I was a NASA astronaut for 18 years from 1996 until 2014.

I spent a grand total of about 30 days living on board the space shuttle in space over two missions.

It wasn't always easy on the space shuttle.

It was fairly small quarters, there were seven of us, so we had to really be respectful of each other.

Like many of you, I'm sheltering in place right now.

I'm inside my home and it's, it's kind of like being inside of a spaceship again self contained.

So based on my nearly 30 days of sheltering in space, I have some tips for you that hopefully will help you shelter in place, embrace the situation.

Remember learning this from john Blaha was an experienced astronaut when I was a brand new astronaut.

He spent some time on space station mirror and he described his mission as almost like a first half.

In the second half.

The first half, he was really missing home and really wasn't taking advantage of where he was and he realized that, hey, I'm here.

There's nothing I can do about it.

I'm inside of the spaceship for a while.

He was up there for months and the second half it clicked and he said to himself, I'm going to embrace the situation and take advantage of where I am and make the most of it.

And he said after he did that, he had a great time and the days just flew by while I'm sheltering in place.

I'm trying to take advantage of the situation, embrace the situation.

One is, I'm straightening out a little bit more going through things that I haven't thought I'd ever go through and I'm trying to do that.

But also I'm trying to take advantage of this new world we live and we're communicating with each other over distance.

My, my, I teach at Columbia diversity.

I've been teaching my course online, we've been having faculty meetings online and I'm getting to learn how to use devices like this right now using my phone and zoom and being, I hope it's working by the way, but I hope I'm recording, but I'm going to learn how to use these things now.

And I've got young people, some of my students and my kids trying to show me how to do these things so I can continue to communicate and send out messages.

And I'm learning a lot.

I'm learning all about instagram and all about ways we can communicate over distance.

And I think that um, a lot of these things that when this thing clears up and were able to be around each other again, I'm still going to be using these tools because they're wonderful.

So um embrace the situation, talk to mission control and be somebody else's mission control.

You know what I mean by that?

Is that when I was in space, even though I was isolated from the planet, I did have my crewmates there, but I did feel kind of on my own.

I really fell on my own when I went out to spacewalk, I did have my buddy, my space walking buddy mike good with me.

But each of us were in her own little space.

So it's kind of like our own spaceship.

And during my last spacewalk I did four space walks on the fourth one, the most complicated spacewalk probably ever attempted.

We were trying to take a piece of the Hubble space telescope apart and something we weren't really sure we could do.

Well.

I made a really bad mistake.

I stripped a bolt on one of the science instruments and I thought it was game over, felt like we're never going to solve this.

Uh I have created this horrible problem and we're never going to find out if there's life anywhere else in the universe and everyone will blame me because it is silly mistake that I made.

Remember actually looking at the planet and thinking that everyone that could help me.

Everyone that I loved.

Everything was down there and I couldn't, I couldn't even get through a hardware store to fix this problem.

It was like I felt separate from from the Earth, but after about an hour or so of troubleshooting the ground.

Mission control came to come up with a solution used to be ready for this.

Yeah, we're ready.

Okay man, Yeah, go, go, go.

Yeah.

The top half of that handrail was freed by the fasteners being released very easily.

The lower 11 of the fasteners did not come loose and Mike Massimino used essentially brute force to remove the handle at the lower portion.

It is now free and a solution worked and were able to get the telescope fixed that day.

I just want to get your closing the doors here.

Tell you what a great job you guys did today and I'm forever grateful.

But there was a time when I forgot that they were there to help me.

So don't forget that help is always there were in this thing together.

And if you're feeling down, if you're having an issue a problem you need help reach out and on the other end try to be someone else's mission control.

I also got a chance to work on the other end of it.

One of my jobs was to talk to the restaurants in space, what we call the cap composition in the control center.

And I always tried to do what I could to make my friends who are in space feel more at ease, particularly during a tough situation, reach out be the person that people can call for help be their mission control.

And don't forget your mission control is there to help you as well?

Exercise exercise is very important in space.

Even on the short missions that I was on longer missions, that's really critical because in zero gravity there's no load on your muscles.

You can lose bone mass as well.

Bone density can go down if you're not exercising because you're floating around on the space shuttle.

When I was flying, we did have an exercise pipe called the Oregon motor.

Were able to ride that thing to get a little bit of exercise.

We also have some thorough bands that we could stretch out and get a little resistance exercise in upper body, even lower body.

And I got the spacewalk.

So we did a lot of space walking and that was complete exercise the whole time exercise.

I think for our missions was just as important for your mental well being as for your physical well being.

And I think it's the same thing here on earth at these times.

I think it's really important to try to get your exercise every day, whatever that means.

I've set up like this kind of wacky sort of gym in the basement with a few weights and I don't have a I like going to the gym.

That's not happening actually to be truthful, I don't like exercising at all.

But getting outside, we can still run, we can enjoy the outdoors, take the dog for a walk, take yourself for a walk.

It always made us feel great in space, Even just getting 20 minutes of exercise on an exercise bike.

So get your exercise, enjoy the beauty around you.

I think sometimes we get so wrapped up into what we're doing, what our chores are a task or whatever it is that's occupying our brain.

We forget to take a second and look around.

And this happened to me on my last spacewalk, My fourth spacewalk.

I was done a little bit earlier than my space walking buddy.

Mike Good was still doing some work near the telescope.

