Do you copy? Massachusetts native and mission commander Stephen Bowen calls in to GBH from the space station

At GBH, we've had the pleasure of speaking with all kinds of leaders, change-makers and innovators in our community. We get to challenge our elected leaders and speak with seasoned experts — all of which are abundant in the Greater Boston area. But one thing we've never done is interview someone in space.

So we jumped at the opportunity to speak with Cohasset native Stephen Bowen. He’s the commander for NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 who’s been at the International Space Station with three other crew members for a few weeks now.

He spoke with GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath about life at the International Space Station. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: The first question I have to ask you is: tell me what you’re seeing right now. Or if you’re not at a window, what would you be seeing right now?

Stephen Bowen: Right now, I think we’re heading out over the Atlantic Ocean. We just passed over South America and are heading up toward the African coast on a 51.6-degree inclination. If you watch a satellite map, we’re heading up from South America to Africa.

Rath: You’re up there with your new crew. Do you feel like you’re settled yet?

Bowen: Not yet. It’s funny because my longest previous mission was about 16 days, so we’ve already passed that. You know, we’re starting to get settled in, and we feel like we kind of know what we’re doing, but we’re not really comfortable.

Some of the guys who’ve been here obviously a lot longer than us, so it takes about a month to six weeks or so before you really feel like this is somewhat normal. Conversely, it takes about that long when you get back to Earth to feel like Earth is normal.

Rath: When you get up there with a new crew, do you have overlap with the existing crew? How does that work?

Bowen: Yeah. When we got up here, Crew-5 was still on board, so those four crew members and us four, and then three on the Soyuz [spacecraft]. So we had 11 people up here, which — even though the station’s pretty big, it’s an operating lab — the actual habitable volume in the places where people live is relatively small, so it seems crowded.

When Crew-5 left a week or so ago, it seemed a lot emptier. They were incredibly helpful during our turnover and explainimg how things operate and how things work, which was great to have. We try to shoot for that. When we get some of that turnover, the learning curve is a lot [less steep] if you’re able to pass on your knowledge.

Rath: I want to ask you a bit about your background. I’m wondering if when you’re looking out that window, if you see Massachusetts, do you ever think about that kid growing up in Cohasset, and did he ever dream of going to space?

Bowen: Yeah, actually, I have done that! When I was very young — I’m old enough to have watched as we first stepped foot on the moon — I remember watching that on a black-and-white TV in our house in Cohasset. So the concept of becoming an astronaut was just sort of fantastic to me.

I never really set it out as a career goal, but I just kind of went along, studied as hard as I could and always took the opportunities I could to learn more. On the path I took, I ended up as an officer in the Nuclear Submarine Corps. I applied from there, and I was fortunate enough to get selected. So it was a dream from when I was a little kid, but it wasn’t something I planned on during my early-adult career. But it’s been a fantastic 23 years so far, and it’s pretty amazing.

Rath: Like those classic Apollo astronauts that you were watching on TV, you followed the Navy route.

Bowen: Yes, I did. When I talk to students, I kind of emphasize the fact that what you do in high school, etcetera, if you’re having difficulty in a class or something, spend a little extra time and focus on that so you can bring your grades up and learn. Because the teachers are teaching us this stuff for a reason, so I kind of got that attitude fairly early on because I was not a good reader at first.

By the time I got to be a senior in high school, I got to choose where I wanted to go to school, and the U.S. Naval Academy seemed like a great engineering school, so I went there. And it was the same thing there — I did well enough that I was able to select the Submarine Corps upon graduation.

I continued to work. When you do that, you get to choose the opportunities you have, and it’s pretty exciting. It led me to the opportunity to apply to become an astronaut, which isn’t like that because there are so many qualified people. I felt like I won the lottery when I got selected.

Rath: Well, you must have done well since then because you’re now commanding this mission. Is this your first mission as a commander?

Bowen: Yes, my three previous missions were all shuttle missions. I basically came up to the International Space Station as a construction worker, as a contractor, helping build the International Space Station. So I have the opportunity now to live in this house, and it’s pretty amazing.

Rath: Tell us a bit more about your mission. First off, the team that you’re leading is an international team.

Bowen: Yeah, this is an amazing group. We’ve got three Russian cosmonauts on board. We brought one of them up with us on the SpaceX Dragon, and we have a United Arab Emirates astronaut, as well, on his first long-duration flight from the Emirates. It’s really exciting to have such a diverse group of people on board.

