So farts in space... Basically in weightlessness,
hot air doesn't rise.
So the good thing is you probably won't smell your own fart
because by the time you've done it,
it's already been taken away by the air conditioning system.
Hi, I'm Tim Peake, a British astronaut, and I flew
to the International Space Station in 2015-2016,
and spent six months living on board.
I'm here today to answer the questions in the Honesty Box.
So these have been anonymously sent in.
So here goes.
First question:
Oh, that's a good question.
Every astronaut who gets on the rocket
has to consider the, you know,
what could happen, the catastrophic implications
of a rocket destroying itself or blowing up during launch
or reentry or space walking
or any of the other hazardous things we do in space.
So it's fair to say that any astronaut
has already thought about that and considered it.
I've been doing that all my career.
As a test pilot, I would go on high risk test sorties
where you just didn't know how the aircraft
was going to perform.
And so I've always approached these things
from a point of risk mitigation.
I look at what I'm doing,
what could go wrong, and what could I do about it?
And then I try and prepare as best as possible.
So training, training, training, make sure
that I do everything possible
if anything were to happen catastrophically.
But yes, everybody has to contemplate that.
Okay, very sophisticated questions here.
"Have you ever pooed your spacesuit
and what happens to farts in space?"
No, to the first, and I'll answer the second in a second.
So really what... You really don't want
to be considering pooing your spacesuit, that's very bad.
But let's dig into it.
It's a good question.
On launch day, you're gonna have many, many hours
in your spacesuit before you actually get
to the Space Station.
So what we actually start the day off with is an enema.
And you're actually offered different types of enema.
I've got no idea what the different...
I flew from Russia, from Kazakhstan with the Russians,
and so they said you can have an American enema
or a Russian enema.
Didn't know the difference, but I was in Russia
so do what the Russians do.
But yeah, so you start the day with a shower
where they scrub you down, antibacterial soap
so you don't carry any bacteria
or viruses up to the Space Station.
You have an enema to clean you out.
And that should stop you from having any desire
to go for a poo for at least, you know, 24 to 48 hours.
So launch day and the day after should be absolutely fine.
What we actually wear under our spacesuits
is what they call a MAG.
It's effectively a nappy
but NASA like to give everything an acronym
and a nappy is not very cool for astronauts to wear.
So it's a MAG: Maximum Absorbency Garment.
So it's an adult nappy.
What happens to farts in space?
So farts in space... Basically in weightlessness,
hot air doesn't rise.
So the good thing is you probably won't smell your own fart
because by the time you've done it,
it's already been taken away by the air conditioning system.
The air conditioning system
on the Space Station is pretty good.
And it's good!
It's not there to just stop you from smelling farts.
It's there to stop you from losing consciousness
because if you didn't have a good air conditioning system,
what would happen every time you breathe out,
you know, we're breathing out carbon dioxide.
And so if you didn't have air moving around
and if you were working, for example,
for a couple of hours at a laptop in one location,
this bubble of carbon dioxide would just build around you
and it wouldn't go anywhere.
And so you'd start to get, you know,
CO2 poisoning from your own asphyxiation.
So a fart would just hang there in space
if it didn't have the good air conditioning system.
Wow, that's a long answer...
...to pooing and farting.
Okay, so let's start with Earth.
I think we'd all agree that we're happy breathing,
we're happy being alive, and we've got a lovely sun
that most of the time keeps it
at a relatively comfortable temperature.
Second favourite is Mars.
I love Mars.
Mars used to have a liquid ocean.
About three billion years ago,
Earth and Mars were very, very similar.
It's got the largest volcano in the Solar System.
It's got the biggest canyon in the Solar System.
Mars is geologically fascinating and a brilliant planet.
After Mars, Saturn's my favourite.
I mean, it's just the most beautiful planet
in the Solar System with the rings, and it's iconic.
If you ask a child to draw a planet,
you know, chances are it'll be Saturn.
After Saturn, I think Jupiter, stunning planet again,
a gas giant, biggest planet in the Solar System,
the Great Red Spot, the hurricane.
We're probably gonna go to Neptune
'cause Neptune is right out there
on the furthest extremes of the Solar System.
But it's a lovely deep blue.
It's a beautiful blue.
It's kind of known as the second blue planet
in the Solar System after Earth.
Then let's go to Venus.
Poor old Venus used to be really, really nice,
I think, again, a few billion years ago.
Probably a good place to go on holiday - not anymore.
Runaway greenhouse gas, it's gone out of control.
Massive carbon dioxide atmosphere.
Hottest planet in the Solar System,
about 460 degrees Celsius on the surface.
And you know, you just wouldn't survive
on Venus for very long at all.
Then let's go to Mercury,
and then all the way back out to the last planet then,
which is Uranus.
You know, I don't think there's much exciting about Uranus.
