Mike Massimino on timeshifting at NASA

Transcript

As an astronaut, you dream about being an astronaut, and then you are lucky enough to get chosen to be one. And then you train, and then you get assigned to a flight, and you get all this training and this responsibility. It’s a dream come true and it’s an important job, but you need to be healthy and awake when you do it.

It’s very interesting. Now, in the age we are in, we can collect data and study things and have apps that can help us, where you can apply the math, the science, the methods behind it and come up with an answer – and sometimes it’s different than what you would expect. It’s funny, people tell you, “How do you do this?” And a lot of it is made-up hearsay: people say, “Well, this works for me,” or “Drink this,” or “Drink that,” or “Take a nap upside down,” or whatever. People have got all these home remedies.

And that’s why I was psyched to see that Timeshifter was now taking that plan that I was used to as an astronaut, where a lot of these smart people like Smith put it together for me. I wouldn’t know where to begin to do that. It’s not as easy as you think, but it’s great to have this app now that I’ve used it. It gives you that plan, so that you’re ready to go when you arrive.

I was just telling these guys earlier that the first time I used Timeshifter, everyone was kind of waiting for me to arrive at this thing, and I got there and my sister and my sister-in-law were talking to me and said, “What’s the matter? We can’t believe that you’ve just come off an airplane from Europe and you seem wide awake.” And I was like, “Timeshifter,” nice and Mickey the note. So that, I think, is the best testament to it: that there really is a science behind it, that these people have studied – Steve and Smith and people at NASA. And they did it because we needed it. We had that need to be able to get to space and be alert. In cases of an emergency, you have to be alert. You can’t be not feeling well because you’re jet lagged – you have to be alert. So it was a necessity, and now it’s turning into something that I think is just as much a necessity for the world we live in now, as we travel so much across time zones so frequently.