Astronaut Chris Hadfield Debunks Space Myths | WIRED

54321 mark hi i'm commander

chris

hadfield

astronaut

space

ship commander

space

walker part time musician i'm here today to hopefully debunk some common space

myths

here's this common perception that you'll immediately be fried to a crisp by radiation unfiltered and unadulterated solar if you get sucked into the airlock, in truth, it's much worse than that. In the shade in space it's like -250 degrees, but the part of you that's in the sun is plus 250 degrees at least, so it'll start to boil and burn, so it's like lying down. a red hot stove with a chunk of dry ice on your back and your lungs will be sucked out instantly, but even worse than that is that your blood is going to boil like if you opened a can of soda and suddenly all the little bubbles come out. because there is no air pressure around you, so you will simultaneously freeze, boil, burn, bend over and no longer be able to breathe, not a good way to go.

I've done two spacewalks and was very grateful to have a spacesuit around. body so that none of those things happen to me sometimes you hear that you have to exercise constantly or you will pass out and possibly die in space it is not true living on a spaceship is the laziest existence you can imagine you have no weight you do not have you don't have to lift your head your heart doesn't have to lift your blood against gravity you can be the laziest person in the universe in space but eventually you need to return to earth and if you don't exercise during your six months in space, you will turn into a jellyfish, so we exercise two hours a day in a spaceship, we have a resistive machine, we have a unicycle and we have a treadmill where elastics hold us. down just to keep our bodies strong enough and our bones dense enough so that when we get home we don't fall down like a puddle, but it's not necessary to exercise all the time, you've probably heard that space has a smell. maybe like a burnt steak or some kind of barbecue, that's true, when you come from a spacewalk you are surrounded by the vacuum of space, it's kind of like the opposite of air, there is nothing at all when you quickly repressurize the hatch and you open it. the hatch and you smell what is that lingering smell of a place that used to be exposed to space, the smell that is there is a little like that trail of smell of gunpowder or burnt steak or to me it is like sulfur like a the witch has just been There's a fresh, lingering trace of a smell.

I think what it really is is the vacuum of space. The vacuum of space is actually pulling traces of chemicals from the metal in the walls of the ship. Little bits of things you never smell. Because Normally there is air pressure that keeps them inside the metal, little by little they release those small gases and particles that otherwise would never reach the nose and are released as that smell of metallic gunpowder, where the smell comes from. maybe it's not even coming from space, it's just coming from the effect of space on our ship, yes actually, it smells a bit like burnt steak, so it's a lot said that if you go incredibly fast like the speed of light, yes you could travel At the speed of light, you will not age and, even though thousands of years pass, you will remain the same, but everyone you know will die.

That's not really true. Einstein called it relativity because what he meant was your aging. be different in relation to the aging of people on earth, you will still age, time will still pass for you, but people on earth will age at a different rate, so if you came back after going incredibly fast, you would have aged at the amount of time it took you to travel, but people on Earth would have aged much faster, they would have had a longer period of time because if you go fast enough, your speed is proportional to the time that passes, so you will still age , but we simply age at a different rate than people on Earth.

Einstein did this cool thought experiment. He imagines if you were looking at a clock and the light from the clock comes and hits your eyes and tells you that it's 12 o'clock. Well, imagine if you could. move away from that clock at the speed of light it would only say 12 because that light and you would be moving away from the clock at the same speed so to you it would always seem like it was 12 forever you would still be getting older, but that clock would always seem like it was the same time. People on Earth continue to live.

They are not aware that you are going at the speed of light. So you can see that time for you because of your speed is relatively different than time for people on Earth, it's a really unusual thing to try to capture in your head what happens when something explodes in space, if something explodes in space, it will make a sound and a human could hear it, it's a pretty easy question to answer the sun is just an explosion the sun is the biggest explosion any of us can imagine it's a huge continuous thermonuclear explosion it's every atomic bomb we've ever seen built much more than that exploding continuously would be the loudest thing imaginable It is constantly happening but we don't hear a whisper and that is because there is nothing that can carry the sound of the sun to us, although it is incredibly violent, there is nowhere where the pressure of all that sound, all that noise can be transported. the emptiness of space to shake my eardrum here and let me hear the sound of the sun.

It's a good thing it's deafening. If something explodes in space, it will make a sound, but there is no way for that sound to transmit through space. As far as I could hear, there's this idea that maybe the only way we could really create gravity is to spin the spaceship so that everyone is stuck to the sides, like on those carnival rides where you're stuck against the wall and by now that's true we don't know how to control gravity we have no way to control gravity we can pretend there is gravity by spinning a ship and everything sticks to the sides like a ball at the end of a rope maybe one day we will figure out how to control gravity , but for now we have to spin the whole ship only in the middle.

