I Trained Like a NASA Astronaut

We were Wanderers from the beginning limited only by land and sky, the frontier was everywhere: undiscovered lands and new worlds, what's up guys? I'm here in Houston, Texas, at NASA because I'm going to train like an

astronaut

. Yes, I'm terrified of her. space the idea of ​​being strapped to a rocket and being launched into an absolute dark abyss there is no hell there is no space for me is the epitome of all my greatest fears the unknown being alone dying like George Clooney and gravity that honestly makes no sense For me I don't know why Sandra Bullock, because we just pulled the line and brought it back, but it was a great movie, regardless of the exact scene being my literal nightmare.

I have that nightmare at least once a month. I have nothing but the maximum. respect for

astronaut

s because of the years of danger in physical and mental training so I hope if I can try this training maybe it will help me overcome some of my fears here on earth so this week we will see if I have what it takes to be an astronaut, I accepted the challenge, my name is Megan Sumner. I'm a public affairs specialist here at Johnson Space Center. It's very competitive to become an astronaut, so in 2017, which was our last astronaut selection, we had over 18,000 people. applied and 12 people were selected, so it's quite difficult to go to space, it's a pretty unique and amazing experience.

You can see the Earth from the point of view of space that not many people can see, but during long duration missions when they are alive. In space for six months they exercise two hours a day and cannot shower for six months. They have to practically take sponge baths when they go out on spacewalks for six hours, which is an extremely challenging activity that they don't do. They don't go to the bathroom to eat. I don't think Michelle understands how difficult some of the training she will be doing is, but before we go to Houston we start our training here in California at the Chinese Airport.

Steve. Pleased to meet you. I am very excited and also a little terrified to fly this plane today. I checked why it is safer than driving on the highway. Oh yeah? Okay, all astronauts have to be

trained

on the T-38 aircraft, that's really it. they put them in a real life situation if something goes wrong then there are real consequences we 39 re going to fly but Rose, would you say this is the previous experience I could have without the T Tauri? Yes, we probably can. I have about 6. G astronauts have to train to be able to withstand the forces they are under in a rocket, spitting, flying a plane and going upside down and experiencing a lot of G's is the best way to do it.

I was personally under the impression that we were going to go to the sky and maybe just do a loop when Steve started going over our plan for the flight, he just kept going, the first maneuver will be a roar, after that we will do a barrel roll . If all goes well, when I think about going to space, one of the scariest parts for me is the launch and experiencing a little bit of what it's like. Well, maybe calm some of those fears. I have never experienced what multiple g's feel like. I like that the feeling will be different in the new one and I'm a little nervous about it, apparently a lot of people faint.

Steve talked in our briefing about kicking me off the plane. I really hope I don't have to use that piece. of new knowledge, so what's really fun and also very scary about a plane like this, is that when you're on a commercial plane you only have a small window and it looks like the earth is slowly moving beneath you and this you can see everything around you felt like a movie, it was so beautiful up there, it felt pretty good on takeoff and within 20 seconds we were taking a sharp turn. I thought there would be a little more warm up but Don't write it down, there was a moment when we were in free fall where I actually felt very calm, it's like time had stopped, that was completely crazy, you're a badass , I'm really good with theme parks and roller coasters, yeah, that's like nothing.

I've experienced it now that we've literally dove headfirst into this training. I am excited to continue today at NASA in Houston. We're in the neutral buoyancy lab. This is where we train spacewalks with our astronauts. We have the models. of almost the entire space station underwater this is the closest thing you can get to actually doing a space walk it's so crazy that they like to recreate what's up there here we have a Japanese astronaut kimiya yui and an astronaut from the NASA lovers who have adapted Now that they are in their spacesuits, they are preparing to enter the water and begin their dive for the day.

The suit doesn't look very comfortable. Yes, the suit is heavy. The suit weighs about 250 pounds, so it's extremely heavy, of course. in space and even in the pool here they don't weigh, so they don't feel that weight, the suit has to have several layers to protect them from micrometeorites and radiation from temperature changes, so they are actually your mini space shuttles , so this moment is this simulates the moment when the door opens and they enter the airlock when they are in space. I'm not the pressurized module which is where they would do what they did here, which is put on the space suit and then once they open the door. door that will be like entering the tool what are they training today the first of the day they will be doing some operations to see if they can pass like a cable through a part of the truss segment to the other fighters in the second part they will use the arm articulated to replace the piece in this part of that segment here and then in the third part of the day they will build a new piece of equipment that being on the space station they are also out there for six hours to think about going to the bathroom come and go to the bathroom They have maximum absorption garments that are more or less a diaper.

