Departing Space Station Commander Provides Tour of Orbital Laboratory

Hi, I'm Sonny Williams. I'm here on the International Space Station. I don't want to say where we are. Right now we are in the Japanese

laboratory

. It is one

laboratory

among many here on the International Space Station. Actually, it's on the left. -hand side, if I were the International Space Station and I was flying through

space

like this, my left hand would be where the Japanese laboratory is, so now again we are on the right side, completely to the right of the International Space Station. es Columbus, the European module, has scientific experiments everywhere. You can see it looks a little crowded and we do a lot of our medical experiments here so this is not the case.

This is a really interesting module, of course, most of these modules you will be able to see. Look, they have four sides and they're joined together that way, we could work on one plane, whether it's a wall, a floor, another wall, or the ceiling, but you know again that all you have to do is turn around and your reference changes the The reason I mention this is because this is where four out of six of us sleep and that's why people always ask if sleeping in

space

do you sleep? are you in a bed? not really because it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter you get the feeling of lying down you just sit in your sleeping bag so here's a sleeping

station

right here I'm going in right now you can follow me if you want so I'm in it's like a little phone booth but it's nice comfortable, I have a sleeping bag right here that we sleep in, so we don't have some kind of cover and we don't fly all over the place, but you know you can sleep in any orientation.

I have him sleeping feeling like I'm standing up right now but as you saw I'm on the floor but it doesn't matter if I roll over and sleep on my stomach I can't have him I don't have any sensation in my head that tells me I'm on my stomach so really It doesn't matter, the sleeping

station

is also like a small office, here we have a computer, as you can see, we have a couple of small toys. I have some books I have some clothes and other things that make it like home. I'm going to go out and just for reference that's a sleeping station this is another one right here there's one on the ceiling if you want to call it correctly Here and then there's a room on the other wall here so we all sleep in a little circle.

Okay, come back. There is more to show you. Here we are in the US laboratory again this is a laboratory with scientific expertise on all the walls here all kinds of things we do and one of the things we also do is exercise we have some exercise equipment on board the space station We need to do that because we lose bone density and muscle mass while we're up here and that's a result of not having to fight gravity. So the way we stay fit is with a bike, a treadmill, and a weight lifting machine. This is the bike where you notice the pedal clip.

So all you need to do is hook your feet and then you can start pedaling. You don't need a seat because you don't sit down. I actually haven't sat down in six months, so you don't need any. any type of seat just make sure you are supported by the pedals, you will probably see the bike bounce a little when I move it, it is not stable and not firmly attached to the wall and the reason for this is space. The station is quite big. You saw that there are also solar panels on the space station. If we start putting forces on the space station, it's going to make those solar panels bounce around a little bit to keep the machines from bouncing around a little bit and moving around. a little bit and that way we don't apply any force to the structure of the spacecraft towards the solar panels, okay, a little further on, come on, here's a cool place, it's like your house, where everyone gathers. the morning after washing your face, brushing your teeth, you want to find something for breakfast and this is our kitchen, you can notice that there are all kinds of food in here, it's like opening the refrigerator, you have all your different things that you want to have, drinks, meats, eggs. vegetables cereal bread snacks and that's a good place where you find all the sweet fixings and then some energy bars just in case, so we have all this type of food, some of it is dehydrated and we have to hydrate it and fill it up. with water some of it is already done and then all we have to do is heat it up so something like this I'm putting out some pretty delicious roast beef brisket, not only is this food made in the USA but we also have food here from Japan. we have Russian food, as you can see, all these red containers are full of food that is from Russia and now we have some of our specialties, some things that we like, some of our favorite things that your family can send, in fact, I like them . fluffernutter's, so they sent me some fluff so I could make another one with peanut butter, so you have plenty of food up here, no problem.

I'm here with my two friends in the airlock, in fact, these are two space suits that are ready. Going outside, as we call it, doing a spacewalk in case we have to do something outside, some of the things we do. Outsiders, as internal repairs, we have many electrical boxes, machinery and solar panels, in fact, I spoke. As we talked before that they are outside and sometimes they don't work very well, remember that space is very cold and very hot and it is also the vacuum of space without pressure, so some of the equipment does not work well all the time, so that we may have to go out and do a spacewalk right behind me is actually the hatch that you go out into space and right now we have it filled with a couple more spacesuits because we have four up here and some of our tools, but of course Behind here is the hatch through which you exit directly into the vacuum of space.

The space suit is quite big, as you can see, it's like being a football player. Part of the reason it is so big and bulky is because of this back part of this backpack. hiking with a backpack, but the backpack and suit weigh about 300 pounds, luckily in space nothing really weighs so you don't feel like it's that heavy, but we need to have a suit that big because that guy back there is essentially the heart of the spaceship, I call this a spaceship actually, it has all the oxygen for you, it has all the carbon dioxide removal system for you, it also has a heating and cooling system to make sure we regulate the our body temperature while we are outside.

