November 23, 2015 Show with Christian Astronaut Col. Jeffery Williams

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet earth listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 23rd day of November 2015 and I am very very excited about today's program.

I know that I say that a lot but this is multiplied a hundred times.

Today is a program that I'm doing in loving memory of my father, Harry E.

Arnzen, who all his life has been in the aviation or aerospace field.

Since his passing in 1998, I've been looking for the perfect moment to pay tribute to him on Iron Sharpens Iron and this is certainly it because in the late 60s and early 70s, my dad worked for Grumman and he was a part of the team that designed the lunar module.

He had been a pilot in World War II for the Army Air Corps and then after retiring worked for Republic Aviation and then later for Grumman and I can still remember sitting in my living room with my brother

Bob as a young boy watching on the black and white television set the first man landing on the moon and feeling such a powerful connection because of my dad's work on the lunar module.

But today our guest is Colonel Jeffrey Williams who is an astronaut and he's the author of the book,

The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space. Colonel Jeffrey Williams grew up on a farm in the rural community of Winter, Wisconsin.

He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1980 and then served more than 27 years in the

U .S. Army. Williams became an astronaut in 1996 and flew on the 10 -day space shuttle mission

STS -101 in 2000 before beginning training for the 183 -day

Expedition 13 in 2006. Williams holds a bachelor's degree from USMA, master's in aerospace engineering degrees from the

Naval Postgraduate School and a master's degree from the Naval War College. He and his wife

Anna Marie reside in Texas and are members of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas.

They have two grown sons and according to the forward of his book by Dr.

John MacArthur, one of my most beloved heroes of the modern day, he says that Colonel Williams took more photographs of Earth than any astronaut in history.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time, Colonel Jeffrey Williams.

Thank you, Chris. It's good to be with you today. And I know that there are a lot of children who are anxiously waiting to hear their questions asked.

I have advertised that this program would be taking place weeks ago and a number of Christian schools from different parts of the country of different Christian denominations and fellowships responded enthusiastically with a whole bunch of questions from their students of varying grades and ages.

And I'm just so delighted that so many of them are excellent questions. I've got to start actually recruiting children to write questions for me more often because it makes my job a lot easier.

And I think I'm going to perhaps steal some of these questions and pretend that they're my own today because they're good.

But before we get into the questions from the kids, Colonel Williams, tell us something about your personal faith in Jesus Christ and if this was something that you can remember ever since being a little boy or was it something that came about later in your life?

It actually was something that came about later in life for both my wife, Anna Marie, and I. We had been married for almost seven years and everything was seemingly going well in our marriage, but like so many times it happens in the world around us, things started falling apart and we got to a point of crisis in our marriage in the late 80s.

It's a long story, but out of that set of circumstances, first God in His grace brought

Anna Marie to faith. When I found out what happened to her, I was a little concerned, obviously, but I spent the next several months studying the scriptures trying to understand this

Savior that she had come to faith in. And after four or five months of studying the scriptures every night,

I committed my life to Christ and we rebuilt our marriage, rebuilt the way we raised our sons and lived our lives.

And that was in 1988, late 87, early 88, and we've been endeavoring to serve the

Lord ever since. Well, praise God for that. It's never too late as long as you have breath in your lungs to start over and come to Christ and have a fresh new life, let alone, the most important thing, having an eternal life.

How did you come to know John MacArthur and our mutual friend, Phil Johnson, who is the

Executive Director of Grace to You Ministries? Well, I've had John on my program once and Phil on many times.

He's probably been interviewed more than anyone on this program, with the exception of one or two who are neck and neck with him.

But how did you get to know them? Well, when I came to faith in Christ in 1988, early 88,

I think it was January of 88, I was hungry to understand the

Bible, hungry to understand all things to get to know my Savior.

And one of those things, obviously, is Christian radio. So when I discovered that there was such a thing as Christian radio,

I listened to everything that I could and eventually discovered Grace to You.

And pretty soon, most other programs started falling by the wayside, but Grace to You stuck with me. And then through the 90s, it really became my habit.

We lived in Houston at the time, and there's a radio station here in Houston known as KHCB on 105 .7.

It became my habit at nine o 'clock every evening. We would have our sons in bed by that time.

They were young in those days, and Annemarie and I would be in bed with the lamps burning and the

Bible open on our laps and listening to Grace to You. And that was our habit for many, many years.

And just so John, through that program, really ministered to us and really taught me the

Bible. He's taught me the Bible like nobody else. As you had mentioned, he is one of my heroes of the modern -day heroes of the faith as well.

And later on in the late 90s, after being selected by NASA and working toward my first mission,

SDS -101 on the space shuttle Atlantis, I wanted to give a gift back to Grace to You, to John, and to the staff who made the ministry possible.

So I wrote a letter explaining what an impact that the ministry had had on our lives, the lives of Annemarie and I, and an appreciation offered to do something for them, specifically fly something for them on the space shuttle into orbit.

And my idea was to fly the MacArthur Study Bible on DVD or CD at the time,

I guess. So they responded to that letter, and that established a relationship that has grown since I did fly the

Bible. I had the opportunity after the flight in, I think, the fall of 2000 to go out to California and visit them on site and return the

CD, the MacArthur Study Bible that I'd flown, and that started a relationship that's been very strong.

John and I have crossed paths since then in God's providence in many places throughout the country and even internationally, to include in Italy and Russia.

So it's been amazing to me how the Lord has orchestrated in His providence circumstances to give us the honor to work together.

Now that you have become a Christian, a very strong Christian, Bible -believing

Christian creationist, how has that affected your life in a field?

I'm not sure what the typical makeup of religion or faith is amongst astronauts, but if you watch television and watch documentaries, you're going to very quickly come to the opinion that astronomers and those involved in all sorts of fields of science, including space science, are predominantly evolutionists and people who would deny creation and so on.

How does that come to play in your new life as a Christian in this very important field that you're in?

Well, I think it has worked out to be not unlike other disciplines that Christians and believers find themselves in, mixed in with other believers and people that are not believers, people of other religions or agnostic or even atheist.

It's really no different in the community that I work in. There are more believers,

I think, than you would think, than most people would think, in our ranks to include among the astronauts.

Certainly not everybody, but there are a significant number. Also among the engineers and the managers and the other folks that literally thousands of people that put this program together, there are many believers.

I recognize that the public face of science in general and space and astronomy in particular seems to be that of evolutionary views and atheistic views and naturalism and all of that, but that's not representative,

I would say, of the people that actually do the work. Oh, that's good to know. That's a pleasant surprise, actually.

I'm going to give our email address out, even though most of our questions today are going to be coming from Christian students from kindergarten through 12th grade who have submitted their questions to their teachers who have forwarded them to me from various parts of the

United States, but I still want to give our listeners the opportunity to chime in if we have time here and there to address one of their questions.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com,

and please include at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. It's chrisarnsen at gmail .com, and the teachers who submitted their students' questions, most of them include the entire child's name, but some of them only include either the first name or the first name and last initial, and I'm just reading them as I've received them.

I'm going to start off with a question that several different students asked.

We have Ella Scalise, who's an eighth grader from Coventry Christian School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

Alicia Wolfe, a fifth grader from Grace Baptist Church Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Kieran Larrison, a fifth grader from Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York.

And Nora Williams, who is also from Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York.

And Christelle E., who is an eighth grader at Smithtown Christian School, Smithtown, Long Island, New York.

And Brian Hanna, who's a seventh grader from Coventry Christian School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

They all asked the question, what inspired you to be an astronaut, and when did it start?

Well, I think as a child, I was always interested in science and how things worked, and I was always exploring, and I was doing experiments.

I remember having a chemistry set when I was very young and fascinating with that type of stuff.

I remember trying to make homemade gunpowder, which is something you probably want to do nowadays.

I would draw too much of the wrong attention. And I tried to even make a rocket that ended up burning up on the launch pad.

It never got any far because it turns out, in hindsight, I didn't know much about nozzles, and that was the secret that I was missing.

But anyway, I was always fascinated with those things. My sixth grade science teacher was one of those guys on the short list that I would say inspired me early on.

But at that age, I never considered it even a possibility. It was over my horizon, if you will.

Growing up on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, it was not part of my world.

It wasn't until I graduated from high school and went off to the military academy at West Point that I became aware of aviation.

I didn't even know the Army had aviators and aircraft, but they do. In fact, the

Army has more aircraft than the Air Force, mostly helicopters. I got to know some folks that had just come back from Vietnam.

They were helicopter pilots that had fought the war over there. They inspired me.

