet. I've had engine failures in T-38s and F-16s, but thankfully not had to eject.

[05:47] CHRIS: You had a bird strike too, didn't you?

[05:49] TERRY: You've heard all my stories! We were taking off from Houston — early morning, around 6 or 7 a.m. Houston sits right in the central bird migration corridor for North America; all the birds fly through Houston and then cross the Gulf to the Yucatán. As we rotated off the runway I could see these little birds go down the engine inlet — then a huge explosion, and all the warning lights came on. The temperature went to maximum on the left engine, which in the T-38 provides hydraulic power for the landing gear. So I let it run for a moment to get the gear up and build a bit of speed, then we did a right 270-degree turn and landed on a different runway. Over 5,000 hours of flying time, that was my shortest sortie — about 0.1 hours. Just a few minutes.

[07:28] TERRY: Oh yes, I saw the birds. We'd actually taxied to a runway we thought would be better for birds, but it didn't help. Birds are just a fact of life if you're flying in Texas at certain times of year.

[CHAPTER: Astronaut Dreams and NASA Selection — 07:52]

[07:52] CHRIS: Was it always the intention to move towards NASA? I know you've spoken about your bedroom as a kid and your fascination with space.

[08:11] TERRY: It was my hope, but not my plan — I didn't actually think it would happen. I really, really wanted to be an astronaut. I checked all the boxes: fighter pilot, test pilot, hoping it would happen but not certain. When NASA announced an astronaut selection, I applied. A lot of my classmates didn't, even though they wanted to — they thought they were too young or didn't have enough experience. Long story short, I was selected. The lesson I share with kids and adults is: don't tell yourself no. If you have a dream, whatever it is, don't be the one who talks yourself out of it.

[09:20] CHRIS: You miss every shot you don't take.

[09:29] TERRY: Exactly. I think that was Wayne Gretzky — or possibly Alex Ferguson. I do guest lecturing at Harvard Business School, and at one event the organiser told me I'd be sitting with Sir Alex Ferguson at dinner. I said, "Awesome — who's Alex Ferguson?" I learned very quickly. He is a great human being. I got to spend an hour with him — I was telling him about coaching my eight-year-old daughter's football team. The best time. I'll be honest, I didn't understand about 50 per cent of what he said, but I could tell he was a good man. For those who don't know, he coached Manchester United — one of the most successful football coaches in history.

[10:49] CHRIS: He also played for my team back in the day, and we could certainly use him right now.

[11:01] TERRY: Right. So — who calls it soccer? Is that just America?

[11:08] CHRIS: Yeah, football is the word here. Counter question: why do you call it football when you use your hands?

[11:20] TERRY: Who knows? Why do you drive on the left? Why do you put luggage in the boot and have an engine in the bonnet? Although "car park" makes sense — that's a proper term. We should have some kind of international committee that takes the best of all the English variants.

[12:05] CHRIS: My little girl watches too much YouTube and says things like "Daddy, I need to take the trash out" — we call it rubbish. The slang in Scotland is even worse.

[CHAPTER: Shuttle vs. F-16 — Mach 2 to Mach 25 — 12:41]

[12:41] CHRIS: Going back to your flying — comparing the Endeavour versus the Soyuz versus the F-16: what are we talking, Mach 2 versus Mach 13?

[13:13] TERRY: Very different. As a pilot you could actually fly the shuttle during launch — after about a minute and a half of powered flight. You could fly it in space: I flew it a lot, grabbed the control stick and manoeuvred for rendezvous and docking. Then when you came back to land, you flew it as an aeroplane. But orbital mechanics work differently from aeroplanes. If you want to speed up in space, you actually descend — lower orbits go faster. If you want to turn left or right, you basically can't without enormous fuel expenditure. And the shuttle's control in pitch was counter-intuitive: if you're at 10 feet and about to land, pulling back makes the orbiter descend first before it climbs. As a pilot you have to keep your brain several steps ahead of the machine, or you'll prang it onto the runway.

[15:20] CHRIS: How do you train for those G-forces and speeds in a simulator?

[15:29] TERRY: NASA had a simulator at Ames Research Center in San Francisco on giant hydraulic lifts — it moved the cockpit box hundreds of feet up and down to replicate what you'd feel during landing. There was also the STA — Shuttle Training Aircraft — which was a modified 1970s Gulfstream jet. NASA added thrust reversers that deployed in flight and lowered the main gear without the nose gear, using all that drag to simulate the shuttle's steep glide. We'd go up to 30,000 feet, drop the nose into a 20-degree dive, drop the gear and the thrust reversers, and practise landing at 280 knots.

