Astronaut Chris Hadfield Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED

my name is

chris

hadfield

i'm doing the autocomplete interview on cable let's start what

chris

hadfield

on the search engine here we go what inspired chris hadfield to become an

astronaut

the first people to walk on the moon when buzz aldrin and neil armstrong walked on the Moon on July 20 69 I thought if they could do that, I could do that thing that inspired me. What was Chris Hadfield's education? I went to a lot of different schools, but basically I'm a farmer, a mechanical engineer and a pilot, fighter pilot, test pilot, that's what. What was my education?

I became an

astronaut

. What was Chris Hadfield's first job? I grew up on a farm, but when you grow up on a farm, it's not really kind of a job. It was just what you do every day after school. My first real job was working in a scientific shipping warehouse when a school ordered scientific equipment I was the guy in the shipping department who picked up the fetal pigs or the scale put it in a box and mailed it to their school, that was my first job. Chris Hadfield found in space Did I find in space a new way of seeing the world?

What did Chris Hadfield do? This is terrible English. What did Chris Hadfield learn from going blind? Well, I learned English better with this sensor during my first spacewalk. There was pollution inside. My space they have taken over both my eyes, they blinded me, what did I learn from that number one? Don't panic. Panic doesn't really help, especially if you're alone in space and the second was that you need to do a better job. Clean the visor of your space helmet because it was actually the anti-fog and the visor being so good in my eyes that made me go blind, so remember if you are doing a spacewalk, clean your visor very carefully and don't let it get get dirty in your eyes and you probably won't go blind emerging from below as often It scrolls on a computer screen these are the

questions

that start with where where does Chris Hadfield live where does Chris Hadfield live I live on earth wasn't always true, but Right now I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and I like it there, it's a nice city, it's well managed, it's a good place, you have the opportunity to live in Toronto, where Chris Hadfield was born.

I was born approximately, I don't know, maybe a few hundred yards from the US border right on the edge of Canada in a town called Sarnia Ontario at Sarnia General Hospital on August 29, 1959 does that make me a Virgo? where is Chris Hadfield right now on earth? I'm in Las Vegas baby and what happens here falls to the ground where is Chris Hadfield? go to space I went around and around and around the world we launched from Florida we're actually on my third flight we launched from Kazakhstan just south of Russia you go straight up for a while then the spaceship spins starts going faster and every time fastest parallel to the surface of the earth, so the entire trajectory of the spaceship is to go around the world and if you can go seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour five miles per second 25 times the speed of sound, then you You'll stay in space basically forever, you'll just glide around once you get there, so that's what I did, three different rockets took off, I circled the world two thousand six hundred and fifty times, so I went on a pretty amazing world tour plus by Keith Richards I think it's okay, wow, okay, this one runs the risk of putting shadows on my face says when Chris Hadfield when when Chris Hadfield let's choose the verb here when did Chris Hadfield first walk in space?

I first walked in space during my second space flight. We were aboard the space shuttle Endeavor We were building the International Space Station Imagine you're wearing the

most

uncomfortable clothes you've ever worn, like a big snowsuit or something, gloves, a hat, and big boots that you can barely move, you're You grab on to both sides of the hatch and you're like a chick coming out of an egg, you know you have to fight your way out, but then you get out and you're weightless, you let go with one hand and float gently to the other side and suddenly you're over. this small, dark claustrophobic place to now be surrounded by eternity where the whole world is silent next to you like this big magical globe but it is separated from you but around you are the three dimensions of everything and it is perfectly black, it is amazing like you have given birth to a completely new place if you get a chance go for a space walk.

When was Chris Hadfield's last space flight seven years ago? Right now he was aboard International Space. Station, it was 2012 2013, it was cool because I was awake for half a year, so we went halfway around the solar system like we were going from one side of the Sun to the other while I was on board the ship, pretty neat, looking at the whole world. As if the exchange ended what was winter in the northern hemisphere became spring I could see the snow and everything moves and things start to turn green the time I was up there okay, when will it happen?

When will Chris Hadfield do it while he beats the drum, please get out of space? I do not do it. Even I know what that question means, maybe people Google it maybe they think I'm still in space. I'm still distracted, well I know I've been back for seven years and happily, so there are no options we're all in. space all the time where would I go? space is all around us why Chris Hadfield is fine why Chris Hadfield is a hero he is not why Chris Hadfield is important to Canada I was the first to do several things I was the first Canadian to do a space walk I was the first Canadian to command a spaceship.