Rath: Tell us about what your goals are and what you hope to accomplish on this.

Bowen: Well, it is a national laboratory, so there are several hundred experiments going on all around us pretty much at all times. Some of them run pretty much autonomously, a lot of them require our input — our activity — to help keep them going. ... There’s a lot of sampling and just maintaining the stations.

But really, what we’re doing is continuing the operation of this laboratory, this incredible asset for science that’s been manned since October of 2000. So almost 23 years now, we’ve had people permanently living in space. That’s pretty exciting in and of itself. But the research is really the goal.

Rath: With all of that, it sounds like the work could never stop. How does your typical day go on the International Space Station?

Bowen: Well, there’s a couple of things that are really important. They want to make sure you get enough sleep, so they do schedule a block of time for sleep. You want to get about eight hours if you can. That’s hard on the ground, and it’s hard up here.

You also have to work out and do load-bearing exercises for two hours every day to ensure that you maintain your bone density and muscle mass. You have to find time to eat and take care of all of those other issues that go along with living, so you end up with about 8- to 10-hour workdays scheduled over 12 hours because you can’t put things right on top of each other. So it’s a long day, and sometimes you do end up working weekends, which is good — you’re always doing something useful and exciting.

If you get a chance to look at our schedule, you can see what we do on a daily basis. You’ll see we don’t get a whole lot of spare time, which is why it’s so important to get weekends and get that opportunity for some downtime to recover, to continue the pace.

Rath: Your crew went up on the International Space Station on a SpaceX spacecraft. Tell me about that, how it’s been learning to use new hardware like that.

Bowen: Oh, it’s so different because I grew up on the space shuttle. When I got the astronaut office, I did three shuttle flights, and I was the flight engineer for my first flight. We had hundreds of switches and circuit breakers and dials and knobs and displays that really required some manual intervention at different points in order to make things happen.

The Dragon spacecraft is almost entirely automated, so in reality, we’re monitoring systems. Our input, our interface is not those switches and circuit breakers — it’s a touch screen. So it’s incredibly different, an incredibly capable machine, and it’s doing its job well for us so far.

Rath: Will you use the Dragon capsule to get home, or does the outgoing crew use that?

Bowen: We’ll use our own capsule heading home in about six months or so. You splash down in the ocean, similar to the way they did in the Apollo days. And that’s because the weather constraints are pretty tight, so that’s one reason Crew-5 was here for a few extra days with us. You’ve gotta make sure the weather’s safe to come home, and that’s how we’ll be getting home in about five or six months.

Rath: Speaking of new hardware, I have to imagine this is a pretty exciting time to be an astronaut with the coming plans from NASA. There are going to be additional moon missions. So as someone who grew up watching those Apollo missions, tell me what it feels like.

Bowen: It’s been incredibly exciting, and it’s been getting more and more exciting over the past half decade or so. Once the Artemis Mission started to become more realistic, commercial crew came online and brought that other set of vehicles and commercial crew vehicles.

We’ve got SpaceX; hopefully, we’ll get Boeing up here soon. That’s incredibly exciting, incredibly amazing to see. And now, with Artemis and Gateway and potential missions to the moon, it’s absolutely amazing. I have friends that have been at NASA a lot longer than me, and they will tell you that this is the most exciting time they’ve ever had at NASA.

Rath: Is there a kind of dissonance or a real contrast when you’re docking the Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station, which has now been manned for over 20 years now.

Bowen: It’s pretty amazing. I came through the hatch, and it looks familiar to when I left it 10, 12 years ago. But it’s just so much busier. Having that extra crew member that the Dragon capsule provides just adds that much more capability to the laboratory itself, and it’s really exciting. It’s an incredibly bustling place, and that’s great to see.

Rath: Stephen, our time has just flown by — you can probably tell how much I’m loving talking to you about all of this. Before we have to let you go, is there anything you want to say to your friends and family back here on Earth and in Massachusetts?

Bowen: I’d like to say hello! I’m really enjoying the weather up here. I know the weather down there has been tough at times these past few months. I guess it was cold and dreary yesterday. I’m looking forward to getting home in the fall time frame. After we get back to Houston and I get some recovery, I’m probably going to head back up to New England and head up to see family in Boston. So it’s going to be exciting. And, you know, maybe we’ll have an NBA and NHL championship to celebrate, as well.