It feels really bad, doesn't it, to say so?
But when Voyager II passed by Uranus,
it was kind of a bit of a bland, pale, blue planet.
It wasn't very exciting.
It was very cold, about minus 240 degrees Celsius.
So that's the order of my planets.
I suppose it depends on your definition of gross,
but if you're a foodie
then you're gonna be bitterly disappointed with space food.
There are a couple of things that they do to space food
that makes it particularly unpalatable.
First thing is they remove a lot of the salt content
'cause salt's not good for our bone density loss.
It does tend to be anything that could just be rehydrated
or like camping food, that irradiated food you get
in foil packets or tins of food.
I mean, I didn't mind it, I'm not a foodie,
I'm not food-motivated... It never bothered me, space food.
And you can take up about 10% of what we call bonus food,
which are goodies off the shelf.
And as long as it's got a good shelf life
and it passes the space flight site criteria,
then you can fly a few off-the-shelf items up there.
Ah, that's a good question.
"Do you think space travel is ethical?"
Yes, I do, otherwise I wouldn't be passionate
about what we are doing and why we are doing it.
The universe is a big place, a really big place.
Just the Milky Way alone,
I mean, it's 100,000 light years side to side,
200 billion stars in the Milky Way.
We will probably never get close
to exploring even a fraction of the Milky Way.
And that's one galaxy
and possibly two trillion galaxies out there
in the observable universe.
It's vast, it's absolutely vast, the universe.
The scale of it is mind-boggling.
So why should we restrict ourselves to one small planet?
I think space travel is very exciting.
It offers the potential
to learn huge amounts of information.
It offers the potential to discover more.
The science that we're learning
about space exploration helps us back here on Earth.
We are developing vaccines for viruses, drugs for diseases,
new methods of energy transformation techniques,
carbon dioxide removal, water purification,
all these things that are gonna help us solve the problems
that we have back here on Earth.
So I'm a huge believer in space exploration
in order that we can use our planet for as long as possible.
Elon. Why?
Because, and this is nothing against Branson or Bezos.
As I mentioned, some of the things that are happening
in the commercial sector,
suborbital space transportation systems, etc,
are really interesting
and could be very, very game-changing in the future.
But right now what SpaceX are doing is phenomenal.
And to say they've disrupted the space sector
is a massive understatement.
It used to cost about $57,000 on the space shuttle
to launch to space and now on a Falcon 9,
a Falcon Heavy, you'll get that
for probably less than $3,000 per kilogram.
Starship is gonna bring that down
another order of magnitude.
So what they're doing is making it cheaper
and easier to get into space
and they're offering huge cargo payloads,
hundreds of tonnes to low Earth orbit.
That opens the door
to some really exciting, innovative prospects.
For example, getting solar energy
from space is something that would be clean,
limitless energy for all of us back here on Earth.
A bit like nuclear fusion.
But you can't build a solar farm in space.
It's prohibitively expensive.
What Starship does is it brings it
into an economically viable range
where actually building a massive solar farm
in space using Starship is...
You know, you can put forward the business case,
it's economically viable, you can get the payload up there
and you can start thinking about, you know,
potentially building, you know, solar farms in space,
clean limitless energy, these kinds of things.
So they are far, far more advanced
in terms of what they're doing
for space exploration than Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin.
So Branson and Bezos.
Lots of physical changes.
The first five weeks
your body's pretty much in overdrive, what's happening?
So first thing you notice is all the fluid
in your legs, or your blood volume basically,
all the body fluid that's normally in your legs and ankles
'cause we're standing and sitting most of the time on Earth,
all shifts up to your chest and face.
So you become puffy-faced, your brain doesn't like that,
gives you a bit of a headache.
So you start losing that blood volume,
that causes you to lose weight.
So you lose about five kilograms in your first five weeks.
You start losing bone density and your muscles atrophy
because you're not using your bones
and muscles as much in space either.
Cardiovascular system changes
and even your eyesight changes as well.
Your immune system becomes more depleted.
Things like your airway even gets inflamed.
So your body's going through all these changes
but actually your body is doing the right thing.
Our human body is amazing.
What it's doing is it's trying to make you
into the perfect human being for living in space.
We try and stop that because we want to come back to Earth
and so we exercise for two hours every day
to try and keep ourselves fit and healthy,
but not fit and healthy for space;
fit and healthy for coming back into a gravity environment.
So yeah, going to space and coming back is punishing
on the body and that's why we exercise.
Okay, astronauts
are effectively government employees.
As a European Space Agency astronaut, we are employed,
with about 27 member states
that make up the European Space Agency.
So it's like a European governmental organisation.
So we are paid
at the same kind of salary scale as civil servants.
I mean, we are not there with, you know,
sports players, football stars or the rest of it.
It's a decent salary.
It's a good level of civil servant salary.