[16:43] CHRIS: There's a lot going on at that acceleration. Is it always manually controlled at that velocity?

[16:55] TERRY: For landing, you hit the atmosphere at around Mach 25, about 250,000 feet up — but that's thousands of miles from your runway at Kennedy Space Center or Edwards Air Force Base. You're going five miles per second. As you hit the air you start to slow down: at first the nose is 45 degrees nose-high and the plasma is hitting the underside at hundreds or thousands of degrees. Once you slow below Mach 5 the nose comes down and it starts flying like a normal aeroplane. The guys who designed the flight control system in the seventies, without any real computers to help them, did an amazing job.

[CHAPTER: Docking with the ISS and Seeing Earth for the First Time — 18:00]

[18:00] CHRIS: What was your first docking approach to the International Space Station like? And — I think your face when you arrive and see Kilimanjaro in A Beautiful Planet is pretty special.

[18:44] TERRY: I love that film. I also teach the "Making an IMAX Movie in Space" class at the USC film school in Los Angeles. On that first flight I was a rookie and very focused on not screwing up — flying the shuttle, making the right computer entries, keeping us on course. We got to maybe a couple of hundred metres from the station and I finally looked up. I was like, oh my God — there's a huge space station out there. Earlier in the day it had been a dot on the screen. Then I turned around and: wow, that thing is huge. On my second flight I was in the Soyuz with Samantha Cristoforetti; she was a rookie, head down typing commands. I said, "Hey, Samantha, look out the window." Her reaction: "Oh my God." I think every rookie, the first time they see the station, is astonished.

[20:12] CHRIS: It's such a feat of engineering — and politically, having fifteen or sixteen countries come together to build it and still collaborating is phenomenal.

[20:30] TERRY: It started in the early nineties. George H. W. Bush tasked his vice president Dan Quayle to bring the Russians on board. Reagan had Space Station Freedom, which had languished for years. HW got Quayle to bring the Russians in and they started the ISS, with development essentially finished under Bill Clinton. Bob Walker, Newt Gingrich's lieutenant in Congress — not exactly a Democrat — got the votes in Congress, where it passed by one vote in the nineties. I think it's one of America's greatest foreign policy achievements. It took the Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when they had unemployed scientists, and rather than those people building weapons for hostile states, they came and worked on the ISS. With what's going on in Russia now, that's a different story — and incredibly disappointing for me personally.

[22:04] CHRIS: The world is in a pretty troubled place at the moment.

[22:11] TERRY: Leadership matters, Chris. When you have a man who wants to restore past national greatness by force, who is dictator for life, you end up in a really bad place. Democracy works — it might not be perfect, but people's lives are generally good in Scotland, good in America. How we govern ourselves determines how people's lives turn out.

[CHAPTER: The View from Space — Borders, Lights, and What Wealth Looks Like from Orbit — 22:46]

[22:46] CHRIS: There's something very touching about looking at the borders of the world from space. If you look at the Korean Peninsula at night — the proliferation of light and energy in the south, then nothing above the border.

[23:17] TERRY: It's a black hole. I never expected to see that. At night you can't see people, but you can see where people are, because what you're actually looking at is wealth. Western Europe — lots of lights, in pretty good shape. And then North Korea: just a black hole. I spent a year of my life flying up and down that border. I find it grimly amusing that someone — probably a Brit — decided to call the most heavily militarised place on Earth the "Demilitarised Zone." And looking down at India and Pakistan: I kept seeing what looked like a long brown river lit up at night. It turned out to be the military border — the floodlit fence. Wealth, or the lack of it, is completely visible from space.

[26:02] CHRIS: Looking at Africa was quite jaw-dropping too — the continent holds so many people, so many countries, and yet so much of the interior is dark.

[26:11] TERRY: You can see the Nile at night. You can see Nigeria — white dots from the oil wealth. You can see Johannesburg. And in between, a billion people and no lights — failed states, tribalism, the consequences of greed and selfishness. It's not something I expected to see from space, but you definitely can.

[27:05] CHRIS: The fishing boats with green lights were quite striking too.

[27:11] TERRY: In Korea, there are swarms of white dots — squid boats that shine lights into the water to attract squid. But in the Andaman Sea off Thailand, they're green. There must be a reason the fish there respond to green light. It's the only place on earth with those green dots.