I was the first to use the big robotic arm. If you're Canadian, you pay close attention and you'll notice that the name of the robotic arm is canid arm, so there's something cool there. A large arm with Canadian flags in space being operated by a Canadian with a Canadian flag on her shoulder for the first time. A ridiculously Canadian big moment. So I think that's why I'm important to Canada. White. Why did Chris Hadfield retire because I have? a Holt, look at my hair because he would never fly in space again and once you've done all the things you should do as an astronaut, it's time to do something else.

Why Chris Hadfield Space Oddity is strange phraseology, but I have a version? from David Bowie's classic song, Space Oddity, which was a play on the word Space Odyssey and I played it on guitar and recorded it on the space station and a lot of people have seen it. It's actually a really beautiful song and David Bowie loved my version which was a great compliment, he said really nice things which was great, why is Chris Hadfield under the ocean? Maybe you don't know. I lived at the bottom of the ocean for two weeks because living at the bottom of the ocean inside a habitat is a kind of Like living in space inside a habitat, it's a good way to train for technical issues, but also psychologically, if you can't immediately surface, if you have to solve all your problems yourself, it's not a bad psychological training ground for being an astronaut, so if you see Chris Hadfield under the ocean, that's probably why Chris Hadfield okay, let's pick a word.

What is Chris Hadfield famous for? I think I'm

most

famous for playing music, weirdly enough. I mean, I'm an astronaut. I have done. spacewalks I was NASA's director of operations in Russia. I intercepted Soviet bombers off the coast of North America during the height of the Cold War, but I think I'm most famous for playing guitar and singing Space Oddity in orbit. I have made a lot of effort to communicate with people using social media during my third space flight. I made a lot of videos. If I go to any school around the world, they've been watching those videos as part of their science classes, the ease of Twitter and things like that.

It allowed me to communicate with so many people around the world almost one on one. What is Chris Hadfield's favorite color? Blue, a kind of sky blue. It's a nice place to have color around my eyes. What awards because Chris Hadfield one. How are you? many awards in 8th grade I won the speech contest at my school in 5th grade I won the posture contest I was also the best test pilot in the US Air Force test pilot school and the best pilot in What actually meant the most to me was that, since I was a test pilot, they did a really complicated test to put a hydrogen combustion engine for a hypersonic aircraft in the wingtip of an F-18 and introduced myself to the Society for Experimental Test Pilots. annual conference and I won the best project for being a test pilot for everyone and that opened the doors to be chosen as an astronaut. the result of a moment in time or that could have been the one I'm most proud of one that had the biggest impact on my life anyway what is Chris Hadfield?

It's a bit tiny what is Chris Hadfield? Oh, IQ, I don't know. I know, but actually, when I was a teenager, I was a little insecure like everyone else and I wanted to join Mensa, the organization of people who had high enough IQs and it turns out that when I took the Mensa test, Mikey was high enough like to join Mensa, but once I joined Mensa I didn't really know what to do next, but at the time it seemed important, what languages ​​does Chris Hadfield speak? I speak English and then I'm from Canada so we taught French in Canada, a donkey pollen food for a COC help and then as an astronaut I wanted to be able to fly a Russian spaceship and work with Russians so you never do Port sceetos, yes I speak a little Russian, a little German, but I've forgotten all about how to eat in space Chris Hadfield well your food floats for a start so you don't need a plate as a plate would be useless , so what you do is get your package or make it cold. or hot and there's a little easy bake oven where you can heat it up to pack it, you can't really cook it, it can be dehydrated food and then you slide it over a needle, mark, press a button and it fills the pack the right amount of water now that you have your package and you mix it up and you velcro it on the wall, you let it sit absorbing the water and then you carefully slide it open because if you open it quickly you're going to get like a little bit of creepy stuff all over the room, so you don't want to that, so you open it carefully so that nothing goes flying because nothing is going to fall on the ground and then you get a spoon, the spoon is a big utensil and you want a long spoon, so we can get to the back of the package and then You eat everything in a package and you don't like it, you have peas, meat, potatoes and corn, first you eat the whole piece and they have to be in pieces with cream, they don't.