Halfway through West Point, I read the book by Tom Wolfe called The Right Stuff, which chronicled the early test pilots breaking the sound barrier, the early jets, as well as the early astronauts.

In that same year, I think it was the same year, 1978, the first Army astronaut was selected by NASA, Bob Stewart.

All of that kind of coalesced to open my eyes to the possibility.

I set it as a goal at that time. That was in the late 70s. I got the opportunity in 1996.

That was many years later, almost 20 years later. That was after not only completing the bachelor's program at West Point, but later, a master's degree in aeronautical engineering and working in the

Army as an Army aviator. Alisha Wolfe, a fifth grader in Grace Baptist Church Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, wants to know, how did you get picked to be an astronaut?

Most astronauts will tell you they have no idea why. Actually, it is a lesson in perseverance that I like to share with young people.

Oftentimes, we don't achieve our goals the first time or we don't achieve them as early as we would like.

I began applying to NASA in 1985, right before the Challenger accident.

It took me a little over ten years, six applications.

I interviewed with NASA three times before they finally selected me. I like to jokingly say

I finally wore them down and they went ahead and selected me. It took a long time.

It took many years, many disappointments. When you interview with them, what that means is there may be several thousand applicants.

There have been 5 ,000 or 6 ,000 applicants, that order of magnitude, in a typical selection. They interview 110 people.

To get an interview is a big deal. Out of that 110 people, historically, they have picked anywhere from 10 or 12 to up to 35.

So even with an interview, your chances are not that good at being selected.

It took a long time. In 1996, I got my opportunity.

Wow. We have a 10th grader from Providence Christian Academy in Scotland, Pennsylvania.

I didn't even know there was a Scotland, Pennsylvania. Hannah Garner asks,

How does your worldview affect your approach to your work? That's a good question.

Everybody has a worldview. Everybody has presuppositions in how they regard all of reality around us.

My worldview is informed first and foremost by the scripture, by God's revelation, by the

Bible. It's through the lens of the scripture that I attempt to understand the things around us.

That includes the work that I do. We explore space for the same reason that humanity has done exploration and discovery throughout history.

God, in the Garden of Eden, relinquished his creation to Adam and Eve.

He said to subdue it and have dominion over it. I believe exploration and discovery is just a component of that commission that he gave mankind.

I often talk about the view of Earth from orbit. I try to point out that the fact that we can go there and fly in space and then look back and see the elements of Earth is a demonstration of the order that God put in his creation and the unique set of circumstances and characteristics that he put in what we call home, the planet

Earth, which is really a spacecraft. In that order, our ability to subdue it, our ability to comprehend it, to wonder about it, to explore it, to discover the raw materials and then do things with those raw materials to advance science and technology, all of that is informed by scripture.

That's my world view. Ultimately, we know because of the fall that there's something more.

There's a void inside us apart from the grace of God. That void is filled by the grace of God, by his son, his work on the cross, his son,

Jesus Christ, who came to die for us. When we come to faith in Christ, then we can live for him.

One of the great studies of the scripture is, and this has to do with worldview, and it has to do largely with young people trying to explore what they're going to do in life.

That's that wonderful word that came out of the Reformation called vocation. When I was a kid, vocation meant you learned a trade.

Maybe you were a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter, and certainly that is a vocation.

But vocation is whatever we do. Vocation is a synonym to calling.

So that worldview informed by the scripture tells us that we are all called to our place in the world.

We're all called in time, a certain time in history, in certain circumstances, in a certain place, and we are to serve

God in whatever we do. It doesn't have to be inside the church. It can be in whatever we do.

It should be God honoring, obviously, in that. But we serve

God in that capacity. A lot of times it's just serving other people. It's providing a product or a service for other people.

And we have Jonah, who is a third grader at Lutheran Day School in Northport, Long Island, New York, asking the same question as Eva Leatherman, a sixth grader at Grace Baptist Church Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were you scared of taking your space flight?

We spent a lot of time training and preparing for everything we do, to include the launch, the work that we do on orbit, the spacewalks, and the entry.

And a lot of that time is spent learning how to deal with things that go wrong.

So that, combined with the fact that, again, if it's your vocation, you're called to do something, the

Lord, in His grace, equips you to fulfill that calling. Given all of that,

I can honestly say I haven't been scared. I respect what we do very much.

There are times, like a launch and getting there and doing a spacewalk, where you really are focused, you really concentrate.

But the training and preparation and all of the dedicated work that the team has put into, literally thousands of people now in the

International Space Station around the globe, dedicated to safe and successfully execute this mission, you grow in confidence with that.

So I can honestly say I have not been scared. If I'm scared,

I probably am in the wrong business. Well, sometimes

I wonder about that about myself, because I'm very frequently scared just using the studio equipment here to conduct a live radio show.

It's kind of humiliating knowing that you're less frightened or not frightened at all operating a spacecraft.

But we do have another listener from, let's see, we have

Stephen Kim at Grace Christian Academy in Merrick, Long Island, New York.

How long and what did your training consist of before going into space?

Oh, the training is a wide scope. Obviously, we train how to operate the spacecraft and we train to understand the systems of the spacecraft so that if something goes wrong with a particular system, we have enough knowledge of the system to figure out what the problem is and then how to deal with it.

On the space station, we do lots of science and experiments and research, so we train on how to execute that.

Because the space station is up there indefinitely for a long period of time, it's not like the space shuttle that we flew for a short period of time and then returned to Earth and where it was repaired and the teams got it ready for the next flight.

The space station doesn't return, so when things break in the space station, we have to repair them.

So we train a lot on how to do the repairs. We can't call a plumber or an electrician.

We have to fix it ourselves. Another example is we can't go to the doctor if something goes wrong or if we have an accident and get injured, so we get medical training to be able to deal with the things that might come up when we're up there.

Of course, we have a team of folks in mission control here in Houston to help support us in all those things and many more, but ultimately we're the ones that have to do the hands -on work.

Nathan Smith and Alicia Wolf, both in the fifth grade at Grace Baptist Church Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, both asked, do you control the space station?

If not, who does? Well, we can control the space station through commanding through its computer systems, but the mission control centers, not only here in Houston, but also in Moscow and to a limited extent in Japan and Germany as well, control the space station.

Now, when you say control, it's turning things on and off. It's changing the orientation of the space station.

It's working the different systems, the electrical system, the thermal control system, the environmental control system, all of that, to keep it a safe and effective environment for the crew.

But it's in free fall, really. It's not like an airplane that you have a stick in front of you and you pull the stick back to go up and push the stick to go down or you go left or right.

The space station is in free fall. There's typically not an engine running, propelling it, which is just the physics of orbital mechanics.

It's hard to explain, but you have to go fast to keep it in orbit and in free fall without a motor pushing it.

In fact, you have to go 17 ,500 miles an hour. That is the orbital velocity.

If I were to try to explain it, how that works, if you take a baseball and you throw it across the street, it arcs and lands on the other side of the street.

If you want to go a little bit farther, you throw it harder and it still arcs down and eventually hits the ground.

You can take the best baseball player and throw it much farther than you and I can, maybe, but still it's going to arc and eventually fall down, probably within view.

If you were to continue to go faster and faster and faster, and you got out of the air, out of the atmosphere, so you didn't have the drag of the air.

Eventually, when you went fast enough, it would still fall in an arc, but it would fall in an arc that was parallel to the surface of the earth.

That's orbit. That's orbital velocity. It's 17 ,500 miles an hour.

If you're out of the atmosphere, then you don't have the drag slowing you down. You continue to go that fast.

We're going to be going to a quick station break and we'll be right back after these messages and more of your questions for Colonel Jeffrey Williams, the astronaut.

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Welcome back. If you've just tuned us in, our guest today is Colonel Jeffrey Williams, a Christian astronaut.

He is the author of The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space.

And we are reading to Colonel Williams the questions of Christian students in varying

Christian schools and church Sunday schools from different parts of the country whose teachers submitted them to us when this program was advertised.

So we're delighted to read them to you. Before we even go into more of the children's questions, tell us something about this gorgeous full -color coffee table size book that you've got that you've written here.

When I came back from the Expedition 13 flight in 2006, I had taken a lot of photography when

I was on board with the realization that when the experience was over, the photography was going to be one of the things that I would have for my lifetime to be able to recall the things and also to be able to communicate the experience to others.

So that was my motivation of taking the pictures, primarily to be able to tell the story, vicariously take people as I like to say to that vantage point.

When I got back, the folks that pay attention to what we call earth observation photography here at Johnson Space Center in Houston encouraged me to consider a book because of the variety and the quality of the photography.

