Brad Pitt asks NASA astronaut who chooses the tunes in space
Actor also wants to know if he's a better Hollywood spaceman than George Clooney.
- Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year" award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Sure, space walks are cool and all, but actor Brad Pitt had a real question for International Space Station astronaut Nick Hague during a NASA chat on Monday: Who rules the tunes? Pitt, who stars as an astronaut in the upcoming movie Ad Astra, was on Earth chatting with Hague, who was flipping his way through zero gravity while answering Pitt's questions.
After discussing more serious issues such as international cooperation in space and keeping one's mental state stable, Pitt posed the real toughie: "Who controls the jam box?" he asked.
Hague told him that, like everything on the ISS, musical choices are shared. "We have a rotating playlist," he said. "We take turns." With an Italian astronaut and two cosmonauts on board, he told the actor the musical background of the ISS is international as well.
Hague also told Pitt that because he so seldom stands on the soles of his feet while in space, the calluses on his feet have all but disappeared. But he's built a new callus near his big toe, because he is "constantly hanging on things with my big toe to hold me in place."
Hague said the astronauts use colors to help them manage their circadian rhythms. The ship is lit in bright blue in the mornings, with the colors darkening to help simulate a day moving towards night. And he shared that spacewalks are incredibly quiet, with no noise except for the hum of an astronaut's space suit's ventilation system.
The ISS crew was able to preview Ad Astra, in which Pitt plays astronaut Roy McBride, who travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his missing father. Hague thanked Pitt for telling stories that keep space at the forefront of the imagination of young people, noting that while he himself will never set foot on Mars, the next generation "will do great things."
And when Pitt asked who played a better astronaut -- himself or movie star George Clooney, who played astronaut Matt Kowalsky in 2013's Gravity, there was only one answer Hague could give.
"You were," the real astronaut said. "Absolutely."
Ad Astra opens Sept. 18 in the UK, Sept. 19 in Australia, and Sept. 20 in the US.