And I said, well, I said to myself, I'm gonna go to the airlock and start getting things ready for us to go inside.

And while I'm doing this, my good friend, one of my best friends scott all and our commander comes over the com loop and he says, hey, mass that's my nickname because hey, mass, what are you doing?

And I said, well, I'm inside the airlock, getting ready to come in.

And he goes, is there anything you're doing now that can't be done later?

I said to him, no, I'm just trying to get ahead.

He goes, well, why don't you stop what you're doing and go outside and enjoy the view.

I want you to take a look around because your space walk with Hubble is about to come to an end.

We're bringing you in as soon as you close the doors.

Okay, thanks twitter.

It was magnificent.

And I thought that's a pretty good idea.

Plus my commander was telling me to do this.

I probably was an order.

I had to do it, you know?

So I go outside of the airlock into the payload bay and I clipped my tether in so I'm not gonna float off into space.

So I have a tether on a handrail and I let go with both hands and I just laid there in the payload bay of the space show and looked at the Earth.

I think it's really important to enjoy the beauty around us, Take the time to enjoy the beauty or if you really don't want to go outside, just stay inside, watch something, watch a couple wired video, something like that.

Some of my friends had to have something to do and we got delayed on our landing by a couple of days and I thought this was the greatest thing at the end of our mission because we had nothing to do for two days.

We got waved off because the weather was bad, we couldn't land in florida.

So we were stuck in space.

I thought this was great and I just spent all my time looking out the window enjoying the beauty of planet earth.

But my crew mates, they needed something to do.

They were going crazy.

So they decided they were gonna watch movies.

There was just one point in the mission toward the end there when I'm looking out the window, we're coming, it's nighttime, we're coming over Australia.

I can see the city lights in Australia.

There was a thunderstorm out over the ocean and I can see the lightning lighting up the clouds.

It was just magnificent.

And right then one of my crew mates drew voice so yells up from the mid deck because hey, Mass I go what?

He says, come on down and go why?

He says we're about to watch naturally break.

You know, the movie about the wrestling were naturally bray?

And I thought, I thought to myself, there's no way that.

And I said I'll watch it when we land.

I'm looking at something right now.

And uh they were off watching naturally bray and I was looking at the most magnificent sight that was just outside our window.

So my recommendation to you is, yeah, you can stay inside and watch a movie if you want to do that.

But don't forget that there's a lot of beauty in our planet just outside the window.

Yeah, pursue meaningful distractions.

So, and I want to stress meaningful if if at all possible.

Uh what we found when we were flying astronauts at the space station at the beginning, I was working in the control center as the cafe con talking to him and they were like, oh they have a lot of all they have some don't as much to do here or there and what are they gonna do?

They're up there for a long time.

And so there was different ideas like they could take inventory and count how many bags of ravioli they have left, stuff like that.

That's not necessarily very meaningful.

What we found was a better activity to do is to come up with a hobby, something that you really enjoyed in your free time when you're up there for that long.

So a lot of the astronauts on the space station got into photography and that's like the best thing you could do probably up there.

We have some great cameras.

You have the most beautiful senior you've ever seen looking down on our planet.

And so they got into photography and different techniques and how to do the time lapse stuff.

So you can do orbits and fly into the aurora.

Some got into doing artwork, some got into playing music.

But you, you want to have something that you find to be what I would say, a meaningful distraction.

So find yourself a meaningful distraction.

Put the time to good use stay connected.

I think we have lots of ways now that we didn't have years ago to help us stay connected to what's going on and to each other uh, in space.

We were concerned about being far away and not connected with what's going on with the world and our families.

But we were able to do things like email, just like a computer at home.

We have computers in space, checking our flight plans that we need to do.

And I also can check my email.

I've already got some email from my wife and my kids and it's great to be able to stay like this video conferences and social media.

I was the first one to ever send a tweet from space and I was thrilled that they asked me to do that because it gave me a way to help with staying connected.

I could share what I was doing.

So I think that's really important.

Check in on people that you care about and also tell them what you're doing, share your, your day with people, let them know what's happening, stay connected being back on earth.

An interesting transition.

I was so concerned about my mission for so long for years and then we flew the missions and after each one, I was happy that they went well and I was a little disappointed that they were over in some ways and you get back to Earth and you start realizing the things that you missed and what I thought about when I was away when I was in space, I thought a lot about my family.

I missed things like the weather, there's no rain or wind or snow or anything like that in space is beautiful, but you missed some of those things.

And so what I found is after I got back to Earth, I just wanted to be around people and just was so grateful that I was back and I could be doing the things that I really enjoyed it around the people I really loved again.

Uh I never complained about the weather anymore either.

I kind of like the rain, we don't have that in space, but we have it here and we kind of take it for granted.

I think.

Um, I think this is kind of similar to that right now.

I'm supposed to be at opening day at Yankee Stadium as I'm talking to you.

He's not even playing any baseball games and who knows when we're gonna get a chance to do that.

And I haven't been around a lot of my family members and I miss a lot of people and big public gatherings.

I miss all that stuff and I'm sure you do too, but we're going to get over this and I hopefully what it will do is help us to appreciate what we have during our good times and remember what it's been like now, all those things you miss when you get back to doing them, make sure you really enjoy them and don't take them for granted any longer.

That's one thing that I learned coming back to Earth.

Yeah.

As an astronaut, the way I've found the best way to prepare for missions and to do things was to hear from other people that had done them and what their experiences.