It doesn't float everywhere and then you make it into a very tight ball because you have to get rid of the garbage, throw it in the trash and then you open the next thing that could be, I don't know, or omelette, that's how we eat. space one thing at a time in your pack is something like, I don't know, eaten on the bus or eating on a camping trip or something like that. There's a funny thing about being in space and that's because there's no gravity, which means the stuff in your nose and sinuses never drains, so it's like you always have a cold, you can't really taste your food as much as you taste here, your food tastes bland because you don't smell it.

We're not getting it through all the sensors so the food and space tastes a little bland and the food that naturally has the strongest spice is shrimp cocktail because we have cocktail sauce that you already taste a lot of radish in spicy. You wouldn't think you'd have a shrimp cocktail in a spaceship filled with delicious hot sauce, you bite into it, it has that nice crunch and then you get that rush of horseradish cocktail sauce that makes you cry and for a moment or two. clear your sinuses so my favorite space food was shrimp cocktail how to sleep in space chris hadfield first you have to decide when it's right because you're going around the world sixteen times a day so when it's night it's night every time you know 45 minutes of Of course the sun will come out every 90 minutes so you will have to cover all the windows so the sun doesn't hit your eyes and then you will float in your little sleeping capsule and there will be a sleeping bag tied to the wall with a rope. you float carefully you float inside your sleeping bag it has arm holes and then you can zip up your sleeping bag and now you are like a fish in an aquarium inside your sleeping bag you close the little doors in your capsule To sleep, you turn the fan down as low as you can, you don't want to suffocate, but you do it quietly and then you turn off the light and then you relax every muscle in your body and your arms float up and your knees float at your waist. and your head moves forward and your whole body is perfectly relaxed andyou don't need a pillow and you never have to roll over your shoulder it doesn't hurt it's like the most peaceful and comfortable sleep you've ever had in your life I think if we start taking tourists to space we'll feel like we're in a space spa, the best sleep that you've ever had, how to meet Chris Hadfield hmm, well, let's see, I speak all over the world, I travel constantly.

I have been millions of people. I don't just hide so if you want to meet me you can go to my website Chris Hadfield CA. I think and see when I'll be somewhere or you can send me a note. We could eat meat. I'm on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and that, you could write me a nice letter. I would love to receive a letter from you and if you make me a very nice drawing, I will stick it on my refrigerator. How long was Chris Hadfield as commander? From the International Space Station for about two or three months we took turns and went up in a small spaceship or in the Russian one the Soyuz.

Very soon we will be going up and down in the American ships built by Boeing and built by SpaceX, but when I went we took turns, there were new crews every three months, so if you think about it, we rotate who's in charge every two or three months. Well this is a great question, at least you physically know how. Did Chris Hadfield contribute well to space exploration when you're the first to do things that people notice? Because, for example, there was never a Canadian who was the mission specialist, who was like a fully integrated crew member on the space shuttle. the first Canadian, so it was a great contribution for the 37 million people who live in Canada.

I did a lot of research while I was there. I helped conduct 200 experiments on the space station. I helped build two space stations, that's kind of you know, with your hands, kind of contribution, but I was the director of operations for NASA in Russia, so I helped the space program throughout the cosmos of Russia and the United States NASA worked and got along so I contributed there and served as an astronaut for 21 years every day for 21 years so it was a great contribution and this question has no name it just has my name. I can open it from right to left just for a change, okay, the first Canadian in space and now we have to choose the the modifier was ah it was Chris.

I would introduce the first Canadian in space. No, the first Canadian in space was Marc Garneau. The second was Roberta Bondar. The third was Steve McLane. I was the fourth fourth Canadian in space. Very proud that Chris Hadfield walked on the moon. I never had the chance and we haven't had anyone walk on the moon since I was 12, soon we will be there training their astronauts right now and we are building hardware right now for people to not just walk on the moon but actually get started to settle down. the moon starts to live there just like we live in Antarctica or some of the more remote parts of the world, so what is happening?

Maybe I still have the chance to do what I dreamed of when I was a little boy. Well, here's the next question. Going to space with who did who Chris Hadfield went to space I went to space with Russians, Germans and Americans, I think, but that's all a bit arbitrary. I went to space with people from Earth. Well, one more question here in the unnamed section. and that's Chris Hadfield, okay, yeah, thanks for asking, okay, part of what happens in space, although a lot of things degrade in your body, you lose part of your skeleton, your muscles waste away because there's no gravity. that you have to fight against. your body becomes lazy your heart becomes smaller your balance system becomes confused because there is no gravity some astronauts in fact their eyeballs due to the change in the internal pressures of the fluids in your body their eyeballs change shape so They don't see as well after being in space, but I came back from space six or seven years ago and my bones are dense, my muscles are strong, my eyeballs are fine, everything seems fine, my balance system is fine. , so yeah, I'm fine.