So I appreciated the feedback and I didn't take a whole lot of it.

But then other people started mentioning, you should do a book, you should do a book. And then

I was given a presentation to a bunch of church leaders at a conference one time and out of the crowd, after the crowd had thinned out afterwards,

Bruce Kintz, who's the CEO of Concordia Publishing House, came out of the audience and introduced himself and said, hey, we would like to do a book if you ever think you might be willing to do that.

And so all of that came together and so it kind of fell into my lap and I felt kind of obligated to do it at that point.

I began working on it and about a year went into it in my free time because I was still busy with my main job.

But after about a year or so, I put it together and submitted a manuscript and then it took them a couple of years to put it together and get it ready to publish.

In the meantime, I was asked to go fly again. So in September of 2009, or maybe it was

October 2009, I launched again from Kazakhstan for another almost six month flight.

And the book was announced, actually I did the final review when

I was in quarantine, getting ready to launch again. And it was announced publicly just before I landed in March of 2010 and then it came out in May of 2010.

So I got to live it all again, anticipating its release. The book primarily has the purpose to vicariously take the reader to the vantage point and be able to share in the experience.

And in particular, for those with a biblical world view, to go to that vantage point and to consider the creation of God, the wonder of his creation, and in particular the wonder of the

Creator who created us and gave us everything that we have, as well as his provision that comes from the earth and ultimately his redemption that comes through Jesus Christ.

And that is the goal of the book. And I do that through telling the story of the flight, through relating to the reader.

As one of your questioners said earlier, what's my world view?

Relating a world view through the lens of scripture and take people to that vantage point.

Well, it's a gorgeous book and the first six schools who submitted questions from their students to us are receiving a free copy of this gorgeous book that will be shipped out to you,

God willing, this week. So we thank you so much for submitting these questions, which we still have many of.

We have a question from Jessica Weber in the sixth grade at St.

Paul's Lutheran Church Sunday School in Amityville, Long Island, New York. She asks, do you feel closer to God in space?

That's a good question. I get that question often. My short answer is no, but that's not the full answer.

We can know of God through viewing his creative work and his natural creation.

We can know of him, but we can't know him. And to be close to God is to know him, is to be in relationship with him.

And that only comes through the saving knowledge of his son, Jesus Christ. And that only comes by the grace of God, through the power of the

Spirit, and his special revelation of the Bible. So my closeness to God comes by his grace through how he has revealed himself in the scripture, in the

Bible, not through view and creation. Now having said that, certainly understanding who he is and what he has done as he has revealed himself in the scripture, and then viewing his creative work from that unique vantage point of orbit and seeing earth and all of the details on earth for that long period of time, certainly it enriches the closeness that I already have to God through his son,

Jesus Christ. Amen. Madison Freiman, who is a sixth grader at Long Island Baptist Academy in Holtzville, New York, says her mom wants to know if you'd be willing to take her dad out into outer space forever.

No, I'm just kidding. That was a joke. I happen to be a friend of Pastor Josh Freiman, who is

Madison's dad. Madison actually asked if the

American flag is still on the moon. It is.

There's nothing there that would cause it to fall down or get blown away. There's no atmosphere there.

So everything that was left there by the astronauts, by the 12 men that walked on the moon in the late 60s and early 70s, is there just as they left it.

It's very interesting. There's a lunar orbiting spacecraft that was launched several years ago to take high resolution detailed photography of the surface of the earth.

Our technology is a whole lot more advanced along those lines than it was in the 60s and 70s.

So they've got some pretty detailed mapping of the moon. You can see the things that have been left by the astronauts in the 60s and 70s.

About a year and a half ago, I was at a conference. Neil Armstrong, who was still alive at the time, happened to be at the same conference.

He gave a little talk. Neil very rarely spoke publicly once in a while, but he was a pretty private person.

Very, very nice gentleman. He and I had a chance to visit a little bit.

I always enjoyed the little time I was able to get with him. But he gave a presentation.

His presentation was on the left -hand side of the screen was a video recording of their final approach to the moon in July 1969.

It was sort of fuzzy. It was most of us remember it. I remember it certainly as a kid watching the moon landing.

And of course, it's been replayed countless times since then. So a lot of people since then have seen it. But it's a fuzzy 60s era video recording.

And then the right side of the screen was a computer generated trajectory of that same flight path, but using the high resolution photography produced here recently by this lunar orbiting spacecraft.

So you see these two trajectories going down as they approach. And on the left side, the original screen, as they get close to the surface, you see a cloud of dust start picking up.

On the right side of the screen, of course, there wasn't a real approach. So you don't see the dust, but you see the high resolution detail of the landing site.

And at the landing site is the bottom half of the lunar lander still sitting because it's sitting there.

It's still there. And it was a wonderful presentation. And everybody really enjoyed it.

And it was an honor to be there to have Neil narrate through that trajectory.

Wow. We have two different students who asked the same question. Kaylee Gloxine, or Gloxine, who is a second grader at St.

Paul's Lutheran Church Sunday School in Amityville, Long Island, New York. And also

Jenna Buchheimer, who is in the sixth grade at Providence Christian Academy in Scotland, Pennsylvania.

They both want to know, what do you eat or drink in space? We have a wide variety of food and drinks in space.

NASA prepares, we have a food laboratory and they prepare food that's mostly dehydrated, although not all of it is dehydrated.

But it's prepared, it's packaged so that it lasts a long time. Obviously, we don't get a lot of fresh food up there.

But the food is then rehydrated. And we got all the meats and vegetables and side dishes and desserts and just about everything that we have here on Earth, we duplicate in some form up there.

So we rehydrate the food or if it's in a package like the military meals ready to eat, we have food also very similar to that, where we just stick it in an oven, heat it up and then cut the package open and eat it with a spoon.

So a lot of the food is prepared that way. The Russians also provide quite a bit of food and a lot of that food is dehydrated as well.

They've got some great soups, as well as other entrees and whatnot. And then they have some canned food, mostly stews with beef or pork or lamb and potatoes and rice and different varieties of that.

And then there's a little bit of food contributed by the Japanese partners, as well as the

Germans and the French and the European Space Agency as well. They contribute food as well.

So there's a wide variety up there. When we have a supply ship come up, the team at the launch site that prepares the rocket and the spacecraft to launch, at the last minute, they will often put in some fresh fruit and maybe vegetables, apples, oranges, that kind of thing, will survive a few days in a spacecraft and get to us.

So we always enjoy the fresh food as well when a supply ship arrives.

We have a couple of students who asked the same question. We have, let's see here, we have

Valentina Flores, who is a sixth grader at Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York.

And Tharon Alamuri, who is in the ninth grade at that same school, do you believe in extraterrestrial life?

I do not. I get that question often as well. In fact, I am documented in some program on one of the cable news channels as being in the window.

They've got some video footage from the space station with me in the window looking out and supposedly I'm watching a

UFO. So unfortunately there are some channels out there that like to produce these supposed documentaries that chronicle this stuff and also unfortunately many people like to want to believe it.

And there's a few people, a handful people that put a lot of effort into it, convinced that there are secrets and that we're hiding things.

But no, I do not believe in it. Now this is a question of my own. Do you think that your faith compels you to be certain that extraterrestrial life does not exist?

And or is there another reason why you do not believe in it? Uh, well,

I would say there's two parts to that question. My faith convinces me that we are uniquely created in this unique place that we call

Earth, designed and purposed to support life as God intended.

So because of that, I don't think that we'll find life anywhere else. But practically speaking, when you actually look at the facts and look at the science and look at the purported evidence that, uh, that suggest it, um, it doesn't, it never holds water.

So in a practical, um, in a practical way, I don't believe it as well. I think, you know, going back to the earlier worldview question and you know, all these things are questions of worldview, um, trying to answer these questions logically.

If you, if you consider that, um, there's a large number of folks for many years now and perhaps throughout ever since the fall,

I guess you could argue that don't want God to be there because they don't want to judge. They don't want to stand before a judge, um, because people recognize that they cannot stand justified before a

God. Well, in the last couple of hundred years, of course, there's been great headway made in Western civilization to, uh, to get

God out of the picture through the philosophies of humanism and naturalism and materialism and all of that.

Well, uh, evolution has come out of that and that's, uh, the most obvious component of it, the

Darwinian theories and all that. Well, that says that life evolved by chance over a long period of time.

And if it evolved by chance over a long period of time here, certainly it did elsewhere too, because we can look out as far as we can see and we always see is more and more and more.