This is maximum fear and discomfort at the same time. Yes, I am Karen Nyberg, I am an astronaut at NASA and I have been an astronaut for almost 19 years. I flew into space twice, so the first time was in 2008 on the space shuttle Discovery and then in 2013 I flew on a Russian Soyuz rocket and I lived on the space station for five and a half months. I watched your YouTube videos. You're basically an astronaut YouTuber when you do your hair tutorial. I thought I want to follow you home, but I have gravity, so I can. I love it. video of you quilting in space are you familiar with Ariana Grande?

Have you vaguely heard her NASA song from her? That's, ugh, I don't know, there was this big interaction where NASA's Twitter account retweeted it. Wouldn't the song come out? Yes, I would love to know a little more about why you wanted to be an astronaut. I decided when I was very little that I wanted to be an astronaut. In 1978 they selected their first female astronauts. I was nine years old and the first one shocked me. Two years as an astronaut candidate is a lot of training, we put a lot of emphasis on emergency training because if there was an emergency you don't have time to really think about it, in fact we do it here in this model of the space station. the instructors will have different scenarios that they will make us run through, so depressurization of the space station by false fire or those are the three main ones where we have to take immediate action.

I think it would be foolish to say that you are not afraid at all. You're strapping yourself to a rocket and going into space, but I think the training we have deep down is very tempered, you don't feel that fear when you're sitting on the launch pad because you have a job to do and you're there to do it. My name is Kimberly Chadwick and I am a countermeasures systems instructor, which means we train the crew on how to stay healthy when they are in space. One of the things people don't realize is when you. You are in zero gravity, your bones and muscles don't have to work as hard because you are not fighting gravity and you can lose up to 2% of bone and muscle mass per month, which is like having osteoporosis, they have three pieces of equipment of exercise to keep them healthy in the space they have a bicycle, they have a treadmill and they have a weight lifting machine.

What's different about the bike in space is that there's not really a handlebar there that I hold on to and there's no seat, you have shoes. that clip on the pedal and you just ride on it and your bike will try the treadmill next okay it's harder to carry them because they would float when we put the harness on them and we use these elastics here oh so you go to having to sell a lot exactly, there you have it, so will it change in the space? We think both will decrease, let's go, so the default is three miles per hour, this is just three miles per hour every time you go up the page.

I'm going up 110 Do you like Ariana Grande? What did you think about her son? Oh my gosh, this next one is the hardest, right, yeah, we'll use the full size bench, but I'll show you zero gravity. first on the bench they pull it and you will see that this is not going to support the entire body, they only need it to support their torso. There is a belt that holds them in place to prevent you from floating, which will make this a little uncomfortable at first. because you have gravity, you want to fall that way or that way, so you want to try to control it and make it go up and down, oh you made it up, that's good though, that's good and zero gravity You wouldn't be fighting. the gravity part so that would be a little easier it looks so strange so how does this work if there is a weight in space?

That's an excellent question. What's going on? We have two vacuum cleaners up here, are you there? They are working against a vacuum. How long do astronauts exercise each day? They are scheduled to exercise for two and a half hours a day for six days a week and then use exercise not only to stay physically strong but also as a mental break. I like it. to compare her day to reading a user manual for eight hours a day, this is Peggy Whitson, she is our record breaker for flying there for the longest period of time, how long was Peggy and the space ?

She was one of our 1 year old astronauts. Can. I can't imagine spending a year on the International Space Station for my first flight. I had no family for my second flight. I did, so there's that aspect to it: I'm married to an astronaut and I've seen it from both sides. It's definitely easier on the part of the person who was flying into space because you're just as focused on work as you are on family. It's harder when I went on my lingerie shoe flight. My son was part of making it easier was making sure he was. comfortable with me going to do that we tried to never let it be a negative thing that mom left we would show her the space station flying into the sky mom will go live there the days went by very, very quickly, it gets difficult, but I think that we, like Astronauts, we learn to compartmentalize a lot.