Thank you, there are many

questions

. about me, how about you have any questions about? I don't know astronauts in general, okay, cool, what an astronaut, here we go, what are the requirements to be an astronaut, that may be changing right now because with Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. and other companies trying to allow anyone who can buy a ticket to be an astronaut or at least fly in space. I think that will be good, but until now you had to be really prepared to fly a spaceship, so if you want to fly a spaceship?

Which are the requirements? Well, you need to understand complicated things like orbital mechanics. How do you maneuver in space? How do you make things work precisely? How does a space suit work? or the physiology of the human body or a little. understanding of solar physics and rocket propulsion systems and communication systems and the ability to reprogram computers and, plus, it's an International Space Station, so learn to speak other languages, so there are a lot of requirements, but the three fundamental things you need are number one. healthy body that fits in your spacesuit so not too big not too small and healthy number two the proven ability to learn complicated things so how do you know someone can learn complicated things?

Choose people with multiple college degrees who have proven they can score high on a test or do original research and then the third person who can make good decisions, so we choose people who have had complicated jobs like test pilots and doctors of life and death where people have run programs in my case to become an astronaut. I really didn't know what to do. I'm from a country that doesn't have many astronauts, but I looked at the world's astronauts and cosmonauts and thought, "Okay, everyone needs a college education," so I went to four different universities. and I did it all in technical mechanical engineering and I thought, okay, I need to look at, you know, Neil, Buzz and Sally Ride and everyone and everyone has good, healthy bodies, so okay, I need to keep my body in shape, so think In what I do. eat and exercise a little bit and stay strong and then I thought astronauts fly in space, you know, that's a verb.

I can learn to fly, I just have to, so I started learning to fly when I was a teenager. I joined the Air Cadets. I was taught to fly gliders and then powered airplanes and then I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and flew a bunch of airplanes, eventually I flew fighter jets as I was an F-18 pilot and then I went to test pilot school. , but the US Air Force and then I was a test pilot in the US Navy, then Canada recruited an astronaut and they hired me to be an astronaut, so I guessed right, I was a kid, what Is astronaut ice cream made?

You probably tried to order ice cream. if you bite into it and it melts in your mouth and crumbles, it's like a block of cotton candy. I think ice cream is Western and ice cream is mostly made of sugar, like whipped sugar, the secret is that we don't actually eat astronaut ice cream. in space it's not really astronaut ice cream, it's Science Center ice cream because if you think that when you bite into that astronaut ice cream, crumbs form because it's that hard, crumbly, sugary thing and those crumbs would go everywhere without gravity in which they would be. your eyes breathe them would be in the filters, so it would be bad space food.

What is the astronaut centrifuge when you fly a rocket because it accelerates through the atmosphere so hard with the big engines pushing you that you could push yourself back in your chair? and you are like crushed by the force of this rocket F is equal to MA the right force is equal to mass times acceleration we have that big force and you are a mass so you are accelerated and you feel that the acceleration is like multiples of your Our Your own weight and the big rocket engines can crush you in your chair with four or five times your weight and when you go back into the atmosphere and we let the air slow us down, you can be crushed with like eight times your weight, which is really brutal, But how do you prepare for that?

Well, what we do is we get into a little simulated spaceship and that's on the end of a huge arm that spins us around and around until we're stuck against the outside. of this little thing and then we have to operate the spaceship and prove that we can do what we are supposed to do. This thing is called a centrifuge depending on how you operate your capsule when you get back home, if you mess it up and have a bunch of laughs, you'll get crushed a lot and you'll have to use the result of your mistakes, so it's a really good backup spot.

To train. What kind of music do astronauts listen to? Where do astronauts come from? We like all the music there. Do we really disagree with the music on board? This astronaut likes music that has a melody that stays in your head and words that mean something and there are many astronauts who are musicians. We keep musical instruments on the space station. There is a guitar. Ukulele there is a battery operated keyboard so when we relax at night or when it's someone's birthday or when it's a holiday we get together with the instruments on board and play music, it's just like you do on land.