Uh, and so certainly there are, uh, there is in all probability other places similar or, uh, to what we experience here, but that comes out of the worldview that there is no

God. Things evolved here by chance over time. And that's a, you go back and you can look at, for example, the, all of the effort that went in,

I think it was in the sixties and seventies, and then it kind of waned after that, loosening out into deep space for evidence of intelligence out there through listening to radio waves and whatnot.

Nothing was ever found, but it was all based on, uh, naturalism.

It was all based on needing to exclude the possibility of God. Amen. Well, I don't know why

I get a kick out of this question, but I love this question for some reason. Uh, Nora Williams, a fifth grader at Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York asks, have you ever argued with your astronaut friends?

Have I ever argued? Well, I never got into a heated emotional argument.

Certainly we have, uh, discussions and we have debates, um, in conversations, we have, uh, disagreements on how we approach things, but that, that happens among all people in all places.

Right. But I can honestly say, and I've been in orbit with, uh, I think up to 45 or 50 people now, different people, either that have been on the cruise that I have been on or have been on other crews that came to visit the space station, for example, on a space shuttle when

I was there on a expedition. Um, and I've never gotten into anything that was serious with anybody.

I've saw in for that. I've been very thankful. And, uh,

Maya Martinez, who is a fifth grader at Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York, uh, asks if you were on a mission and something went wrong, would you ask

God to help you with it? And also, uh, Nora Williams, again, of Our Savior American, New American School asks if you pray to God to help you along the way.

Uh, absolutely. I, um, ask God to help me in all things, things that are going as expected and things that don't go as expected.

Uh, ultimately it's by his grace and the, and the provision in the little things I like to say in day -to -day life, um, that we're able to navigate through the things of life.

So we are, we are dependent creatures and we are dependent on our creator.

Um, so I am reminded of that often. I remind myself of that often through, um, the study of his word and prayer.

Um, and, and I live in dependency of him and that includes asking him for help.

Uh, Ruth Himme or Heine in the seventh grade at Coventry Christian School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania asks, have you ever ministered to one of your fellow astronauts and they were later saved?

Uh, well, I've certainly have many, have had many discussions and I'll broaden the question to more than astronauts.

It's everybody that I work with. Um, uh, many discussions on spiritual things, many discussions on, uh, things of God, many discussions discussing the passages of the

Bible, um, uh, in regards to creation and view in the, uh, the view out the window in regards to the uniqueness of his son,

Jesus Christ is our savior, uh, fully God, fully man. Um, had many of those discussions.

I've had discussions with, um, uh, with many believers to encourage and minister to them.

And they've been, uh, encouraging and encouragement and ministered to me as well. Um, to, um, the, the different, uh, trials of life and whatnot in different circumstances that we lived through, uh, or just, uh, growing in our faith.

Uh, I've had discussions with folks that, um, are not antagonistic, but really not interested as well.

And, um, and some of those have been fruitful, at least in part, and others have been, have had little evidence of fruitfulness.

Um, I've had discussions with professing atheist on things. And some of those discussions have been very stimulating and very exciting and encouraging not, uh, in that we're able to have honest and open discussions and not become emotional about it.

Now, I haven't said all that it's our job just to be a witness to our savior, to be a witness to God, uh, to be a witness to him as he has revealed himself in the scripture.

Ultimately it's God that works in the hearts of people. So it's not by our effort that, that people come to a saving faith.

It's by the grace of God that they come to a saving faith. We're just called to be obedient. Amen. And witnessing to him.

Amen. And, uh, by the way, Isabella Reisinger in the sixth grade at Grace Baptist Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania asked the same question.

I didn't want to leave Isabella out there. Uh, Olivia Myers in the sixth grade at Grace Baptist Church Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania asks, who noted the speed limit sign?

Is there a speed limit in space? Uh, what they probably saw was the speed limit sign that we have in the space station.

It was put up there by expedition one, uh, as I recall. Um, and it says speed limit 17 ,500 miles an hour.

And there might be another one that says speed limit 25 ,000 kilometers per hour using the

European units. Uh, but that's a little humor. That is the speed, as I said earlier, that we stay in orbit.

Uh, Marcus Busolile. I'm sorry, Marcus, if I'm mispronouncing your name.

Marcus Busolile or Busolile in the fifth grade at Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York asked, does time go by faster in space?

Uh, as far as I can tell, as far as I, you know, subjectively experienced time, um, behaves the same way up there that it does here.

Some days go fast, other days go slow. Uh, but time seems to go at the same speed, uh, um, overall.

It, you know, we, when the day flies by, that's just because we're, you know, that's just because of what we're doing.

Uh, when the day drags on, it's because we're missing something. We wish we were home. We, um, we're not as occupied as we'd like to be, although that's usually not the case up there.

But, uh, time seems to go the same up there as it does here. By the way, I also wanted to, uh, let you know that, uh,

Elena Dudley in the 10th grade at Coventry Christian School in Potsdam, Pennsylvania also asked a question that we earlier asked about, does

God's creation in your relationship with Christ in any way? So I just wanted to make sure she wasn't left out on that.

Uh, we have, uh, Marcus Rivera, a senior at Long Island Baptist Academy in Holtzville, Long Island, New York, wants to know the following.

Can you tell me what time zone you adhere to in space? And do you wear an

Omega Speedmaster watch in space? Obviously, Marcus's dad works for the

Omega Corporation. Well, I do usually wear an

Omega Speedmaster. I've got one on my wrist right now. Um, just because we, we use it in training.

So we're very proficient at using it when we're in space. Um, it has been the traditional watch used by astronauts and NASA since at least the

Apollo days, if not before, I'm not sure. Uh, but we typically live on Greenwich Mean Time on the space station, which is the time in England.

Uh, a typical day we'll get up at six in the morning and work all day and have our evening time and go to bed at 10 at night.

Uh, but the question also, uh, I need to say also that we don't have the, the sensations that we have here in the ground of day and night.

You know, we kind of know when it's midday, when the sun's high in the sky, we know when it's getting towards the end of the day when the sun's getting low.

Uh, so we have that very visual, uh, cue of the illumination outside. We don't have that in space because going around, um, the earth at 17 ,500 miles an hour, that means we're around the earth.

Every 90 minutes, we see a sunrise and sunset. So we'll see many days and nights, you know, in the workday.

So the watch on the wrist is very important to stay on schedule. We have a kindergartner

Jack Graff at Long Island Baptist Academy in Holtzville, Long Island, New York, wants to know what it feels like being so far away from earth.

Obviously that's a very general question, but it's a good question. It's a great question. Yes. It, uh, uh, it's a very humbling experience to be that far away.

Now, when I say that far away, we're actually not that far off the surface of the earth.

We're typically about 250 miles or so, maybe a little bit higher, um, nowadays, uh, above the earth.

So that's just high enough to be out of the atmosphere and to be able to stay in orbit. However, going that speed, you're still a long ways.

It's still hard to get home. You can't just drop down on, on the earth. Um, so in that sense, you're far away.

You're also far away in that, uh, when we launch and we get to the space station, we're going to stay there almost six months.

Uh, so you're far away from the end of that. So there is an, there's is an element of isolation, uh, from friends and family.

There's a element of, uh, of, uh, being in a way and knowing that the family's got to, uh, live here life on the ground as you normally live.

And with all of the ups and downs of life, and you can't be there to either enjoy the ups or to support them in the downs of life.

So there is that sense of isolation. We do have great communication up there though. We, uh, my wife and I talk, uh, typically twice a day.

Uh, I can call on the equivalent of a voiceover IP telephone. Um, and every

Sunday afternoon, typically Sunday afternoons, we'll have a video teleconference. So we're able to see each other and she'll sometimes invite friends, uh, or we have our, what now our extended family, our sons are both married and, and our older son and his wife have children.

So we will have the grandchildren this time, this flight coming up, uh, to also vicariously take them through the experience.

We have to go to a break right now. Uh, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, feel free to email us at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. We have plenty more questions from kids out there and I'm hoping to get to as many as I can before the program is over.

Don't go away or we will be right back with Colonel Jeffrey Williams, the Christian astronaut right after these words from our sponsors.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in for the last hour, we have been interviewing Colonel Jeffrey Williams, who is a

Christian astronaut, and he's the author of The Work of His Hands, A View of God's Creation from Space.

And Colonel Williams is actually preparing right now for another space launch in March.

He's going to be on the space station for six months. Before we return to our questions from the kids, tell us something more in detail about that and what you'll be doing.

Well, we've been flying in space. We've had humans in space in the space station for over 15 years now.