[CHAPTER: Daily Life on the ISS — Food, Hair Cuts, and Computer Networks — 29:51]

[29:51] CHRIS: Pivoting to your time aboard the ISS — you mentioned that the hardest thing you had to do was learn to cut Samantha's hair. Is that your handiwork in A Beautiful Planet?

[30:07] TERRY: Yes, absolutely! If it looks good, I'll take credit. Samantha flew again after I retired, which is great. She normally just let her hair grow out and tied it in a ponytail — most women in space do. But Samantha is Italian, she's the most famous Italian on Earth, and she wanted a proper haircut. Before I was allowed to launch, I had to go with her to her hairdresser in Houston and learn how to cut women's hair. Not something I ever expected to need when I signed up to fly F-16s.

[31:03] CHRIS: How does cutting hair in zero gravity work?

[31:19] TERRY: You need a vacuum cleaner. My crewmate Anton Shkaplerov would hold the vacuum, I'd cut with scissors, and the hair would fly off straight into the suction. It's a three-person job in space.

[31:42] CHRIS: I'd really recommend people pick up your book, How to Astronaut — it's the closest anyone will come to experiencing what life in space is actually like.

[32:11] TERRY: Thank you. Read by the author.

[32:12] CHRIS: Exactly. It doesn't hide anything — eating, sleeping, toilet behaviour, all of it. How does digestion work without gravity?

[33:14] TERRY: I was worried about that, and in fact some scientists in the fifties were saying humans can't live in space because food won't fall down to the stomach. But it doesn't fall — little muscles push it along. Your body's muscle contractions take care of it regardless of gravity. I never noticed any difference.

[33:53] CHRIS: What about the food itself? Did it get tedious, eating out of pouches?

[34:07] TERRY: Honestly it was fine. Most of the time you're just too busy — you don't want to spend an hour cooking. The food is easy to prepare. Gathering all the containers is a bit of a pain, but you just get it done and move on.

[34:53] CHRIS: How much of your time was work versus downtime?

[35:03] TERRY: We set our watches to GMT — credit to the UK for managing to put space on British time. First meeting of the day around 7:30 in the morning. An hour off for lunch. Evening meeting around 7 p.m. where you'd call Houston, Moscow, Europe and Japan. After that you're free, but there was always cleaning up to do, and I always tried to go eat dinner with the Russian crew — I'd take my food down to their segment because I wanted us to function as one crew, not two separate groups. Then I'd spend time taking pictures or downloading images. I'm a late-night person — usually going to bed around midnight. Sundays were generally off.

[CHAPTER: Spacewalks — God's View of Creation — 36:28]

[36:28] CHRIS: You installed the Cupola module, which has seven windows looking down at Earth. Is it looking up or down at the planet?

[36:37] TERRY: Your brain decides. The Cupola is on the bottom of the station, so technically you're looking up at Earth. The night after we installed it and opened the windows for the first time, Capcom called up and asked: do you feel like bats hanging down, or moles poking your head out of the ground? Half the crew felt like bats, half felt like moles. Fascinating how your brain makes that choice.

[37:15] CHRIS: So that's where you spent your free time, photographing Earth?

[37:37] TERRY: Whenever I had time, which was never scheduled — it was always me carving out moments. That module has seven windows and the view is extraordinary. I took about 300,000 photographs on that mission alone.

[44:15] CHRIS: You did three spacewalks, right? About 19 hours in total?

[44:37] TERRY: About six and a half hours each — so nearer 19 or 20 hours outside the suit. Including suiting up and de-suiting, it was probably over 24 hours in the suit across the three. When you're outside, you feel enormously on the clock. One small meteorite through the suit and you're gone. You're very aware of the danger and the time pressure.

[45:28] CHRIS: What was it like going from inside the station to outside for the first time?

[45:51] TERRY: Impossible to describe. The view of the universe — I felt like I was seeing something humans weren't meant to see. I felt like I was seeing God's view of creation. And then I had to get back to work: put grease on the next bolt, plug in the next cable. Those were my two main tasks. Pretty phenomenal and pretty mundane at the same time.

[46:38] TERRY: People ask if I'd go back. I'd go back to shoot a film. I would love to make a proper narrative film in space. For me the view was definitely the best thing.

[47:12] CHRIS: Did you feel anything physically — solar winds, temperature variance — during the spacewalk?

