Weekend Plans With Christina Koch

Weekend Plans is our exclusive lifestyle feature where we highlight the real off-duty routines of the most exciting people in modern culture. 

This weekend, NASA Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch sits down with The Daily Wire to chat about her 29-minute morning routine, family moments that are too sacred for Instagram, and how getting comfortable with failing — in surfing and rocket science — made her one of the most inspiring astronauts of our time.

***

Christina Koch settles in for our chat, wearing a royal blue NASA bomber jacket, decked out in official patches. Under that, I catch a glimpse of what looks like a concert tee, but instead features the schematics for an F-1 rocket engine — you know, the kind that successfully powered six Apollo-era missions to the moon. 

I feel intellectually underdressed. But Christina’s laidback personality is refreshingly disarming. “I am here to underwhelm, trust me,” she says. I almost fall out of my chair. She’s so beloved, the internet spontaneously combusted with merch featuring her quotes (“Planet Earth: You are a crew”), her likeness, and the Artemis II team. 

In light of all the hubbub around her latest mission, I wonder what she misses about Earth when she’s 252,756 miles away. 

“I miss my family and my good friends. If they could come with me, I would probably never come back.” She doesn’t need creature comforts, but I immediately realize I’ve taken the “earthy things” she mentions for granted. Having lived on the International Space Station for 11 months, she recalls, “I was never thinking ‘A latte would be great right now,’ but I missed things like wind, the feeling of the breeze on your face, the smell of the ocean, the blue sky.”

When she isn’t exploring the galaxy, she misses that too. “I miss everything. I miss floating. I miss the teamwork; being a part of a crew where you are working towards the same mission the whole time and you’re spending your off hours together, you’re supporting each other in every possible way … selflessly, with intention.”

While the crew remains intact for post-flight engagements and tasks, Christina can feel the energy shifting. “We’re having to face the fact that it won’t last forever. We will move on and we will have different goals. A part of me already misses my Space Bros.” 

“The views are great,” she says, “but it’s the camaraderie and teamwork that would bring me back every time.”

Credit: NASA

But first, coffee

So what’s Christina’s personal rocket booster? “I am a black coffee person,” she says. “One cup of black coffee in the morning. Even if it were decaf, it would just be the ritual of it for me.”

“We had coffee in space, thankfully, so we could all have that ritual. You can’t smell it, though, in space. It’s in a pouch.” I suddenly feel like we’re best friends planning NASA’s next manned mission. I suggest that they start pumping the smell of coffee into the cabin. “Yeah, we need some coffee essential oil.” (“Houston …”)

When she’s home in Galveston, Texas, Christina’s out the door before her husband, geographic information systems engineer Bob Koch, gets out of bed, thanks to her longer commute. Bob handles their pup Sadie’s breakfast, but Christina’s morning routine might be more streamlined than anyone’s. 

“My breakfast is a protein bar in the car on the way to work every day. The time from the alarm to the car is about 29 minutes for me, including a shower.” I suggest that she brand this bare-bones AM groove. She laughs. “It’s called ‘setting the bar very low.’”

Someone to come home to

Fans’ hearts melted at Christina’s reunion with her dog Sadie post-mission. (The couple’s “LBD,” or Little Brown Dog, was also ecstatic about Christina’s return from the ISS in February 2020.) But apparently, Sadie doesn’t hold back on the LBD affection. “She just loves people, so she probably would do that to you as well if you got down on the floor and let her lick you to death.” 

Despite the global interest in Christina’s every move, not every emotional moment makes it to social media. “To be honest, the real tearjerker was me saying goodbye to her. That will not be on Instagram because that was a lot.” Sadie has a sixth sense for when Christina’s heading out on a mission. “I travel a lot these days, so she knows when we pack that something’s up. Dogs know your vibe; they know when you’re sad. So she knew when I said goodbye that it was a serious one.”

For this family of scientists, the bond with their four-legged rescue is real. “I had a long, heartfelt goodbye with her this morning because she was just extra cute.”

The ultimate view of nature

Christina’s social media teems with jaw-dropping POVs from space, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime cosmoscapes that someone else might ironically tag “view from my office.” But I was curious as to whether these types of views might make nature on Earth feel a little lackluster. Luckily, that’s not even close to being the case.   

“For me, it helps me appreciate it and see it in a different light,” Christina assures me. I think of her shot of Raglan, New Zealand, from the ISS; it reveals a sweeping aquamarine coastline that even the luckiest among us will only ever view from sea level. “I look at the ocean, or look up at the blue sky, or look at a forest and literally imagine how it looks from the universe, and it just makes it so rich. There’s just so much there.”

Hanging ten

There’s no better advocate for the great outdoors — whether it’s your backyard or the dark side of the moon — than Christina. But instead of strictly being a favorite way to decompress, her passion for catching a wave aligns with the physicality of her more high-profile ventures. 

“The one thing that is the same is having to take in a lot of inputs at once, process them, and then react. Especially when you’re first learning surfing, this idea of when do I pop up, when do I set my line, when have I caught the wave, when do I paddle harder, when do I paddle less … There’s so much happening all at once.”

“We have this saying in human spaceflight about growing your world,” Christina says. “At first, your situational awareness bubble is very small and you can maybe only take one input and have one output. But as you grow that bubble, you can take in multiple inputs and have multiple outputs. That’s what you’re working towards.”

Having surfed exactly once and barely stood up on my board, I ask if surfing offers a budget version of weightlessness. “It doesn’t really feel like floating, but there are those takeoff moments that are very beautiful.”

Credit: NASA

Trusting the journey 

Looking at Christina Koch now, it might be hard to picture a time before she became a star of the U.S. space program. But when she first began her journey to become an astronaut in 2013, she says the energy was more like “I’m really bad at it and it’s really hard.” Still, she went full-send on that daunting learning curve. 

“When I was a baby astronaut, I used to say that my job was to show up at work and learn new things and be bad at them. And I truly was,” she explains. “You just have to accept that you’re bad at a lot of things when you first start, and you just have to keep trying and trust the process and know that you’ll get there.”