The next questions are where they ask us are you not where I think it will say where is where the astronauts are trained. Astronaut training for the United States is primarily at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, they're just outside of Houston and then in Russia it's at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center but we also train in Canada at the Canadian Space Agency. on the outskirts of Montreal and we train in Europe in Germany at the European Astronaut Center which is on the outskirts of Cologne Germany and then also in Japan because it is an International Space Station, so each one has their own training and that is in a little scientific training town called scuba all over the planet where astronauts feel the atmosphere begin, that's cool, you're floating weightlessly in space, you spin your spaceship backwards because you're going around the world in this perfect circle and you turn on your big engine for about four minutes and it changes your perfectly circular orbit to a kind of oval where there is a nano low part and a high part and that low part of your The oval begins to touch the top of the atmosphere, as if you were taking out the hand out the car window, you're not going too fast, you can feel a little bit of air pressure, but you're going so fast where you're going five. miles per second, so even a little bit of air really starts to slow you down and when you feel the top of the atmosphere, the only way you can really feel it is if you hold your checklist and let it go and instead just floating in front of you, now it starts to gently fall towards the ground, everything starts to behave like a feather and you are still barely sitting in the seat you are strapped to, but with each passing second you start to see the effects of gravity more and more more and we actually call atmospheric entry at about four hundred thousand feet up, at that altitude we call it entry interface, that's where you start to feel the atmosphere starting and if you look out the windows of the spacecraft you can see that.

They are starting to get hot and as you get in it gets hotter and hotter and there are flames coming out everywhere until you can imagine that somehow you are inside a blast furnace and the red and yellow flames are tearing everything around your ship. that big deceleration is causing all the friction and pressure and drag, that's what the atmosphere does to you a little later, but the initial tenuous atmosphere of 400,000 feet where the astronauts hang out, uh, on the space bar, yes, standard jokes, well, we have to live close to our training. team, so most astronauts live near the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training center in Star City Russia or the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, there are some obvious favorite places near those space centers where we go at night there were a classic one called the outpost that was near the Johnson Space Center and had all kinds of contraband paraphernalia, pictures of old astronauts, pictures of signs and things that people had brought back from space and taped to the wall in this old, disgusting fire trap that was a building, finally the fire inspector said Now we know we have to be adults about this and the outpost was torn down, but for many years that's where the astronauts hung out at the outpost.

The next questions by popular demand began with why astronauts never cry in space. It's not because we're not sad, actually sometimes you cry because you're happy and what I found was actually such a rich experience that my emotions were closer to the surface the whole time. I found myself laughing and crying much more often than I do. on earth, but you really can'tcry without gravity, gravity pushes the weight of tears out of your eye. Well, without gravity, then the tears won't come out of your eye, in fact, they'll just stay in your eye until you can't really see properly and then you need a tissue or something to dry your eyes now if you watch the movie Gravity.

I think that when Sandra Bullock was crying somehow, her tears were propelled through the spaceship, her tears were streaming across the room. I don't know anyone who cries like that in space tears don't fall why the astronaut doesn't use a pencil in space that's not true we use pencils in space all the time pencils don't care where the gravity is can you write to yourself can you write you can write sideways so we use pencils all the time we use grease pencils because grease pencils are very sturdy we use markers markers work very well pens don't work very well because you know, take a pen and write backwards for a while If your pen doesn't write backwards like many of them do, then it won't be a good pen to use in a place where there is no gravity.

I don't have a Sharpie, but if I did, I would cross, oh no. Why do astronauts use a pencil in space? A bit of a caveman phrase, but we use pencil in space because pencil works well. Why do astronauts exercise in space? Being in space is the laziest existence. It is the best place for a couch potato. you have to fight gravity you don't have to lift a finger you don't have to lift your head everything just floats nothing sinks it's a great place to be but as a result of the fact that you don't have to fight gravity you can be super lazy, even your heart becomes lazy because it doesn't need to lift blood from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head, it just has to push it through your blood vessels, your heart actually.

