"The Answer Is Both.  You Will Disappear Forever, But You Will Still Exist Inside Of The Black Hole.

Yeah, that's a wonderful thing.  And whether you're flying low level, over the earth's surface, or way up high in the earth's atmosphere like with the ER-2, there's different sights.  

One thing I like about flying low level is the vegetation, the hills, the mountains, the water - where you see details in the waves and the trees up close that are just absolutely beautiful.  Conversely, when you're way up high  you see everything.  And that's where you realize how many different pieces of the earth's surface come together, between the oceans, the big lakes, the mountains and everything, and the colors are so different that all they just paint an incredible picture from 13 miles above the earth.  

And when you look from the surface up through the beautiful atmosphere that we have from where the sky moves from a light blue color and then gradually gets dark blue and then purple and even starts to turn black way up high, that's just an incredible sight that I feel real privileged to see every time I go up there.  It's a privilege, it's just amazing.

What's the most beautiful natural scene uou've ever seen personally, as in Aurora Borealis, volcanic eruption, or something that made you seem like the Earth should be treasured?

"So, the interesting answer is that there probably is a black hole near the earth.  But in space terms, when we say near the earth, we don't mean really that close to the earth.  Maybe about ten or twenty light years away.  Just like the nearest stars are about ten or twenty light years away.  So the difference is that that black hole today is just sitting there, not doing anything. 

The black holes we know about are much farther away, thousands of light years away.  And they're really really bright because they're sucking in gas which gets heated up to millions and billions of degrees and shines in really bright x-rays.  So if one of those really bright black holes were one of the close black holes, about twenty light years away, it would kill us all."

What would happen if a Black hole would be near the earth? What would be the consequences to humans?

So on the ISS we have a wake-up time.  There's not really any predetermined time because we're orbiting the Earth every ninety minutes.  But you have to pick a time scale, so we actually picked GMT, which is close to London time.

So we wake up, we have a normal conference call with the ground, we talk about things that are going on the space station, what we're going to do that day, and then we have a plan that tells us what we're going to do down to every five minutes on board.  And so it depends on the day.  

A lot of time we're doing science experiments, sometimes we're doing maintenance on the space station, sometimes we're even getting ready to do a space walk.  Those are the best days.  But every day is something new and different up there.

What does a normal day for you consist of?

Working at NASA has been an extraordinary experience and I have a lot of memories I can tell you are my favorite.  But there's one in particular that stands out above the rest.  

I was a new flight director, only been in the office for two years, and we were executing the STS-120 mission, where we were taking these solar arrays that are in blankets, and you put them up on board the space station and you unfold them like an accordion.  

As we were unfolding one of them, we saw it rip.  And by the time that the power discipline expert could make the array stop, we had a huge tear inside the solar array.  After several meetings, it became clear that we were not going to be able to undock the shuttle in that configuration and we had to figure out a way to fix the solar array.

At that time I was working at what we called a team four.  So three teams used to support the shuttle mission, but we always had a fourth team waiting in the background for something to go wrong.  So at that point we called together a meeting and a young engineer showed up who was about 24/25 years old.  And [he] said "Flight!  I have a solution!"

So he walks into my meeting with this. [holds up object] And I said, "what is that?"  

And he says, "It's a cufflink, Flight, and I made it out of spare parts that are available to the astronauts on the space station. And if you take this and you weave it through some of the holes and you pull it tight, we'll be able to secure the solar array."

And so sure enough, we were able to take this cufflink and a couple more like it, and put one of our tallest crew members on board a stacked set of robotic arms and he installed a cufflink.  And that cufflink is there today and keeps the space station solar array structurally sound.  So best moment ever.  You never know what a 24/25 year old can accomplish.

What has been the best memory you have so far at NASA?

"Time works like a lot of things in Einstein's Theory of Relativity: it's relative.  The way that time works according to, say, a person in a spaceship flying into a black would look pretty normal. An astronaut could look at his watch and it would be going more or less normally.  

But the time connected to the outside world, outside of the black hole, would just break down entirely.  It's essentially forming a wall between inside of the black hole and outside of the black hole. And the time on the two sides of that event horizon are just going to be completely different."

How does time work in a black hole?

I thought, um, I actually thought The Martian was pretty good.  They do a good job there of kind of showing the challenges of working in a space environment: some of the isolation, how do you troubleshoot problems, the kind of interactions that crews would have.  I think that's a movie that captures somewhat the feel of space exploration.

What popular film is the closest to reality for you?

One of the things I always find to be most fascinating about spaceflight is that I can be on the phone with a crew member who has called me from the space station while watching them fly over.  And every time I always sit there like a dork and go [waves] "Hiiiii!" as if they can see me.

What aspect of spaceflight always blows your mind, even after all this time?

“Black holes are just...pure gravity.”

Whats the best metaphor/ explanation of blackholes youve ever heard?

"Theoretical?  Yeah, I think so, I think we could do it.  Uh, technically there are still a lot of details that need to be worked out."

Could you theoretically time travel through a black hole or other object with such intense mass?

Yeah, that's a great question and that's exactly how it feels.  Once we get up about 13 miles above the earth, and get everything set up and start doing the science collection, every now and again you have to kind of stop and just take a minute to look around.  And it's a fascinating sight up there.  

On a normal clear day looking down at the earth, you can see the curvature of the earth out in front of you, and then the sky is just a really dark purple up there because you're above all the moisture in the air that causes the dark blue to turn to light blue down towards the earth's surface.  And it's such a different sight, it really makes you understand how small we really are.

What does it feel like to be up there and look down at the Earth? I've always imagined it would send me into a moment where I feel so small compared to the expanse and beauty of Earth.