Expedition 1 launched in the fall of 2000, early

November 2000. So the continuous presence means that we hand over crews typically every six months, although Scott Kelly is on board right now.

He will be on board for almost a year, and I'll replace him when he'll land in early

March, and then I'll launch in mid -March. So in a sense, it's just a continuation of this permanent presence in space.

The space station is huge. It's got a crew of six right now. It's about the volume of a 5 ,000 -square -foot house, and it's primarily an orbiting laboratory.

We do lots of science and research on board. So I expect to be doing a lot of that.

A lot of the research is on ourselves. We're guinea pigs while we're up there. We're trying to understand the effects on the human body in the environment so that we can continue to develop countermeasures to support future exploration.

Occasionally, we go outside to do a spacewalk, to do typically repairs or sometimes deploying experiments on the outside and doing some other work.

I expect it very likely that I will do a couple of spacewalks while I'm up there, and I'll be launching in March on a

Russian Soyuz. This will be my third time on a Russian vehicle from Kazakhstan, this time with two

Russian cosmonaut crewmates, and we will join three other people that will have been on board since December.

They're in Russia right now getting ready to go down to Kazakhstan, and they'll launch here in a couple of weeks.

We'll join them on board and finish out, as I said, the crew of six.

So we rotate three at a time. We launch crews of three, four times a year, rotating three at a time and maintaining a crew of six.

We intend to fly the space station into the 2020s.

Right now, the agreement among the partnership is at least to 2024 and perhaps even longer than that.

So really, what I'm preparing to do is just get back into the mix to do what

I did the last time, very similar but different, but continuing that human presence in space.

Well, I'm going to take this opportunity to take one of the questions from our regular listeners. Andy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania wants to know, have you learned to speak

Russian fluently, and what has it been like working with the Russian cosmonauts?

Nuzhnegorodny Petrovsky. Yeah, what I just said is it's necessary to speak

Russian. We use Russian and English on board. In fact, looking back, the hardest thing, people ask about what's hard about the training.

Obviously, there's a lot of different training. The scope of training is very wide. But for me,

I always had an inclination toward technology, toward science. I love flying, technical things.

So none of that was hard for me. But learning the Russian language was the most difficult thing for me.

And I've been studying it now for, oh, 13, 14 years. They say

I'm in an advanced level, although I feel advanced. But yeah, we use both languages.

Through the 2000s, I spent about half my time in Russia. So I've been there probably 50 times over the years preparing for these multiple missions that I've been on.

They are a key partner in the International Space Station. We started a partnership with them in 1992 -93.

And some of your listeners may recall that we flew the space shuttle to the Russian space station

Mir several times. We had several Americans fly on Mir. And that was used as a way for us to get to know how to work together and how to understand each other's systems and the way we operated in preparation for the

International Space Station. So the Russian part has been very key in my experience.

I've been overwhelmed with the irony all these years, having started out in the

Army in the late 70s and then graduating from West Point in 1980, going to flight school.

My first military assignment was at the time West Germany, when there was West and East Germany.

And East Germany was part of the Soviet bloc, and they were our enemy.

And we were there to be a defense of Western Europe if the Soviet Union invaded

Western Europe. So that's how I spent three years early in my Army career in the height of the

Cold War. Then years later, to be living and working near Moscow, and on weekends going into Moscow, walking around Red Square as an

Army officer, U .S. Army officer, taking pictures freely and roaming around as I please.

I've never been gotten over the irony of that. Yeah. We have two questions that are the same from Smithtown Christian School in Smithtown, Long Island, New York.

Megan P. and Matt C. both ask, do you think that the

Big Bang Theory actually happened? And since you're a Christian astronaut, do you believe that it's possible for someone to go into space, see all the wonders and beauties of it, and then say that a big explosion caused it all, instead of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, intelligent designer?

Well, frankly, I haven't had a whole lot of time to study the details of the

Big Bang Theory. But I would say that the supernatural work of creation in six days probably would be in the eyes of many a big bang, if you will.

The way I view origins, the way I view how things came to be, first and foremost comes from the account given in Genesis 1 and 2.

It's a supernatural work. And again, as I alluded to earlier, if you exclude the possibility of God, you exclude the possibility of the supernatural, and all things have to be explained in nature.

And it cannot be explained. And the Big Bang Theory, as far as I know, is just one of multiple theories that attempt to come up with some theory, some hypothesis that explains things naturally.

But it just doesn't hold water. And by the way, Megan P. is in the 8th grade, and Matt C.

is in the 10th grade, I think I failed to mention that. Elise G. in the 10th grade at Smithtown Christian School on Long Island, New York, asks,

Do you believe that people will live on Mars one day? That's a good question.

There's a lot of focus on going to Mars. It's always been that way. You can even go back to what we would call early science fiction in theaters and whatnot, as early as in the 30s.

And even before that, some of the theorists envisioned going to Mars.

And Mars has always been sort of the destination, the goal, if you will, in human space exploration.

It's always been, let's get to space. Let's figure out how to get to space, to go to orbit, to go to the moon, and on to Mars.

Now, a lot of the focus that you hear, especially in recent years on Mars, is this hypothesis that if we find life there, or the evidence of life, or the evidence that life existed one time, then again, we beef up our theories, our naturalistic theories that life evolved.

I don't think that we're going to find life there. And the only way

I can explain that that's the driver is, again, trying to explain things from a naturalistic worldview without the existence of God.

But Mars has always been, historically, even without the modern technology, we've been able to view it.

And we see that it has an atmosphere. And we have been seated with the science fiction stuff of Martians and aliens coming from Mars and whatnot.

That's a long answer to the question. I don't think that we will be living as we define living here on Earth on Mars.

We will go there eventually and explore it. We'll bring some things back. But in order to live there, we have to take all of the things that naturally occur here on Earth by God's design to sustain life, to sustain our life.

The atmosphere, the water, the food sources, the energy sources, all of that has to be taken there.

Now there may be some resources that we're able to use there, but largely it's going to have to be taken there.

By the way, I just wanted to correct the pronunciation of one of the students' names.

It's Bryn Hanna, who was in the seventh grade at the

Coventry Christian School in Potsdam, PA. But sorry about that,

Bryn. Aaron Rivera, who is in the third grade at Long Island Baptist Academy in Holtzville, would like to know if you have ever seen any satellites while in space, and if you've ever seen the

Hubble telescope while you were up there. Well, the Hubble telescope is in a completely different orbit from the space station.

And I was not on the shuttle missions that went to Hubble. It's quite a bit higher than us, and it's also in a different orbit with a different, what we call, inclination or an angle relative to the equator.

So no, I haven't seen Hubble. I have seen other spacecraft that have, as they've approached the space station to dock with the space station.

I have not seen other spacecraft or satellites in other orbits. It's just they're too far away, too small, moving too fast.

And it would take just the right angle for the sun to reflect off them for us to see them.

And because we're all moving so fast, that angle would be just for a split moment in time.

I have seen, interestingly enough, meteorites, meteors that come from deep space and enter the

Earth's atmosphere and burn up in the atmosphere, and you see a flash of a meteorite going through the atmosphere below us.

I have seen that on occasion. Here's an interesting question from Sophie Wise in the 10th grade at Coventry Christian School in Potsdam, Pennsylvania.

Did you notice anything about Earth when looking at it in space that you had never realized when you were on the planet

Earth? Good question. I think

I realized it before going there. But one of the things that strikes most astronauts when they go there for the first time is the relative thinness of the atmosphere.

That is, the thin band of the atmosphere that you can see at the edge of the

Earth is very thin relative to the diameter of the Earth. And when you realize that that, along with the visible water cycle, all the weather patterns, the cloud formations and whatnot that you can see, that is key to making the

Earth habitable and supporting life here on Earth. And you realize that the

Earth itself is a spacecraft with a very intricate life support system.

Those things we have to duplicate through technology and means of the systems that we have on board.

We have to supply our own oxygen. We have to remove the carbon dioxide that we exhale.

We have to remove the humidity that we exhale. We have to maintain the temperature in a comfortable range.

All those processes that occur by God's design naturally on Earth, we have to duplicate.

So I think that that's one of the things that probably strikes us the most. And we grow to appreciate that more than many things.

This is from one of the teachers, Mrs. Liz Graff, elementary teacher at Long Island Baptist Academy in Holtsville, Long Island, New York.

She asks, according to NASA transcripts of the Apollo moon missions, several astronauts reported hearing music in space.

Have you ever heard it? And can you explain it? Thank you for your kindness and taking our questions. Please don't tell me it's disco, though, if you hear the music.