It also has a computer, so it tells you on a screen here if there's something wrong with the suit, if we're running out of oxygen, if we have too much carbon dioxide or any kind of electrical problem, so it's a nice little detail. Pretty impressive. spaceship and I actually had to go out, I used my spaceship, little spaceship, a couple of times and it worked great. Luckily, it works very well. You might want to see what the helmet looks like. It's also cool. We don't usually go out like this. so you can normally see when the helmets open so you can see what it looks like inside someone's little head would be inside here so you can see you can turn your head completely while you're inside there but the helmet stays Still, it's determined how far you can see and it's usually pretty sunny out there so we have to wear our sunglasses and these are our sunglasses here that make you look cool.

Here we are on the throne. Impressive, you might see how little you may have noticed, a little moon on the outside, this is our

orbital

latrine right here and of course it serves two functions, number two, I'll show you here, but you'll see it's quite little one so you have you have a really good aim and you would be ready to make sure things are going in the right direction and it smells a little bit so I'm going to close it and that's of course for number two and this guy here is for number one, so there are two slightly separate functions, but you can do both by essentially hanging here and doing number one and number two.

I might add that it's color coded so they don't really mix together, which is nice. yellows for number one and there is also a selection of paper, people always ask about toilet paper, what do you do with toilet paper? What kind of toilet paper do you have? We have gloves only because sometimes it gets dirty. We have some Russian wipes that are a little bit rough if you like the rough type of toilet paper, we have some nice tissues that are nice and soft, if you like soft toilet paper, we have Huggies just for any cleaning, you know, we're all babies ever and this helps and then If things get really out of control, we have disinfectant wipes just to make sure we clean in here because you know, just like the water that I showed you, number one things can get everywhere if You don't aim correctly and you did.

I mention that they both have a bit of section, so they shouldn't keep things going in the right direction, but like I said, sometimes things get a little out of control if you yourself are out of control flying, so we have a lot of protections . things and of course you have your privacy. There is a small door to let other people know you are there. Now I'm going to take you to one of the coolest places on the Space Station. It's like a glass bottom boat. the dome sticks sticks under the space station is one of those places where you find yourself hanging out all the time because all you want to do is look back at our planet.

I think some questions I had were about what are you doing in your freedom. time and you can't help but want to just come to the dome and look outside as much as you can and a lot of people play with myself about where we are flying above the earth. I'm trying to get in here and I just guess that after being here for a while, you can understand it, you can distinguish different types of clouds on different continents, you can distinguish different types of soil on different continents, so let's see and then of course there's a lot of ocean , so generally We are over the ocean at first glance.

I'll tell you in a moment where we are. Where do we go now. We are right over Africa. It's a little cloudy, as you can see, so we're right over the continent of Africa. What's happening? who think it's a Soyuz spacecraft which is the spacecraft that's going to take us home to planet Earth today oh my gosh, maybe we have to go take a look at it. That's cool, it's a little bit smaller than the rest of the spaceship, the space station, so we'll see if we get there, it'll be a little bit narrower, so we'll be able to look all the way to the back of the spaceship, which is where there's the Russian segment, and then they could watch to the end. forward to the front of the spaceship where the Japanese laboratory, the European laboratory and the American laboratory are.

Hey, one thing I didn't show you or talk about, but didn't show you, was exercise, another piece of the exercise device. This is what we call red and with this you can vacuum lift weights in these cylinders just like you do at home in a gym, for example if I wanted to do a squat I could do it like this which means some weight on this . Which I'm not lifting with anything, so it's dirty, it's too easy. One of the interesting things you can do. You could do things that you can't do at home, for example, squats with one leg, because you can't with the other leg.

Don't fall so all kinds of things you can also bench press. We have a bench we could add here so you can work on your beach muscles. Okay, I showed you the Sawyer, let's check it out, hey Aki, what are you doing downstairs? This is one of the cool things about space too, it looks like there's a big hole here, but you don't even think twice about it, you can just jump over the hole or if you want, you can jump into the hole. I'm going down like Superman again. We were lucky to have a really cool big space station that you can fly on and it's actually called PMM.