It gets smaller, your muscles would waste away, you wouldn't have this big skeleton fighting against gravity, so your skeleton would dissolve. We have to exercise in space because we're coming home again and we don't want to come back like, you know, jellyfish, so we exercise about two hours a day on the spaceship, we have a stationary bike without a seat because we don't need a seat, it's more like I don't know a unicycle without a seat and then we have a treadmill that we can run on and there are big elastics that we use on our hips and shoulders to hold ourselves on the treadmill so we can run and hit and then we have a resistance machine, you can't lift weights because you don't weigh, so between the treadmill and the bike and the reason system, exercise 2 hours a day, you want to be aware of your own sweat when it's not heavy, so what we do is we keep a towel nearby and if you're good, you can take the towel and just float it on the space next to you and exercise for a while until you sweat and then dry. the sweat is removed and the towel gets kind of gross after a while and then you just stick the towel to the wall with velcro and the sweat evaporates and turns into moisture inside the spaceship which is collected in the dehumidifier and converted again into drinking water and board your sweat becomes what you drink the next day.

Yes, as long as you have a good purifier, it works fine. I came home the same weight I started with, but with 20% less fat, so I had 20% more muscle, so that was good. the slightly torn back was fine and my cardiovascular system was fine, but I didn't maintain bone density and my hips and upper femur had lost about eight and a half percent of my bone, which is a lot, etc. You are at great risk of breaking your hip when you return until your body goes whoa, I'm back on earth and starts forming dense bones again, why do astronauts go to the moon?

So far only 12 astronauts have walked on the moon 24 astronauts have gone to the moon, many of them just orbited it, they didn't walk, not that many astronauts have moon types, but why do astronauts go to the moon ? We went because in May 1961 President John F. Kennedy stood up. We stood up and said we chose to go to the moon, that's why we went, it was a form of cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, it was proof that we could, it was to challenge the entire industrial capacity of the United States, as because.

Climb Everest, challenge yourself and see if he can do it, make it part of who you are, but now that we've done it, why go back to the moon? I think now it's like all exploration, first prove you can do it and then do it. Part of the experience is that we will eventually go to the Moon to stay and live like anywhere else. Why do astronauts train underwater? How is weightlessness simulated? I mean, sitting here in this chair, I get crushed all the time, so it's a terrible simulation of weightlessness, now we could all ride in the back of a plane and have the plane push around and have us all float for a second in the back or if you made the plane work like that you could hover for maybe 20 or 30 seconds and we do that because it's good for short little experiments but if you really want to train for an eight hour spacewalk you can't do it in little 20 second segments, so we decided a long time ago.

We train underwater and we use the buoyancy of the water and then the weight of the suit to balance us and then it's like being weightless, it's not of course because if you go face down in the water the blood still rushes to your head. and you have the resistance of water moving through water is very different than moving through the vacuum of space. It's like if you imagine how big a normal Olympic pool is and then make it 45 feet deep, that's what the space station pool trains for. The pool is what we call the neutral buoyancy laboratory.

Well, as an astronaut? How many astronauts have walked on the moon? Well, it started with Neil and Buzz and ended with Harrison Schmitt and the Cernan jeans sermon, so that's four and there were eight others in between. Apollo 11 12 not 13 because they had problems with the weight of the moon 14 15 16 and 17 so 12 human beings have walked in the middle brave guys how do astronauts communicate in space we talk to each other on board the spacecraft and there are people of everyone All over the world, so you have to choose a common language, most of the International Space Station was built by English and Russian speaking people, so on board we speak mainly English, but a lot of Russian for a species mixture of both. like voodoo yoga Petroski, but Muslims will keep our gender Dancy, so I had to learn to speak Russian because I was a member of a crew aboard the space station and the cosmonauts equivalently learned to speak English, but that's just between we. to talk to Earth, so this is what you do: you pick up the microphone on the space station or press a small transmit button on the wall and your voice goes through the air to a small microphone on the wall, the microphone converts it into an electrical signal which then goes through the wires to a little digital thing which converts it into a digital signal and then it goes out of the ship to a big antenna and we send it to a geostationary satellite at twenty, you know, two thousand miles from Earth and picks up that signal from us and then redirects it to a big satellite dish somewhere on the planet like the ones in New Mexico and then they pick up that little weak digital signal and then they take that digital signal to send it through cables across from United States.

United States and arrives at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where there is another small machine that takes a digital signal and converts it back into some kind of analog signal and then goes through a cable to a small speaker that shakes from the same way as The microphone was made on the space station and it moves the air molecules and they cross and they get close to someone here and they listen to you. How long it takes depends on how far away we are. Sometimes we are on the other side of the world. Radio waves basically go. at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, but still, you know, 186,000 miles, the world is 25,000 miles around, so if you have to go up to 22,000 and back and maybe even double that, it can take one or two seconds.

