Questions to Ask an Astronaut
Questions for talking with someone who has flown in space: launch, daily life in microgravity, the repairs nobody planned for, re-entry, and the awkward business of coming home.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What does Earth look like from space?
Why ask it
Crews consistently describe the atmosphere as startlingly thin and the absence of any visible border as the detail that stays with them. Ask what surprised them rather than for the view in general, because the general version has been requested a thousand times.
What was going through your mind during launch?
Why ask it
Launch is loud, violent and short, and honest answers are usually procedural rather than poetic: watching a display, feeling a stage separation, waiting for a callout. There is a checklist on the mind, not a sunset.
What does your body feel like in zero gravity?
Why ask it
The first days in orbit are physically unpleasant for most people, with fluid shifting up into the head, puffiness, congestion and often nausea. An answer that goes straight to the fun of floating is skipping the part nobody films.
How do you eat, sleep and use the bathroom up there?
Why ask it
The practical answers are genuinely strange: airflow does the work gravity normally would, sleep happens strapped to a wall, and anything not secured drifts into a vent. It also opens up how much of orbital life is maintenance.
What does space smell like?
Why ask it
Crew members have described a distinct smell on suits and airlock hardware after a spacewalk, often compared to hot metal or welding. Small sensory questions like this tend to get an unrehearsed answer.
What is it like to watch the sun rise and set every ninety minutes?
Why ask it
Sixteen sunrises a day dismantles the body's sense of time, and managing that is a real operational problem handled with lighting, strict schedules and covered windows. The answer moves from the spectacle to how anyone actually sleeps.
How long did the training take, and what did it actually involve?
Why ask it
The gap between selection and a first flight is usually measured in years, and most of the training is not flying: language study, spacewalk rehearsals in a pool, robotics, and failure scenarios run until they are dull. This is where the job stops sounding glamorous.
What did you work on day to day?
Why ask it
Orbital time goes on experiments, repairs and exercise against a tightly scheduled clock. Asking what they worked on rather than what they discovered gets you the working day rather than the press release.
How do you keep your body from falling apart in microgravity?
Why ask it
Bone and muscle loss is the central medical problem of long missions, and the countermeasure is hours of resistance and cardio work every single day. Ask what it feels like to run on a treadmill you are bungeed onto.
How did you stay in touch with your family?
Why ask it
Contact is possible but rationed and often delayed, and the strain usually falls harder on the household than on the crew member. This tends to produce the most human part of the whole conversation.
What is the hardest part of living in space that people never think about?
Why ask it
Invites the unglamorous answer: constant fan noise, no privacy, no shower, no fresh food, and the same few faces for months. It gets further than asking about danger, which they have answered on every panel they have sat on.
What did you miss most about Earth?
Why ask it
The answers are almost never grand. Rain, wind on skin, walking somewhere for no reason, cooking a meal. It is really a question about what ordinary life contains that you only notice when it is removed.
Did anything go wrong that you had to fix yourselves?
Why ask it
Every long mission accumulates repairs nobody planned, and these stories show what the job actually is: improvising with the parts on board while consulting people hours away in another timezone.
What was the most frightening moment?
Why ask it
Better than asking about danger in the abstract, because it forces one episode with a beginning and an end. Notice how much of the answer is procedure, since training is designed to leave very little room for fear while it is happening.
How do you live in close quarters with the same few people for months?
Why ask it
Crew compatibility is selected and trained for rather than left to luck, and the techniques transfer to Earth: raising irritations early, protecting shared meals, finding somewhere to be alone in a place with nowhere to go.
What was re-entry and landing like?
Why ask it
This is the phase with the least margin, and returning crews describe heavy loads, heat and a hard arrival. Asking what they could see and hear produces something concrete rather than another description of risk.
What was the hardest part of coming home?
Why ask it
Readjustment is the part that gets left out. Balance and coordination take time to return, gravity feels punishing for days, and there is often a flat stretch afterwards that few astronauts raise unprompted.
Has being up there changed how you think about anything down here?
Why ask it
Framing it as a change in thinking rather than a revelation lets them answer modestly, which is usually the truthful option. Some describe a lasting shift in perspective, others say plainly that they came back the same person.
What would you tell someone who wants your job?
Why ask it
The useful version of this answer is unromantic: a hard technical field taken far enough to be genuinely good at it, a medical record that holds up, and a tolerance for being turned down repeatedly. Ask what they would do differently.
If you could go back tomorrow, would you?
Why ask it
A closing question that gets an unguarded reaction, and the pause before the answer carries as much as the answer. Some say yes instantly, others weigh what a second mission would cost the people who waited through the first.
Talking with someone who has flown
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before the conversation
Find out which missions they flew
A shuttle flight in the 1990s, a six-month station rotation and a suborbital hop are entirely different jobs. Mission name, duration and role are usually public, and knowing them stops you spending your limited time asking about the wrong one.
Learn the handful of words you will need
EVA rather than spacewalk in technical company, microgravity rather than zero gravity, crew rather than passengers. Getting these right means the first two minutes are not spent correcting your terms.
Ask one question, then chase the detail in the answer
The standard questions have standard answers, delivered many times. The interesting material comes from your second and third question, so pick something specific out of what they just said and go after it.
Ask about their own experience, not the agency's position
Serving crew often cannot comment on budgets, future missions or colleagues, and pushing there produces a careful non-answer. First-person questions about what they saw and did are both more answerable and more interesting.
Adjusting for the setting
A school group
Children ask about food, bathrooms and vomiting, and those are good questions with vivid answers. Put the practical ones first, keep the pace fast, and leave anything about risk until the end so the session does not turn into a conversation about dying.
A public event with a microphone queue
You get one question and the room has heard the obvious ones. Something small and specific, asked in a single sentence, has a far better chance of an unrehearsed answer than a broad request for what it was like.
A recorded interview
Agree in advance what is off limits, since crew health, other crew members and unflown missions are often constrained by employer rules. Confirm mission designations and dates in the room rather than reconstructing them later.
What not to ask
- Anything inviting them to debunk a conspiracy theory. It is the most worn question in the field and it eats the answer you actually wanted.
- "Do you believe in aliens?" as an opener, which asks a scientist to guess in public.
- Questions about the cost of the space programme, as though the person in front of you set the budget.
- Disaster comparisons. Crews who lost colleagues will raise it if they want to, and it is not a warm-up topic.
- Assuming everyone on a crew did the same job, or that the pilot did the science and the scientist did the flying.
- "What was it like?" as your main question. It is too large to answer, so you will get the version everybody gets.