Space can be very stressful and we want food to be a positive experience for astronauts in low Earth orbit. I'm Ryan Dodd, I'm the ISS food system manager and I'm on the team here at the Johnson Space Center that helps get all the food to the International Space Station right now. The ISS food system has about ten different standard menu containers that the crew can eat from at any time, as well as a crew. Specific menu made specifically for you and you get a container for coffee or tea. Today I selected some of our perennial favorites that the crew has for you to try.

Yeah, the first thing I want to get out is a shrimp cocktail, those are frozen. dried shrimp, so feel how light it is, the food is about 90 percent water and after we freeze-dry it, here in the food lab it goes down to about 10 percent moisture, which makes it stable in storage so that bacteria cannot grow and spoil the food after freeze-drying has a shelf life of approximately three years. What am I holding? Let's see, this was packaged in late 2017, so we're going to rehydrate it and you can let us know how fresh it tastes. I'm not going to get sick, you're not going to get sick, why can't we just feed someone nutrition bars?

The answer is: have you ever tried eating Clif bars for six months straight? That variety has been found to be incredibly important to keep them interested in food because if it doesn't taste good astronauts will stop eating, lose weight and we may actually experience mission failure, so, when Ariana Grande at least her song NASA I'm a big Ariana Grande fan for me she said this is our generation, really amazing things and we're going to space and we're also starting the commercial crew program and launching crew from the United States for the first time since 2011, which which is pretty amazing, the deepest interpretation of that song, so this is ourshrimp cocktail and was cooked two years ago.

Yes, bon appetit. I'm really impressed. Honestly, I was hoping to eat Clif bars. It is very important to have good food in space. One of our other favorites is macaroni and cheese. You guys made them at home and then freeze-dried them. Yes, this is all from scratch. How does it work somehow, grandma? Well, everything is from scratch. We put a lot of love into all the food that arrives from the International Space Station. OMG, it tastes like homemade macaroni and cheese from a really amazing five-star restaurant. Finally we're going to finish with one of the crew members' favorite desserts.

This is the cherry and blueberry pie. Wow, what do you think girl, you know what? I'm thinking you're there, what do you think? And you know it's cool, yeah, my God, what's going on? Inside the spacesuit there is a four psi Delta between the inside of the suit and the vacuum of space instead of putting on a full suit and putting you in a vacuum chamber this is an alternative way of doing it so this is just simulating feel the pressure, oh my gosh, feel it, oh yeah, work with a pressurized glove. Well, I'm the deputy director of the current suit system, so my job is to make sure the astronauts have the correct size suits and then, if something breaks or needs adjustment, figuring out how to fix it or help the astronauts make those adjustments. .

So this is one of the tethers they have on the Space Station. Half will go to your person in your spacesuit and the other half to the space station. You have to press the button on both sides and then twist the bottom there. You say, yeah, my God, eight hours of this, okay, the real test is not being in lightning, something everyone has seen and has in their homes. The fine motor skills were difficult and a lot of fun to do with the gloves, so people do this in space. There are very complex tasks that astronauts have to do this is like being in a mascot uniform while being asked to draw a perfect circle this is crazy okay I have to understand this.

I'm sorry if the hardest thing I do during astronaut training is tie a knot. In a flash that says something about the attention to detail that astronauts have, we are being monitored by mission control centers around the world Houston Moscow and I never had a moment where I didn't trust what they told me if our computers Laptops showed up warning that something was wrong and they called and said there was no action. I completely trust that they have everything under control and I don't need to do anything. There was never a trust issue with that and crewmates we are also doing this as a team it is not an individual effort and therefore you have to be able to trust your teammates it literally looks like in the movies when I told him to the people who were making this video and who would send it to NASA, they all say, oh, were you doing that? where you spin around the multi-axis trainer, yeah, and we learned that that's not even part of astronaut training, no, why in the movie the first astronauts and Mercury Gemini did that training, but now we don't do that very often?