So when I called my wife from the Space Station, I would go through all those links and then I would call you through the Houston phone system and it would ring on her phone, but the delay was so long that she would answer it and say hello and I would say hello, but when she said hello and it reached me and I responded, three seconds could go by and she would always think it was like a sales call and hang up on me. So, she actually got the numbers from NASA so that instead of showing up as an unknown number, it said space, so her phone would say space.

Oh, space is calling and then he would wait for me to answer the next question: how does the astronaut get there? get back to earth when you say how to get back to earth your real question is how to slow down you don't want to hit the world at seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour we don't have enough fuel to just like we fired our rocket and slowed down we couldn't bring that much fuel with us so we just use Frick, we use air drag to slow down, we start falling into the atmosphere and then once we're in the atmosphere it catches us and then we fly the spacecraft as carefully as possible so as not to have too much drag or too much heat, the big ones turn all the way down to align us and then as we approach the earth, if your spaceship has wings like the space shuttle, then you can land it on a runway, but if your spaceship it's just a little capsule like a gumdrop then it would just absorb the world so we have a big parachute or maybe two or three parachutes and then you can land in the water that's not too hard you've made a belly water can be hard, but water is a little more forgiving than land or rock, so you can land your spaceship on water and then risk it sinking or you can land it on land and if you're going to land on the ground you can use airbags at the bottom and that's what Boeing is doing now or you can have little rockets that just before you hit the ground go perfect and fire so that it slows you down just before you hit the ground and that's what which we did on my third space flight and the Soyuz has little retro rockets to cushion you or as we Russians call them soft landing rockets, it's like Greenland or the Cape of Good Hope, no I don't think you already know the sales pitch, it's a Pretty tough landing okay, last questions, how do astronauts poop?

I don't think you're asking how we poop, I think it's how we use the bathroom, we poop like everyone else, okay. I'm going to get graphic here for a second. How do you know when you have to poop in the dirt? It's actually the weight of the poop inside you that tells you hey, it's time to poop. You know sometimes you're lying in bed and you're okay, stand up poetry, you're like, wow, I really pooped, well, if you're not heavy and your body isn't going to tell you it's time to poop, then you almost have to learn. this new kind of fullness symptom that tells you it's time to poop.

You count on gravity because gravity will pull it away from you and without gravity, even when you finish defecating, the stool will stick to you, so we use a rubber glove and sometimes you have to. like physically separating the poop from your body, but then taking the place of gravity to flush the poop into the toilet. It is an air flow. We have air drawn into the toilets, we have fans and that also works for the P, whenever you want. to poop on the space station then you wait until it's your turn in the bathroom because there are a limited number of bathrooms on a spaceship two four six people go into the bathroom, look, we have it's like a small enclosed area, take your Take off your pants completely because you don't want them to float when you're on the toilet and then you sit on the toilet and you can hook your toes under some loops so you don't float off the toilet or on the space shuttle we had a kind of safety belt safety that said: "Imagine wearing a seat belt so you don't float out of the toilet, but you don't want to float out of the toilet halfway, be a mess, and then turn the toilet is the loudest thing on the spaceship because of all those big fans that push air into the toilet and then you urinate and poop like you do everywhere and the urine goes into a sewage system that has purifiers and filters and it gets spun.

You go back to drinking water again like on Earth, except it's not as personal on Earth and then your poop goes down and is dragged into a tank. It looks like a big milk bottle on the space station. When you're done, we use wet wipes. because you don't have a sewage system, so you don't have to use toilet paper, get nice and clean, everything goes in there and then goes down into thetoilet and then clean it for the next person you put the lid on. the toilet and when the milk can is completely full of poop, we seal it with these big dogs with knurled knobs on the top so none of the smell comes out and then we put it in a kind of cold storage area at this station and then when one of the unmanned ships arrives with all the food, supplies and scientific equipment and then we fill it with all our garbage including our solid waste or our poop, we seal it and then when it undocks it separates from the station and we shoot it into the atmosphere and then it burns up in the atmosphere, so the next time you wish on a shooting star, think about what you're looking at.

I'm Chris Ad Field, thanks for being a part. from my cable autocomplete exercise. I hope you learned a few things about space flight and maybe a little about astronaut Chris Hadfield.