That's an interesting comment. I have to say I don't remember ever hearing about that. Oh, OK.

Folks heard music. I have not heard music other than what could be explained by playing the music through headphones or speakers.

It is interesting. People think it's very quiet out there. It's not that quiet. We have fans and pumps running continually.

Even when you do a spacewalk outside, we have the sound of the fan that moves the air through the suit or moves the oxygen through the suit, circulates the oxygen going continually.

So there's that whine of the fan going on all the time. Well, that's in the craft, though, that in outer space there is no sound.

Am I right on that? Sound has to travel through a medium. And we hear sound because air is around us.

So it travels through the air. So you are correct. Sound will not travel through a vacuum. So if something exploded in space, unlike in some of the movies where you hear it, there would be no sound.

There would be no sound. Haley Ackle, a ninth grader at Long Island Baptist Academy in Holtsville, New York, would like to know, what do you do in your spare time in space?

Well, there's not a lot of spare time. The days are pretty full. Sundays are lightly scheduled.

We try to have Sunday kind of a day off, although there's never really a day off on the space station. You're always maintaining the systems, tending to things.

You're always staying alert for things that might go wrong or whatnot.

But when we do get those free moments, I like to be in the window viewing the

Earth and viewing the other things that we can see, deep space. When we're on the dark side of the

Earth, we turn all the lights off, you can look into deep space and see a star field that's absolutely spectacular.

So that's how I would spend a lot of my time. Obviously, I mentioned earlier that we can communicate to friends and family on Earth, so I make phone calls definitely to my wife, as I said, every day, but other family members as well and other friends.

I try to have a short list of folks I try to stay in touch with. We have email capability up there, so I've got a steady stream of email that I'm reading and sending now and then, so there's a little bit of that.

I have always taken a paper Bible with me. Certainly, we have electronic means as well, but I take a regular hard Bible with me, so I'll spend some time in devotions and studying the

Scriptures. I guess those are the main things

I can do. Well, you did actually remind me to announce that this program today is being especially sponsored by our friends who published the

New American Standard Bible, and this year marks their 73rd anniversary, so we want to thank everyone at the publishing headquarters of the

New American Standard Bible for their faithful sponsorship of Iron Sharpens Iron, and we congratulate you on your 73rd anniversary of publishing

God's Word. We have Riley Minor in the ninth grade at Coventry Christian School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, who asks, of all the steps in preparing for a mission, during the mission, and recovering from a mission, is there any part you would omit if given the choice?

If so, which ones? Oh, boy. Well, we have sometimes dirty, miserable chores that we have here in the ground.

We have our category of those up there as well, so just the way we treat trash and garbage and that kind of stuff, so some of that stuff

I would omit if I could. But for the most part, everything is very interesting.

It's very enjoyable. If you have a curiosity for things, even in the mundane things, the curiosity for how can

I best do these mundane things in the environment of weightlessness, being in a remote place that's not frequently supplied, that you can't go to the hardware store, you can't do this or that, all of that brings a certain level of interest to it, even the things that we would rather not do.

Isaiah in the fourth grade at Lutheran Day School in Northport, Long Island, New York, asks, has an asteroid ever hit your space shuttle while you were in space?

No. Asteroids have been far away, thankfully. That's been in the public eye here recently as well.

I think a couple of movies have been produced in recent years on it, and there's been some voices out there that fear the collision of an asteroid.

We have not been hit. We do get hit with, I would call, probably the size of specks of dust that either are in orbit around the earth or come from deep space, because you can see very minor,

I would call minor, nicks on the outside of the space station. So there is some evidence of being struck by very small particles.

Isaiah in the fourth grade also asks, is it hard to walk around in your spacesuit on earth? You cannot walk around in your spacesuit on earth because it weighs about 350 pounds.

Wow. It's very heavy, and so it only works in weightlessness. Now, we do train here on earth in a spacesuit to do spacewalks, but we do that, first the spacesuit is mounted on a stand, and we climb into it.

We have some people help us get into it, and then we're hoisted by a crane into the water, and we have the,

I think it's the largest swimming pool in the world. I don't know of any swimming pool that's bigger than the one we have here.

It's 40 feet deep, 200 feet long, and 100 feet wide, and we use that to train for spacewalks, because we can get us so that we're neutrally buoyant in the water, even with a very heavy suit, and it simulates, it comes very close to simulating a weightless environment, so we learn how to operate in that suit, but it's not possible to walk around in the suit.

Leah, in the fourth grade at Lutheran Day School in Northport, New York, asks, if you had children, would you bring them into space with you?

People ask me sometimes if there's anything from science fiction that you could have, what would you want, and that would be the ability to beam up or down that was on the old

Star Trek. I would love to be able to bring family members and bring them up there for a day or for a short period of time just to share any experience, beam them up and then beam them down.

At the same time, I'd like to be beamed down for the weekend sometimes to go spend time with family and friends.

And I want to apologize for Diana Barbaracena, because she also asked, what would you do for leisure time in space?

She's with Grace Christian Academy in Merrick, New York, in the eighth grade. We have a question from Alexa Aurelio in Grace Christian Academy in Merrick, New York, also in the eighth grade.

What is the most fun thing to do in zero gravity? Oh, well, astronauts all like to play with their food.

We throw a food run at each other, and you can do that and get away with it up there.

It's related to that, it's fun to take water and squeeze water out of a straw into the open air.

So you basically have bubbles of water. Very unique things you can do with those, very visually interesting.

I've tried to take some video of the characteristics of water bubbles in a weightless environment.

So that's a lot of fun. Obviously, we ourselves are weightless, and to be able to turn around and do somersaults and other acrobatics in a weightless environment is a lot of fun.

So all of those things, everybody turns into a kid again. And that question was also asked by Isabella Norton in the third grade of Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York.

We have a question from Christian Rogers of Grace Christian Academy in Merrick, New York.

He's in the eighth grade. What was your job on the shuttle craft? On the space shuttle,

STS -101, I was the flight engineer. So I had the seat between the commander and the pilot, assisting them in the ascent and the rendezvous with the space station, and then in the entry back to Earth.

So just like many of the old airliners, they would have a pilot, co -pilot, and a flight engineer.

I was the flight engineer for the Atlantis. I was also the lead spacewalker.

We did one spacewalk during that time, and then had a variety of tasks that I was assigned to do inside the space station while we were docked to it.

Incidentally, that was at the very beginning of the space station program in the spring of 2000, before the first expedition crew launched to the space station.

So it was just two modules at the time, so it wasn't very big. It didn't have its own life support systems yet on board, so a crew couldn't stay there for a long period of time.

Only shuttle crews went there and docked, and we were docked there for about five or six days, maybe a little bit longer than that.

But a very unique opportunity to go to the space station when it was in its infancy.

And I don't know if you've answered that question, but Brianna Rivera in the ninth grade at Our Savior New American School in Center Reach, New York, wants to know, what are your most recent projects in space?

Most recent projects include, well, there's a long list.

I could list experiments that are going on in all the different areas of science.

We have some plant research, genetic plant research going on. We've got multiple studies of the human body.

I mentioned earlier that that's one of our primary categories to try to understand the effects of weightlessness to continue to produce countermeasures for future exploration.

We're doing, just like a lot of research hospitals have research programs that they use like mice or rats or other animals to do research, we're beginning to do research using mice on board so that we have some mice operations that will be going on.

In the areas of material science, it takes very small samples, but it's a furnace that studies how things burn in a weightless environment.

And that's again for design of future systems on board. And there are many, many other things that are going on it.

Your listeners could certainly go on the NASA website and do all the research and they will end up in a bottomless pit of topics to research in terms of the research that's going on in the space station.

Luke Van Grouw in the fifth grade at Grace Baptist Church Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, wants to know, what differences do you face in space other than zero gravity?

Well, you are isolated inside a spacecraft.

In this case, it's the space station, which I mentioned earlier is very large, but still you're isolated there for a long period of time.

And you have to sustain all of the elements that are necessary to keep a healthy environment.

We have to maintain our atmosphere. We have to manage our food. We have to manage our water cycle.

We recycle wastewater and make it into drinking water because we don't have a pipeline to us.

We do get supplied now and then, but the supply ships only come periodically.

So, we have created our own habitable environment inside the spacecraft.

All right, we're going to go to our final commercial break right now. So, we're going to be right back after these messages with more of your questions for Colonel Jeffrey Williams, the

Christian astronaut, right after these messages. So, don't go away.