[47:21] TERRY: They told me I'd feel hot at one particular spot and cold at another, and they were right. As soon as the sun came up I wasn't cold any more. Mostly the suit keeps you at a fairly normal temperature and pressure.

[CHAPTER: The Water in the Helmet — A Scary Moment Outside — 47:53]

[47:53] CHRIS: There was a situation with water condensation inside your helmet, wasn't there?

[48:04] TERRY: The year before my spacewalks, Luca Parmitano — an Italian ESA astronaut — almost drowned. He had a serious water leak inside his suit and nearly suffocated. After that incident, NASA came up with several fixes. We put an absorbent pad inside the helmet — basically a maxi pad — and a small snorkel mounted at chest level, going down to the crotch area. The idea is that if the upper half of the suit fills with water, at least you can breathe from the dry lower section while your crewmate drags you back to the airlock. On my second spacewalk I looked up and my entire visor was covered in water; I could feel the pad getting wet. The first thing I did was find the snorkel. It turned out to be condensation — the same phenomenon as a glass of iced tea on a warm day — rather than a serious leak like Luca's. But there were a few minutes where I was genuinely wondering.

[CHAPTER: Ammonia Leak — When We Thought the Station Was Going to Die — 50:01]

[50:01] CHRIS: What was the scariest moment up there?

[50:08] TERRY: I wrote about it in View From Above — chapter five. We had an ammonia alert. Ammonia is the coolant in the US segment. Houston called up and said, "This is not a drill — get to the Russian segment and close the hatch." So we went. We thought the space station was going to die. If there's a real ammonia leak it kills the station. We spent an entire day on the Russian side thinking the ISS was finished. It turned out to be a false alarm — but that was a sobering day. When they told us it was clear and we could go back in, they said, take two of you down, bring a mask, and verify. So we went back into this abandoned spaceship — stuff floating around because we'd left in a hurry — like a horror movie. But it was fine.

[51:50] CHRIS: Is there a difference between the coolant systems in the US and Russian segments?

[52:01] TERRY: Yes — the Russian system uses a glycol-based fluid, essentially sugar water. It doesn't transfer heat quite as well, but it also won't kill you if you breathe it. NASA was very clear with us: if you breathe the ammonia, don't bother working the procedure — you're going to die. So yes, quite different.

[CHAPTER: The Russians, the Duma and Watching War from Orbit — 53:50]

[53:50] CHRIS: How was your relationship with the Russian cosmonauts? You learned Russian as part of your training.

[54:13] TERRY: Da — better than Scots Gaelic. The relationship was great. I loved being in Russia, loved the food, loved the people I met. It was right in the middle of the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine in 2014. They annexed Crimea, started a war in the Donbass, shot down the Dutch airliner. I was good friends with the cosmonauts I flew with. We learned Russian together, we ate dinner together every night. I still see one's daughter in Los Angeles.

One evening in January 2015 I was in the Russian segment after dinner, looking out the window. You could see little red flashes in eastern Ukraine. You could see Russians killing Ukrainians — from orbit. We didn't say a word. We just watched. I went back down to the American segment, and now the cosmonaut who was there that night — who should be the most enlightened human being on the planet — is in the Duma promoting that war. It's one of the most deeply disappointing things in my life.

[56:27] TERRY: I spent three weeks in Eastern Europe recently and I'm so impressed. People in Estonia, Poland and Finland spent a century under brutal Russian occupation. They understand the dangers of authoritarianism in a way that perhaps nobody else does. We always said "never again" after Auschwitz. Well, folks, it's happening again.

[CHAPTER: Future of Space — Artemis, Starship, and the Road to Mars — 57:59]

[57:59] CHRIS: I'd like to ask your views on the future of space travel — the Artemis programme and the Gateway, because it looks like NASA is planning a lunar flyby before a potential Moon landing.

[58:42] TERRY: The flyby mission will happen. The Orion capsule first flew when I was on the station — I have photos of it launching from the STS-130 window. It flew unmanned on the SLS rocket recently. The next crewed mission will orbit the Moon and come back. After that it gets complicated: we don't yet have a spacesuit for lunar surface operations — that's being built by Axiom, with exterior design by Prada. More important is the interior, quite frankly. And then there's the lander, which NASA has contracted to SpaceX. It'll be a version of the upper half of Starship — a 30-metre-tall vehicle that needs to refuel in Earth orbit. They'll need to launch six or seven tanker missions first to build a fuel depot, something we've never done before. A lot of miracles need to happen in a fairly short time.

