Hi, I'm Derek Muller the creator of Veritasium here with UNSW TV at the Powerhouse Museum.
Tonight is a very special event. It's called Space Oddity and it's a night
with a former commander of the international space station, Chris Hadfield.
I'm here with the former commander of the international space station, Astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Chris: My pleasure.
Now, I have some questions from UNSWTV and fans of Science Alert.
Trevor Kemp asks, what was your greatest physical or academic obstacle that you had to overcome
in order to become an astronaut?
It's maybe a surprise, but the hardest thing is remembering everything.
I studied as an astronaut for twenty-one years and people taught me things for twenty-one
years that you needed to know. And when you're on board a space station,
you need to think back, what did that guy tell me eight and a half years ago on how
to use this little piece of equipment because now I need to know and they're not here to ask.
It was an enormous memory task and so finding
a way to keep all that stuff in the front of my head, that was the hardest thing of all.
There are a million things that can go wrong. We've been studying for years and years and years
and there's an astronaut saying that is:
"there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse".
(Laughter)
Nicholas Hilliar asks, what did you dream
or how was sleeping different in space?
Nicholas, sleep on board the space station is physically different because you're
floating weightless the whole time. Your arms are just floating in front of you
and you don't need a pillow and you don't need a mattress and it's as if you're just
suspended and tumbling through the universe so it's immensely relaxing, it's lovely.
And as for dreams, I don't think much about dreams.
To me what was really interesting is what was happening while I was awake and that was
really the stuff of dreams.
So we'd go around the world every 92 minutes and the world turns underneath you as you're going.
So it's as if someone's pouring this huge kaleidoscope of the world constantly underneath you.
Ruth Parksy asks how did your body react to gravity when you returned to Earth?
When you get back to Earth, your body has become adapted to living on the space station.
It's used to weightlessness and to be subjected
to the oppression of gravity again where it's pushing the blood to your feet and spinning
your balance system or at least confusing your balance system and forcing your muscles
to fight it all the time. Having to hold your head up for the first
time in five months, it's kind of brutal. It's as if you're recovering from a long illness
or you've just been through a car crash and your whole body is all shaken up.
And it takes quite a while. It took days and days before I started to
feel normal. It took about four months before I could run
properly again and I'm still growing my skeleton back, it's a long process.
This is what the soft landing rockets look like.
Sue Salinas asks, what experiment would you like to see performed in space or which experiment
is the most important happening right now?
The space station has about two hundred experiments running on it and for Sue, I think
that the most interesting one is we're collecting what the universe is made of.
We don't know what the universe is made of, we cannot count for 94% of the universe.
We call it "dark matter" and "dark energy", we're trying to figure it out.
It's really important if we want better engines, if we want to travel further in space, we
at least need to know what the universe is made of.
There's a huge experiment in the top of the space station called the alpha magnetic spectrometer
that is collecting the subatomic particles of the universe to try to figure that out.
There's a lot of cool experiments, looking at the world, studying the body,
studying physics, studying flame.
So that's a candle on Earth, on the left. The candle on the right is a candle on the space station.
Colin Clunis asks, what message do you want to bring back for the next generation
here on Earth?
The most important message for me is for people to see opportunities that exist.
It's really easy to get locked up in your own little subset of the world and not realise
all the amazing stuff that's happening right now.
The discoveries that are going on, the ability to communicate it through the internet, the
awareness of the universe around us, the possibility to increase standard of living for people
all across the world, those can only come through awareness, through study, through
learning, through seeing all those things that are happening and my biggest message is
don't let yourself get locked up in a small world with limited horizons.
It's amazing the opportunities that exist and the ability to access this is real right now.
Thank you very much for chatting with us.
Thanks, nice to meet you all.