One of my favourite space films is Apollo 13
but it's not really sci-fi 'cause it happened
and it was very close to reality
and the film was brilliant and accurate.
So sci-fi film, I'd probably say The Martian
is my favourite.
I liked Interstellar as well.
It was a brilliant film.
But The Martian, great fun film.
Matt Damon's a brilliant actor, very funny,
it was quite close to the book, Andy Weir's novel.
[Erin] Were you any good at it?
Scientifically pretty accurate as well.
Andy Weir's novel was very accurate.
The Martian gets a little bit Hollywood at the end,
flying through space with a glove ripped.
But hey, you know, Hollywood's there to entertain us.
It doesn't always have to be factually correct.
"Should billionaires be allowed to travel to space?"
That's another good question.
I think that when we look at space tourism, and
what's happening with commercial suborbital space travel,
it might be useful to think back
to aviation in the 1920s, 1930s, those pioneering days
of flying and those first flights across the Atlantic.
And that was really only accessible
to really high-net-worth individuals who could pay to fly
across the Atlantic in 1930, for example.
Now if you said, you know, what kind of percentage
of the population could afford to fly across the Atlantic,
it's much, much greater.
Many people just consider that an ordinary holiday.
I think in 100 years' time we'll be thinking
of some form of space transportation in the same way.
The cost of that travel is gonna come down and down and down
and it won't just be billionaires flying to space.
It will become accessible
to a much greater percentage of the population.
The other interesting thing
is the kind of suborbital flights
that are going on right now,
they're just launching and landing
at the same location, popping up into space,
a few minutes of weightlessness, popping back down again.
There's no reason why you couldn't launch in Texas
but rather than landing in Texas, you know,
landing in Europe, for example, that suborbital trajectory
is a point-to-point transportation system around the world.
So potentially this is actually paving the way
for a new form of travel that could get you
from London to Sydney in 40 minutes, for example,
in 50 years' time.
Good question!
I think, on the shuttle, I might be wrong here,
but I think there may have been a married couple
on the shuttle that have been in space.
Not to say that they had sex whilst they're in space
but I think that there has been the opportunity,
shall we say?
So do you think anyone's ever had sex in space?
Not sure. Do I think that people will have sex in space?
Absolutely, space is opening up at a commercial level.
We will potentially have people, you know,
vacating on orbital hotels in space in maybe 50,
100 years' time.
So if it hasn't already happened, it will do.
That'll be the 400-kilometre-high club.
For me, going to watch E.T.
on the big screen was a huge moment.
I still remember it, my father took me, an amazing film
and I just think, you know, E.T. is brilliant.
So I'd have to say, out of all the space films I've watched,
E.T. wins it.
I think for me, in zero gravity, it's a bit like any sport,
you get better and better and better
at it the more that you do it.
And so after a month in zero gravity,
your somersaults and your spins are pretty good.
After two months you can fly yourself down the Space Station
without actually hitting any of the walls and you get faster
and faster and it becomes more and more fun.
But on Friday nights we would tend to gather together
as a crew up in the Russian segment, have a meal together,
all bring some of our bonus food and share it round.
Really nice sociable occasion.
Talk about the week that we'd had, but the competition
on a Friday night was who could throw an American football
the length of the Space Station.
So from the Russian segment
all the way down to the front end
of the US segment without it hitting any of the walls.
Might sound easy, but there's a kink there
as you go from the Russian segment to the American segment,
it goes kind of off-axis for a bit.
Really hard to do.
Scott Kelly had been up there for eight months
when I got on board the Space Station and I think he
was the only person I saw actually do it really cleanly.
Was I any good at it?
Not bad! After six months, I think I got it, I did it once.
Not quite as well as Scott
but at least I got it through the gap.
The other thing, actually,
just to follow up on that question,
there's a toy box on board the Space Station.
I didn't know about that until a couple of months
into my mission when I was looking
for some Alka-Seltzer tablets to do a demonstration of,
you know, when it all fizzes up in water, and I'd run out.
And so I asked one of the crew mates
and they said, "Oh, go to the toy box,
there are some more in there."
I was like, "What's the toy box?"
And they showed me where this bag was
on board the Space Station.
And I looked in there and not only were there Alka-Seltzer,
there was a basketball, there was a hoop,
there were four Nerf guns in there as well.
And that was a lot of fun having a Nerf gun battle
on board the Space Station.
I'd like to say yes, but sorry, it's not really a planet.
When you look at the true definition of a planet, its size
and has it cleared its own orbital path,
you can't really include Pluto as a planet.
So sorry, no.
Because Mercury is way too hot.
Venus is horrendously hot and 90 atmospheres pressure
and sulphuric acid rain,
it melts lead on the surface, right?
So you're not going there.
And the rest of them are made of gas,
so you're not going there either.
So Mars is the only place beyond Earth
that we could feasibly ever go with planets.