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Again, 717 -254 -6433. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron. For the last 90 minutes, we have been interviewing Colonel Jeffrey Williams, a

Christian astronaut who is preparing for another space launch in March of 2016.

He's going to be spending six months at the space station. Obviously, we would ask all of you to pray for his safety and for him to be a powerful witness for Christ and his gospel and all that he does as an astronaut.

I also want to thank again the publishers of the New American Standard Bible for making this program with Colonel Williams possible.

We want to congratulate them again on their 73rd anniversary of publishing God's Word.

If you have any more details you'd like to find out about the New American Standard Bible, go to nasbible .com.

That's N -A -S, which stands for newamericanstandardbible .com. N -A -S -B -I -B -L -E .com.

Going back to our student questions, Ethan Eisenberg in the fifth grade at Grace Baptist Church Christian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania wants to know, if you could go to any planet, where would you go?

Oh, good question. If I could live in any climate, was that the question? No, go to any planet.

Oh, planet, planet. If I could go to any planet. I don't know, I kind of like the Earth. Well, I guess he means visit.

Well, I did have a hope early in my career of getting the opportunity maybe of going back to the moon.

The moon would be a fascinating trip. Going to Mars, I'm not sure I've personally ever warmed up to that idea.

It's never been realistic within my career, but that's a long ways away, and that's the closest planet for us to get to.

Well, if you want to answer the other question that you thought it was, what kind of climate do you want to live in?

Well, we live in Houston. I probably wouldn't have chosen

Houston if the work wasn't here, but the work brought us here. We actually love it here now, and so I put up with the heat of the summer.

Growing up in northern Wisconsin, that was a little shocking, but we've lived in many places through our military career.

We lived across the country, and as well as I mentioned earlier, Western Europe. So I think any climate can become boring after a while.

I think variety is truly the spice of life. We love it here in Houston now, not in spite of the climate, but because of the community, because of relationships that we have.

Ultimately, that's what it boils down to. We can go into ideal climates, and the paradise part of the climate will soon be over.

We have two students that have related questions. Bayane Destin, I'm sorry,

Bayane, if I'm mispronouncing your name, who is in the eighth grade at Grace Christian Academy in Merrick, New York, asks, what medications do you bring with you out in space, and what are your primary health concerns?

And Brianna Rivera, in the ninth grade at Our Savior New American School in Centerville, New York, asks, how do you deal with space sickness?

Good questions. As I mentioned earlier, we can't go to the doctor. We have to supply our own medical help.

To do that, we have the equivalent of a small emergency room on board to include a lot of medications that we might use to treat different kinds of problems, illnesses, or whatnot.

Personally, I haven't experienced a great need for any of that. Personally, I have used things like ibuprofen that is an anti -inflammatory for aches and pains, and I do that primarily for the launch countdown, because we're in a

Soyuz capsule, and I call it as if you're triplets in a womb, because you're literally in the fetal position with your knees bent up to your chest, and we strap in about two and a half hours before launch.

So the pain to my knees becomes a little intense by the time we launch, and even after we launch, we don't get out of the seat for several hours.

But thankfully, in my experience, the need for medications has been very minimal.

And I assume that they are the ones that give you specific medications. You can't just take anything that you want on there, right?

No, there's specific requirements that have been reviewed by the medical staff, and we have flight surgeons, doctors, medical doctors on the ground that support us in all of that.

Yes, there's been a lot of thought put into it, and we consult with people on the ground if we're going to use it.

But generally, you know, we don't have a lot of need for that. The health requirements of astronauts are pretty stringent, and they do, in addition to all the training and preparation that we do, we also continually go through medical testing of all different types.

I am fairly confident in my health, my state of health right now, although you never know,

I suppose, but because of all of the testing that we have to go in preparation for flight, you gain a pretty high level of confidence in our health.

Brittany Ward at Grace Christian Academy in Merrick, New York wants to know, how does exiting the

Earth's atmosphere affect you? Well, let's see.

I could interpret that question several ways. I'll interpret it this way. I remember on my first flight, and this was on the space shuttle in 2000, being on the flight deck as a flight engineer, while we were under thrust of the rocket, so feeling about three times the force of gravity, and getting that sensation of speed, and we were going up the east coast.

We had launched from Florida, and we were parallel on the east coast, and I could see Virginia, the

Carolinas and Virginia going by. And then it was during the daytime, and you saw the blue sky.

If there was any weather, and it was partly cloudy that day, but even away from Florida, all the weather was below us, so we were above the weather, and the bright blue sky started fading to black.

And then I knew that we were leaving the atmosphere and entering space. And that made a profound memory for me, that is like yesterday to this day.

And we have Jordan Syracuse in Grace Christian Academy in the eighth grade in Merrick, New York, asking, is it colder or warmer in space?

Yes. It's both colder and warmer. In fact, it's much colder and much warmer, and it depends upon whether the sun is shining on an object or not.

And we pay a lot of attention to this, particularly when we're doing spacewalks, because we're climbing around the outside of the space station.

And the thermal analysts and engineers on the ground will do predictions to make sure that we don't go to areas that are too cold or too hot.

It depends upon the material, whether it's metal or other kinds of material, what kind of metal it is.

If the sun is shining on some materials, it can be several hundred degrees above zero. And when it's in the shadow, in the shade, or on the night side of the

Earth, when the sun is not shining, some materials can get down to on the order of 150 or 170 degrees below zero.

So when we're in space, the temperatures are extreme.

And Madeline, who's in kindergarten at Lutheran Day School in Northport, Long Island, New York, wants to know, why is it dark in space?

Well, the reason that it's not dark here is because of the atmosphere. When we go outside in daytime and we look up and we see blue sky and we see the white of clouds and whatnot, that is because of the sun's energy passing through the atmosphere, and it's actually an illumination of the atmosphere.

So when you get out of the atmosphere, there's nothing for, even if the sun is shining, all you see is the bright ball of the sun, and all around it is black, because there's nothing for the light to reflect off from.

And by the way, the question about hot or cold was also asked by Lara Zeger in the second grade at Providence Christian Academy in Scotland, Pennsylvania, who was in the second grade.

And we have Molly Fitzpatrick in the fourth grade at Providence Christian Academy in Scotland, Pennsylvania.

How many people are going with you to space? What size is your ship? I will be going on a

Russian Soyuz, which has a small spacecraft with three seats in it, and I will be flying with two

Russian cosmonauts. One of the Russian crewmates of mine, it will be his first flight.

Alexei Ovchinin is his name, so I'm very much looking forward to helping him, to going through that and seeing him experience it for the first time.

The other crewmate, his name is Oleg Skripachka, it's his second flight to the space station.

We will be launching from Kazakhstan, which is a country in Central Asia, from the launch pad that Yuri Gagarin launched from more than 50 years ago.

He was the first man in space, so a lot of history there. That's where the

Russians have launched their crews since the early days.

Let's see, we have Evan Thole from St.

Paul's Lutheran Church Sunday School in Amityville, Long Island, New York. He's in the fifth grade and he asks, did you go to space camp as a kid?

I did not. I did not have the opportunity. I did other kinds of camps, like scout camp, and even though I didn't come to faith in Christ until later as an adult,

I do remember as a young child being sent to a Christian camp one summer for a short period of time, but never space camp.

I don't even know if they existed then. So they actually exist now? Space camps?

Oh yeah, it's a great educational tool for young people to go to space camps.

The most well -known one in the country is in Huntsville, Alabama.

There's another great space camp at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There's different educational activities here in Houston at what they call

Space Center Houston. And then there are what are called

Challenger Centers. There are many of them throughout the country. Your listeners can find them on the website.

Named after the space shuttle Challenger, the space shuttle that was lost in 1986 in an accident.

But Challenger Centers are dedicated to the education of young people.

And it's fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade in that range, I think.

So there are many opportunities that are either space camp or related to space camp.

Cheyenne S. in the eighth grade in Smithtown Christian School on Long Island, New York.

Do you share the gospel with others in space who are with you? I will share the gospel with anybody that I get an opportunity to share as God orchestrates the details of the day -to -day activities.

The door has to be open to that. Obviously, we want to work well with the people around us.

So the door of opportunity needs to be open to be able to share the gospel.

But we have an interesting environment in our businesses. Our lives literally depend on each other.

So it takes maybe a little bit extra discernment to recognize an open door and to also recognize when the door is not open.

Sam S., who is in the eighth grade, and Kiara V.,

as in Victory, who is in the tenth grade, both at Smithtown Christian School on Long Island, asks,

Do you read the Bible in space? I do read the Bible in space. As I mentioned earlier, on every one of my flights,

I've taken a physical Bible with me. I have it out on the space station. We each have our own personal crew quarters.