Wouldn't they have weight? I've seen people think that NASA is working on warp speed so we can travel at that speed. from light to interstellar planets warp speed is a science fiction invention if we knew how to work with warp speed we would do it, we wouldn't know how to get close to the speed of light, it takes an unlimited amount of energy the faster you go it takes more energy e is equal to m c squared it actually increases with the square of the speed so how can you generate so much electricity and what does it do to your mass?

We don't know, we think maybe it's possible that you can go faster. than the speed of light, but we sure don't understand how right now, so we're not working on it, so it's not really true, we expect it in so many movies, you see it's the only way they survive the trips interstellar from one star to another is to freeze yourself in cryosleep, we don't know how to do that now when you freeze water which is what we are made of mainly our blood and everything that turns into crystals turns into ice crystals and if you allow the beautiful and delicate nature of your human body expands into ice crystals, it will destroy your structure, it will kill you, you know, freezing destroys it so that your hand will gangrene and you would end up completely destroyed. bodies, so right now we don't know how to successfully freeze a human body so it's not permanently destroyed, maybe we'll find out one day, but all those movies that rely on freezing the crew we don't know how.

To do that, it's not real. You see it on the Internet all the time that someone builds a balloon and launches a little figure with a camera attached where it takes a picture high up in the atmosphere. Seeing the curvature of the Earth is cool, but there are some people who think you can fly up into the stratosphere with some kind of high-altitude balloon. Actually, you can do it, but it's really complicated. Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of a balloon and actually left. through the speed of sound falling towards the earth and landing with a parachute it was very high in the stratosphere the stratosphere starts at about six or seven miles up it's not that high and then it goes on for a long way there's not enough air to breathe You need a plane with internal pressure to keep your body healthy if you are that high, but if you have the right equipment, yes, we can use a balloon to get high enough to go all the way. to the stratosphere, so if you have the right equipment, it is true that you have probably read somewhere on the Internet that if you go to the space station your body will get taller, it will expand and it will be painful and you are going to be taller forever.

It's an irreversible experience, not really true as I'm here talking right now. Gravity is pulling me towards the ground, every bone in my body and the little bristle between the bones, like each of the vertebrae in my back, they all have a little disc between each of the bones and even the bones In my hip and knee bones there is a small space, well, if there is no gravity pulling me down, all those spaces can get a little bigger if you stay. in weightlessness for a few weeks, in fact your body just stretches because the gap between each of the bones becomes a little bigger and in my case I became much taller, but in reality you are not taller, you are only temporarily longer, but it's not permanent as soon as you get home and gravity starts doing its work on you and crushes you, everything crushes towards launch, so you can be for a while a little bit higher in space and It may hurt your back a little because everything is squeezing, some people have back pain in space as a result, but it's not actually growing, it's just stretching to its natural maximum and will be squashed again as soon as it reaches home.

If you get a lot longer after being in space for a few weeks, think about what your pants would be like, you know they will be way above your ankle and if you put on a custom spacesuit you adjust the spacesuit to your body size, but we know this is going to happen, so we actually plan ahead, we adjust our spacesuits knowing that the

astronaut

s are going to be a little bit taller when they're in space or at least their bodies are going to be a little bit taller when they're in space. being stretched out a little bit and even the seat that protects us when we return to the ground, the protective seat so that when we hit the ground it protects us adequately, we take into account the fact that our spine is going to be a little longer when we arrive.

You're up there but your clothes you don't really know how they fit because you're floating weightless, your shirt is always floating around your body so you never have an idea up there how well the clothes fit just because there's no gravity so put them down and look and see how well they fit your body, it's more like they're just floating next to you. I read somewhere that on board the international space station bacteria multiply 10 times faster in space, so if you get Sick, your body is going to be ravaged by this voracious strain of mutant salmonella.

No, it's a different place than Earth, the space station we run around with little swabs all the time to measure what microbes and what viruses and what little bits of life might be growing on the spaceship, we also walk around with little cleaners. and wet wipes and we clean the entire space station all the time like in a hospital to try to keep everything clean and sanitary and we are finding that some of those primitive life forms mutate slightly differently in the weightless high radiation environment of the spaceship, but no one has died yet from mutant salmonella.

I'm Chris Hadfield. I hope this has helped answer some of those common space

myths

.