The movies are more science fiction than reality. There are many misconceptions. I think there are too many to name them all. I just understand that we are just people going to space. I don't know how you changed that my name is Paul Valle. I'm the project manager here at the active response system, take the discharge system Argos is a robot that simulates reduced gravity and that means we can make you feel like you're weightless, we can make you feel like you're in lunar gravity. on Mars, so we'll hook you up to our harness right here, we'll activate the system and you'll immediately be placed in weightlessness and you'll be training like an astronaut watching TV on the space station.

Doing like a space walk out there, so this is the harness that you'll be in and then they'll pick you up on this gimbal up here and this is what will connect you to Argos. I'm so excited I never got to go. to Space Camp when I was a kid, yes, this is your moment, so better than the kids at Space Camp, they can't use this system, we do a lot of astronaut training for specific tasks, for example, repairing something that when propelled is floating. We also do a lot of motion tracking and have them walk or gravitate, for example, do movies ever use this system for stunts or motion capture, not for stunts or motion capture, but we've had some experiences of how Are space flights when the first man was here?

I had the entire cast that year to do various trainings, okay Tyler I'm going to have you upright, is that scary and should I be scared? No, I don't think so, if you just push yourself and float away even though you are. I'm going to float forever, so I'm not going to be George Clooney, I'm not going to be George Clooney today, okay, Tyler drives well and I can go up from the course and you can stay there so you notice that you have some ability to move and if you grab that table, you can lower your head a little bit and lift your feet up, push it off and get back to neutral, are you ready to go?

I guess what I'm going to do first is I'm going to take you to this mockup right here and then to all these yellow handrails that we have around when you're supposed to grab them and touch them like an astronaut, oh my god, this feels so strange it feels exactly as seen in the movie, so you want to keep your body moving nice and slow, that's why we have speed limits in place, if you go too fast we will lock your brakes, we train our astronauts not to move fast and you will notice it as you progress. you have to use the same amount of energy to stop if you have a space suit on and you weigh now you know the mass is 600 pounds when you try to move outside the International Space Station when you try to stop your body you have to control all that mass that's in this , I forgot for a moment that this side is like the other side and that is the floor, yes, in the space there is no real floor or ceiling, right, there is something that feels really elegant and beautiful. this, although I probably don't know, you look pretty good, actually, yeah, you look more stylish and some other people have been.

Am I more stylish than Ryan Gosling? He was pretty good, we, well, yeah, I'm pretty. Well, yes, it was a natural gravity. I can see them showing us instead of Neil Armstrong. Were you here with me? I was here? The Argo system was honestly a once in a lifetime experience. I can't believe I had to do that. There really is something. It's magical to feel weightless and that this space around you is completely habitable and it also felt like mental weightlessness, which was really cool, so now I'm going to experience lunar gravity, which is minimal gravity, being able to jump very high. easily but you still go back to the ground, so now you're in lunar gravity, so now you weigh one.

Oh, you literally feel like you're Spider-Man. It's another fun thing. The new signs are push-ups. Yes, you can always do that with one hand. dad, being an astronaut is very easy, I'm just kidding, announcer, mine is very difficult, wow, I'm going to go to the outer space level, sorry, you hit his top safety stop, okay, you jumped too hard, I'm a superhero too strong, this experience has a small sample of what it is like. It's like training to go to outer space, it really taught me a lot about myself and I think the misconceptions I have about the things I fear the most before this experience.

I thought space was this scary and unknown frontier which I realized through this experience. And launching a lot of my challenge videos is that the perceptions I have about these things are often romed by hearing Karen say that she is a human like me, it really puts things into perspective, a lot of times we look at our heroes and put them on this pedestal as they are separate and different from us and at the end of the day we are all human and if anyone else can overcome their greatest fears, so can I and anyone can do it.

If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up in the comments. Below, what crazy challenge should I take, the next challenge I take, and as always, subscribe so we can continue having more adventures together. Also a big shout out to these amazing participants in our hashtag I'm an Instagram Ultra Challenge if you want a chance to be next. Greetings of the week, be sure to make a post on Instagram and tag me using the hashtag soy ultra to tell me one way you've overcome an obstacle in your life and totally kicked ass. Many thanks to NASA for allowing me.

Hanging out with you last week was an amazing experience and best of luck to the next round of elected astronauts.