[01:01:54] CHRIS: If that's successful, could we build upon it and reach Mars?

[01:02:04] TERRY: I hope so. I give a talk about exploring Mars. The main challenge is propulsion: a conventional rocket takes three years to reach Mars and return. That's a lot of food, water and equipment — and the cost per pound to the surface is extraordinary. NASA themselves say each SLS launch costs $4 billion — and that's just the rocket, not the payload. The only way it really works is through a genuine public-private partnership where private industry drives innovation and public funding provides the backing.

[01:04:14] CHRIS: Would you be eligible for another mission?

[01:04:21] TERRY: Probably not with NASA — I left and there's a long queue of young astronauts, which is exactly right. You never know with commercial companies. But I'm genuinely happy with what I'm doing now, and I like life on Earth.

[CHAPTER: One More Orbit — Guinness World Record and Hamish Harding — 01:04:40]

[01:04:40] CHRIS: You broke a world record a couple of years ago as well — that was One More Orbit, wasn't it?

[01:04:45] TERRY: Yes — circumnavigating the globe over both poles in a Gulfstream, setting a new speed record. I got to direct my first feature-length documentary at the same time. The man who made that happen was my friend Hamish Harding — an air pilot and aircraft salesman, and just a great human being. Unfortunately he was one of the people on the Titan submersible. He died earlier this year [2023]. He was British, and watching One More Orbit you'll see him throughout. A great guy.

[01:05:36] CHRIS: Congratulations on that world record. How did the routing work?

[01:05:50] TERRY: We stopped three times: Kazakhstan, Mauritius and Punta Arenas in Chile. Each stop was maybe thirty to forty-five minutes to refuel. We had two crews so one could sleep while the other flew. 44.5 hours in total. My friends teased me about roughing it in a Gulfstream business jet. I just owned it: yes, I was having lamb chops while technically flying over the South Pole.

[CHAPTER: Books, Call to Adventure, and Pay It Forward — 01:06:46]

[01:06:46] CHRIS: Your book How to Astronaut is honestly one of the best recommendations I can make. You also wrote View From Above and An Astronaut's Guide to Leaving the Planet. What are you most proud of?

[01:07:17] TERRY: The fact that I actually wrote them. Most astronauts have ghost-writers. I wrote every word myself. How to Astronaut has 51 short essays — how to launch, how to put on a spacesuit, how to exercise, are there aliens, have people had sex. Serious things and crazy things. I also have a children's illustrated book in the works — about dogs, illustrated by a cartoonist friend of mine. I need to find a publisher.

[01:09:06] CHRIS: What's next in terms of projects?

[01:09:31] TERRY: A couple of film and TV projects. A new book — more of a motivational book, my life lessons rather than a space book. The executive consulting and motivational speaking continues. And the baby book about dogs, which I'm very excited about.

[01:09:35] CHRIS: Call to Adventure — an adventure recommendation to inspire people to get away from their screens.

[01:09:40] TERRY: As part of NASA training we did NOLS — the National Outdoor Leadership School. My crew went up to Alaska for about two weeks of sea kayaking. No phones, nothing. Watching orcas, eagles and bears. Spectacular. You need to do that every once in a while. Modern connected life is toxic. Social media has its golden retriever channels and they're great, but there's so much bad stuff. Get outside.

[01:10:46] CHRIS: Sea kayaking in Alaska with orcas is on my bucket list too.

[01:11:05] TERRY: Alaska is amazing. Prince William Sound is the place to go.

[01:11:23] CHRIS: Final segment — Pay It Forward. A worthy cause you'd like to raise awareness of.

[01:11:35] TERRY: Guide Dogs for the Blind. There was a documentary a few years ago called Pick of the Litter — total tearjerker and absolutely brilliant. They train guide dogs that give blind people independence. I love dogs; I'm a golden retriever person. It's a great charity.

[01:11:58] CHRIS: Excellent. We'll get all that in the show notes. Where can people find you?

[01:12:17] TERRY: Website: terryvirts.com. Instagram: @astro_terry. Twitter: @AstroTerry. LinkedIn: Terry Virts. Instagram is more space pictures and fun; Twitter tends to be more political news.

[01:12:50] CHRIS: Thank you, Terry. It's been an absolute pleasure — I hope we've inspired a few more people to look up.

[01:13:10] TERRY: It was great. Thanks, Chris.