It's a very small compartment about the size of those of us that are older know phone booths.

A phone booth is a thing where you went in to make a phone call before cell phones. It's about that size, so just big enough to be able to hang a sleeping bag on the wall.

We have a light in there. It's a little bit quieter, a little bit more private. But I'll spend some time in there before going to sleep reading the

Bible, as well as other times. We have Ingrid G.

Well, actually, we already asked that question about how does being in space affect your relationship with God.

Thank you, Ingrid G., who's in eighth grade at Smithtown Christian School. Lorraine A., in Smithtown Christian School, in the eighth grade,

How bad would it be if you or someone else got stuck outside for a while? I guess it'd be pretty bad.

That would be pretty bad, and we take great precautions so that things like that don't occur.

When we go outside on a spacewalk, we go outside in a spacesuit that has an oxygen supply that has a battery on board to run a fan to keep circulating the oxygen inside, and it has other systems to maintain an environment that we can survive in.

But it only has a limited lifetime. We typically plan a spacewalk for six and a half hours.

We have extended them out to a little over eight hours, but you can't go very much longer after that.

So we always have a plan to come inside, and we have redundant means if things go wrong to get back inside.

Oh, by the way, I will add that's true with the space station itself. If we were to have an emergency, let's say a leak or another kind of emergency where we could not maintain an environment that was safe to stay in, that we could live in, we come home on our

Soyuz spacecraft. It serves also as a lifeboat, and we can be home in a few hours. This is an interesting question, and I guess it depends on what side of the theological aisle you sit on when it comes to this.

Sam C., who is also in the

Smithtown Christian School in Smithtown, Long Island, New York, he asked, and I don't see what grade he is in, but he asked, do you believe it's

God's plan that he is sending you back to space, or is it your own decision? Well, I guess you could argue that I, along with the management of NASA, made the decision for me to send, but I believe that ultimately we're never out of God's plan for us.

We're never out of God's will for us, ultimately, that he has orchestrated or he has determined every day before any of them came to pass.

And that's not a matter of being a puppet. That's why I think historically it's been such a point of contention among folks and the whole concept of free will and whatnot.

But I see it as a great provision that, and again it goes back to vocation, answering the call of God.

And in answering the call, he gives what we need to answer the call. And that includes what he has ordained for us in each of our days that come to be.

And I want to take a couple of our adult listener questions real quick.

We have John in Phoenix, Arizona, who asks, my question to Colonel Williams is what was the most exciting thing you have experienced going into space?

And how has going into space impacted your faith, positively speaking?

Well, the exciting things are many, but I would include in the top of the list, the ride on the rocket to get there.

It only takes, it takes less than nine minutes to get to space. So that's a lot of energy riding on top of that rocket.

And then when you get there, of course, you're in a weightless environment. The rocket is gone and you're just there in a spacecraft going around the earth at that orbital velocity.

But that's definitely a highlight of the experience. Another highlight is a spacewalk to actually go outside the spacecraft and climb around the outside for six and a half or seven hours.

And you yourself are a spacecraft. And to be able to view the entire earth from that vantage point is pretty spectacular.

I haven't talked yet about an entry, but an entry back to the atmosphere is pretty dynamic in itself.

And now that's definitely a highlight of the experience. So those would be the highlights.

How has it impacted my faith positively? I think

I've touched on that a little bit. It just enriches the wonder of God's wisdom in his creative work and his design and in his creation and his purpose in creation and beauty and awe and the wonder of all that.

And just growing to appreciate his creative work and us bearing the image of God in our appreciation of that.

Pastor David Anglican, I'm sorry, Pastor David Anglin, not

Anglican, Pastor David Anglin of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Amityville, Long Island, New York, wants to know what in blazes did the head of NASA mean when he said that the agency's primary mission was outreach to the

Muslim world to make them feel good about their historical contributions to science? I don't remember

Jack Kennedy saying anything about that. That question will have to be directed to the administrator, but there were a few of us that were scratching our heads as well.

Ann Mankin, who doesn't say what grade she is in, but she is in the

St. Paul's Lutheran Church Sunday School. When you look down at earth, did you feel like God must feel?

Um, that's a tough question. People sometimes say, oh, you were closer to God when you were there, but God is not restricted to space.

He's not restricted to time or space. We can't comprehend that. So, no,

I don't think you can feel like, we're still finite beings, so we can't come anywhere near with feeling

God's perspective on things, even the view of earth from orbit. And, uh, you may have answered this before, but Kieran Larison in the fifth grade at our

Savior New American School in Center Ridge, New York, how long does it take to train to be an astronaut?

For my first flight, I trained for about a year and a half. That was on that 10 day space shuttle flight.

For my first long duration expedition to the space station, I trained for about four years.

And, uh, I really want to make sure that you have enough time to really unburden your heart and have what you want most etched on the hearts and minds of our listeners, especially the kids who are listening before you leave this program today,

Colonel Williams. Uh, from now, so you want to, that was the last of the questions?

No, I was going to throw in some questions after you finish, but I just wanted to make sure you had some time to summarize since we only have about five minutes left.

Okay. Well, I just, uh, I love talking to young people and I really appreciate the questions that have come in today.

And I'm sure there are many others that you haven't had a chance to get to. Yeah, there's a ton of questions here. Yeah. I'm always, uh, just very encouraged by the curiosity of, of young folks and the great questions that they come up with.

And I just want to encourage them to, uh, uh, to continue to, uh, to search for the truth, um, in, in all things in life to, to keep, uh, um, fostering the curiosity, uh, for why things work the way they do, uh, to continue to grow an understanding of those things.

Uh, but most importantly, transcending all of that to continue to grow, uh, for the believers, uh, among them.

And even those that are searching to continue to grow in their, uh, knowledge of the truth of God's word, uh, to continue to inform their minds and their hearts with, uh, what one of your questioner asked about early in the program, worldview, how we review all of reality and, uh, that and what our purpose is in life.

Our purpose is bigger than us. It's, uh, it's not for us.

We don't do the things for ourselves that we do in life. We do it for a greater purpose.

We do it ultimately to answer the call of our Lord and to serve his people around us.

So I just, uh, would continue to encourage, uh, folks to, uh, to pursue that.

And I also will add, I think it's starting to diminish, but for many years

I was hearing, uh, young people be encouraged with the mantra that you can do anything you want to do.

You can be anything you want to be. And that's just not true. That's, uh, in fact, it's a, it's in some cases, it's really a tragic lie.

It sets people up, uh, to come to the point where they conclude that they've failed because the truth is we can't do everything we want to do.

We can't be anything we want to be. Uh, God gives us each of us a unique place in life, a unique place in society.

He equips us uniquely with, uh, certain passions and talents and, and gifts and, and that kind of thing.

And then he gives us opportunity and all of that stuff has to align, uh, to answer our call.

Also, you could say that there's not some things that are more important, more significant than other things.

Um, everybody, if they faithfully answer their call in life, their calling in life, their vocation, and they serve

God in those, the elements of that calling, they are doing, uh,

God's important work and they are, they are important. Uh, and, uh, and that includes all of the obvious trades and vocations that are out there and where you go earn a living, but it also includes parenting children and all of the things that, all the investments that we make in the people around us.

And, uh, Luciano P. also was one of those who asked if it was your point or God's to be an astronaut, uh, from Luciano P.

from Smithtown Christian School on Long Island, but Aidan O. from Smithtown Christian School wants to know, while in space, do you see anything that secular scientists might say contradicts with creation?

Uh, well, I would, I would broaden that to, in all my experience. I, you know, we, we hear all the time about evidence of, uh, naturalistic philosophies, evidence of evolution, but I've searched for decades now for evidence and the scientific evidence isn't there.

There's not a conflict, uh, with what we observe, um, and the science, the true science that's out there, which is, uh, making observations that are repeatable and coming up with hypotheses and proving them to be true or false.

There's not a conflict between science and the scripture. The conflict comes in the presuppositions that go into your science.

And we're at a time, Colonel Williams, any website or any other information you care to give very quickly?

Uh, well, there are many websites out there, but, uh, I, I would just encourage people to continue digging along these, these, uh, topics.

Thank you so much for being a guest. Thank you so much for the teachers and students who sent in questions to us.

I want, I look forward to your return after your, uh, March launch, uh, and you, after you return after six months to be a guest again on Eintrap and Zion.

I would be honored to be so. Great. And I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater savior than you are a sinner.