You may have seen her through the window. It is a large silver container. Which is really cool about that. It's essentially our closet in our pantry or whatever you want to call it, we have extra food down there, we have extra clothes, we actually throw the trash down there, so it's nice and organized and we have all the things we need while we're working on all these other things. modules, all stored in this location down here and it's a lot of fun to play with now that it's much bigger than the Soyuz. Oh, one thing we need to show you is our patches here, well, we've been up. here we have been expedition 32 first and then recently we left, we were expedition 33 and there are all the crew members who are here with us at the moment me, yuri malenchenko aki hoshide, if you couldn't read japanese, go guinea tarelkin yes you can read the Russians Oleg Novitsky and Kevin Ford, who just took over as

commander

of the space station and will be the

commander

for the next two months and, by the way, is behind thecamera right now, so you can say hello to them.

Kevin, they were going to the Russian segment, get ready, you don't need a passport either, it goes a lot further back than this, we'll take a trip and say hello to the guys there in just a minute, but let's do it first. actually, then we'll go down to the Soyuz at the end this is the beginning this is the FTB and the cool thing about this module is actually the first piece of the space station that came up in 1998 the space station has been around For now, man, for 12 years, but he's been in space for about 14 years and this was his first.

It's like the Russians, pmm, it has a lot of storage space, as you can see. here we are in the heart of the space station really this is the service mall module this is the central post in case we had any problems I know when a couple of questions are what kind of things do you have to worry about and some of the things we have to worry about in space are fire, if we had a fire, if we had a depressurization like if a micrometeorite hit us and there was a hole or if we had some kind of toxic atmosphere we use ammonia for our radiator, then there is a possibility of ammonia getting into the vehicle and then it would be bad for all of us if we had any of those problems.

We come here, which we call the central post, it is the main heart of the space station and it was also the The first computers that came here ran the space station, so behind this wall here are these main computers, so we meet here as a group of three or six and then we figure out how we're going to fight the fire, repair the hole or figure it out. the toxic spill and the good thing about this module, of course, is the central position, it also has large windows towards Earth, it has controls for flying visiting spacecraft, if there is help right here, it has Russian and American computers to help us. control everything we need on the space station, it's a couple of our crewmates back there.

Oh, long live Oleg Novitsky on the right and approaching the Co release on the left. There's also a second bathroom here, which is really cool because six of us going to one bathroom is really hard and there's a bathroom here in a bathroom on the other side where I showed you and you can probably see on the wall behind one leg and an earring some of the heroes of the Korolev space program Sergei Korolev, who was the chief designer of the men. to space and of course on the right side Yuri Gagarin the first man this reminds us of our roots.

I'm going to stop here just for a second. You can see on the Russian spacecraft that there are also other modules protruding down and up on the right. here, let's see them trying to get their bearings, that's a place where we do spacewalks for the Russians, the Russian side, there are Russian spacesuits here and also a visiting vehicle that brought fruits and vegetables and it turns into a garbage container when we we disengage from this side. Also a future place where they will do spacewalks and connected to it are Kevin's legs and you are Ginny's Soyuz spaceship and now we will still see our own Venezia on the probe going down, it's a little complicated to get in here. this is the docking probe right here this great thing this helps us connect to the spacecraft this probe actually inserts into this cone and this is how the spacecraft, our Soyuz, initially connects to the ISS which is then replaced by clamps that are over here that allows the two spacecraft to stick together and then you can remove the probe in the cone, so here we are, or we use this is what we call the Beto, the habitable compartment with the Russian second child , also has a small bathroom.

It's not as good as the other baths, so we try not to use it too much. It has drinking water if we need something to drink and of course it is packed with a lot of cargo for us to both carry up and bring back. down has a second purpose when you return to earth, it serves as a garbage container during the descent, it will get rid of this area here and everything in it will just burn up when it enters the atmosphere, that way we can get rid of a bit of trash, but the main area where we were on launch and where we're going to be on descent is down here because we're not part of the trash, so we're in a safe place, so we're in the descent module.

It's a little small, but you can get in. I'm not sure how well you can see here. Wait a second. I'm going to bring it up this way so you can see the hatch and you can see. Kevin, it's a little small, although we'll go in and show you around, we're just starting to get ready, we've been getting ready for a couple of days to take it home, it's a little soft, but everyone asks how do you sit in the Soyuz and sit in your seat like this seat is molded through your body so you can squeeze in here and be pretty relaxed everyone has a handmade seat for them and then of course there's a control panel and that's where we do the Most of our actions and work here there are hand controllers that you can fly the vehicle with and there is a stick here that is mainly used for communications when we are trying to talk to the ground so three of us fit in here like I said it's a little soft but somehow it seems like we all managed to get in here and fit in pretty well and it's a pretty safe trip home.

You're probably wondering what all this junk is behind us. Well first of all it's all of our parachute and then it's all of our survival gear in case we end up landing somewhere strange on the planet and there's no one there to rescue us right away we have all kinds of survival gear with us to keep us going. safe here, so they've already thought of everything we'll do. Being home on the planet within the next 12 hours is pretty shocking.