PBS News Hour

LISA DESJARDINS: Fewer than 300 Human beings have visited the International Space Station, even fewer than that has spent more than 150 days living there.

And as NASA plans to de-orbit the space station and 2030 the chance to see Earth from the ISS Cupola is getting slimmer.

John Yang recently spoke with one of those few astronauts about the joys and challenges of life in space.

JOHN YANG: Cady Coleman is one of only about 670 people on Earth who spent time not on Earth.

She's a former NASA astronaut, a veteran of two space shuttle missions, and have a six-month mission on the International Space Station.

She writes about all of this and how she succeeded in the system not designed with women in mind in a new book, "Sharing Space: An Astronauts Guide to Mission, Wonder and Making Change."

Cady Coleman, thanks so much for being with us today.

Select Group have been in space, but even a more select group who spent six months in space in a zero G environment.

What's that, like?

CADY COLEMAN, Author, "Sharing Space": I loved it.

People feel bad for us.

They're like, Oh, six months, that must have been awful.

And I literally didn't want to come home.

There's a lot of work and stressful but the fact that like we think about floating up there, but it's about flying, like if you want to go somewhere, you just give yourself a little tiny push and you will fly across the whole station.

So it's a whole new way of life.

And I like what my colleague Don Pettit said he said, If I could bring my family with me, there's just no reason to come home.

JOHN YANG: Many astronauts like to be tethered to the wall and their sleeping bag and in their sleeping chamber.

Not you.

You wanted to float free as you slept.

We'll talk about that.

CADY COLEMAN: I think you experience zero gravity during the day and you're working and you're going in you're doing but we get to live there.

It's there all the time.

And I just wanted to like have it be part of sleeping, too.

Now I'm not floating around the whole space station, which had like a cabin.

And often I would kind of wake up you know, upside down or you kind of wonder where I am where you are.

But I literally would wake up just thinking wow, I'm still here.

JOHN YANG: Did spending time in space change your view or vision of life on Earth and our relationship with Earth?

CADY COLEMAN: I'm somebody that's always thought that if we could just connect with each other a little bit better or a little bit more people together.

We'd be better off we'd have more solutions and handle situations better.

And yes, seeing the Earth from 250 miles above they still felt at home and I looked down and I just was like off only people could realize that we're all from the same place.

And I think that when we go to Mars, you know, nobody's going to be having bumper stickers that say their country that it's all going to be E for Earth.

JOHN YANG: You write about it in the book about spending so much time away from your family, talk a little bit about that.

CADY COLEMAN: It is really hard, it's hard, we've made a big decision that I would go on this Space Station mission, which meant a couple of years of training around the world, as well as that six months up on the Space Station.

It is a long time to be away.

There is this element of that it's dangerous.

And I think the going up for launching and the coming home, are the times that that we just can't ignore that.

But actually up in space, I think that they just felt like mom was working someplace else.

JOHN YANG: Being in a system that wasn't designed for women.

The spacesuits for instance, not designed for women, some of the workspaces not designed for people with shorter arms, talk a little bit about how you navigated that.

CADY COLEMAN: Everybody's going to do it differently.

And, you know, you can come up with a situation where they're sort of like, you know, I don't know if we need people like you here.

And you can say, but you know, you picked me, or you can be on the end of which is really where I kind of tend to work, which is how can I explain to these people who don't see that I belong here, not because they don't like me, but because they just don't have that vision yet.

There was a time in the mid-90s when they decided for the space station, which would start in mid 2000s, they would not have the smaller spacesuits.

And if you could not qualify in that space suit, for us in a medium space suit, which is actually quite large for us, then you could not live and work on the space station.

I did qualify in the medium.

But if I hadn't, I would actually still be waiting since 2010, when I launched to be able to go.

And there's so many implications, you know, in terms of management and experience and being somebody's, you know, can really go out there and bring what they want to the mission.

And I think that because it's a physical thing, it helps people understand that sometimes there are less tangible things where you walk in a room and people are surprised to see you or they're surprised by your lifestyle, or by the way you communicate.

And in those situations, there's lots of people that try to they can see people who aren't quite seen, and also relate well to management, and bring them together and literally introduce them.

Hey, you want Cady as a Capcom because she talks.

JOHN YANG: Among your many other achievements, you play the flute, and you had what I believe is probably the first and maybe only extraterrestrial flute duet with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull no less.

How did that come about?

CADY COLEMAN: So a friend of mine is a DJ in Houston, Dana Steele.

And she like Dana, you must know how to know how to get ahold of Jethro Tull.

And so she got ahold of him, wrote him a nice letter.

And I was able to bring his flute up to space.

And we couldn't figure out what to do, until I looked at our calendars.

And on April 11, of 2011, Ian Anderson was playing a concert in Russia, in the city of Perm, and I was living on the International Space Station.

And it's a special day because that is the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight.

The first person to leave the planet, it's not about a certain country, it's about a person left our planet.

And so for us to do a duet between Earth and Space seems quite appropriate, and very scary for me.

JOHN YANG: The challenges you faced in the Astronaut Corps aren't limited to the Astronaut Corps, there are a lot of people going through the same things in their careers.

Who you hoping would be motivated by this book would read this book and say, o, this is how I can do this?

CADY COLEMAN: I think this book will appeal to people who know they have something inside of them that the world needs.

And you can't always be the most confident about that.

I mean, I'm not.

But I -- this book is designed so they can read that some of these things happen to me in the space program.

And if it could happen in a space program, it can happen anywhere.

And it does.

And just realize that, you know, you're in a group, you're part of a group, get that group to help you and may not seem fair, but you have to speak up about who you are and what you bring.

JOHN YANG: A lot of the lessons you learn were big to talk about how to leverage insecurity to performance.

Some of them were small, talk about wiggling your toes, so you don't tense up.

What are the biggest lessons that you learned and want to impart?

CADY COLEMAN: The biggest, most important lessons for, I think, for all of us are the teamwork once because, you know, there's stories about, I mean the magic of space of all the things the possibilities that we have.

But we're not going to have those possibilities on this planet if we don't solve some of our challenges.

And you know, sports coaches like to say that, you know, it's all about the team and not the individual.

And that's true in terms of the bigger mission.

But the individual and what they bring is really paramount.

But just as paramount is that you on the team, either understand what people bring or realize when they can't bring it themselves and you need to help them.

JOHN YANG: Cady Coleman, thank you very much.

CADY COLEMAN: Thank you for having me.