(bright upbeat music)
- Oh man, I'm dizzy as hell.
Everything's spinning.
Space medicine is pretty cool.
I've talked about it on the channel quite a lot,
but how do you actually test what happens in zero gravity?
Well, do experiments on the International Space Station,
of course, yes, but a),
there are only ever a few astronauts up there at a time
and they've got tons of other stuff to do
so it's highly unlikely your experiment will get chosen.
b), if your experiment does get chosen,
you don't wanna waste all that precious astronaut time
doing the preliminary stuff, you want all the prep done,
you want to know whatever you're testing is feasible
and most importantly, c).
I won't get to do any of that because surprise, surprise
my application to become an ESA astronaut
never got off the launch pad.
Yes, for some reason, me writing a 16 page manifesto
about my social media clout
and the promise to re-enact to the Doctor Manhattan meme
in space failed to impress the astronaut selection committee
that only chooses a few super dedicated,
utterly exceptional people, less than once a decade.
Their loss.
But another department of the European Space Agency
did get in touch with me.
A better department, let's be honest.
And they asked if I wanted to do a weightlessness flight.
I said "I don't know, I mean,
any old science influencer does them these days".
And they said "No, no, no,
this isn't some commercial fun flight just for laughs,
this is a flying laboratory with real science being done
that I can take part in".
And I said "Okay, I do hate frivolity
and I like my science to be completely serious,
but this still seems so run of the mill".
So they said "We'll give you two flights instead of one".
And I was like "Yeah, maybe, you know,
sweeten the deal a bit".
And they said
"You'll be weightless for a total of 23 minutes,
that's more than Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson,
Derek and Simone put together".
And I said "You son of a (beep).
I'm in".
Obviously, that isn't quite how it went.
This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream and Nebula.
If you want to see loads of extra footage from this trip,
head on over to Nebula now,
where you'll find an extended cut
with this much time added on to the end of this video.
To understand the physics of parabolic flights
you should watch those people that I
cheekily mentioned just now,
because they've made some fantastic videos
that explain many aspects of weightlessness training.
So instead, what I'm gonna concentrate on today
is the biomedical science that's done on board
because to reiterate, many 'vomit comets',
as they're often known are commercial operations
that anybody can just pay for and fly on.
They tend to do maybe 15 or so parabolae,
each of which gives you
about 22 to 25 seconds of weightlessness.
Whereas the Novespace Airbus 310 that I went on
is first and foremost a science campaign with one,
just one spot for a media person.
In fact, even though the US has a few companies
operating these kinds of flights,
this is the real deal from a science perspective.
So a team from NASA came all the way to France
just to use this plane.
And they even used my neck in their study,
more on that later.
The day before the first flight,
we had our orientation and checks.
(Casey Neistatish luxury plane journey vlog music)
- This plane's old enough to have
all proper controls, it's not fly-by-wire computers
stopping you from doing all kinds of stupid things,
but still very young in terms of flight hours
'cause it's not like a commercial plane that's been
all over the globe.
So it's a really good candidate for this.
(music continues)
- Well, I've just had my
pre test checks for the jugular flow study
and apparently my jugular is juicy
so they're gonna take me in the study, very nice.
And that happens tomorrow.
(alarm beeping)
(motor whirring)
- [Man] There is one thing
that has nourished our soul. - [Child] Mom,
that YOUTUBER is on TV.
- [Man] And elevated our species above its origins,
and that is our courage.
The dreams of an entire planet
are focused tonight on those fourteen brave souls
traveling into the heavens.
- [Woman] That's man's not a YOUTUBER,
that's your daddy.
- [Man] And may we all, citizens the world over,
see these events through.
Godspeed, and good luck to you.
- So I'm...
We are on the parabolic flight on the way up
yet to make the first parabola.
And I'm sitting next to Neil Melville,
who is the director of parabolic flights at ESA,
is that right?
- It's the parabolic flight coordinator.
- Coordinator.
Neil, I think you've described it before as a
flying laboratory.
- Yeah, it's a, it really is a flying laboratory.
And it's really quite unique because there are so many
different types of experiments that
onboarding it's a very small space
and different teams from all over Europe
are investigating those really different things.
- Onboard for this campaign we had a whole bunch
of physics experiments which were fascinating,
but you don't really want me attempting
to explain them in any detail.
I can tell you that we had experiments about novel ways to
safely deorbit satellites instead of
blasting them out of the sky like the
Russian government recently did.
One about attitude correction for tiny femto satellites,
one about heat transfer in zero gravity,
because you don't have the usual convection currents.
And one about the Djanibekhov effect.
And if you don't know what the Djanibekhov effect is,
I mean, frankly, I don't know what to tell you.
No, I mean I don't know what to tell you.
- So really loads of different stuff onboard,
and also a few biomedical experiments.
- Right.
And let's hear a bit more about them.
Now, I will get to the science in a moment,
but first of all, I had to twat about a bit.
I know it's hard for you lay people to tell,
but not all of this is aimless twattery,
some is high-level content-generating twattery
as I was trying to do CPR in space because
of my tendency to cause in-air medical emergencies.
That's gonna be a video on its own.
Make sure you're subscribed because that's coming soon,
but let's concentrate on the proper scientists for now.
A team from St. Mary's University in London
were testing an innovative sled,
which reproduces the act of jumping
without relying on gravity.
As you might already know,
or indeed remember from my previous videos,
one of the biggest problems in microgravity
is the loss of bone density, which could be catastrophic
on a long journey such as going to Mars.
Plyometrics, or jumping, is a fantastic way to stimulate
bone growth, which is why basketball
and squash players have some of the highest bone density.
Indeed, I used to be a pretty serious sprinter
and my favorite part of training was plyo.
And even in my advanced years,
I still like to do it now and again.
Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to try the sled out,
not least,
because I was busy offering my beautiful neck veins to NASA.
Well, when I wasn't doing this
or this
or this.
The second biomedical experiment was a biggie.
- I am Dr. Karina Marshall-Goebel,
I am a senior scientist with KBR in the NASA
Johnson Space Center Cardiovascular and Vision Laboratory.
We're investigating the cerebral venous outflow dynamics
during weightlessness.
So we're gonna be looking at the internal jugular vein,
the brachiocephalic veins and the blood flow dynamics
that occur both in one g and zero g.
- [Rohin] I know you also do some work regarding
nerves and eyes and things.
But they're pretty boring, so let's concentrate on the
vascular stuff because you do something very unusual
for research in this field.
And you won a lot of mainstream media headlines
with a study you published a couple of years ago.
Tell us about, a bit about what that shows.
- Sure, so we did a study on the International Space Station
with crew members undergoing long duration space flights,
so anywhere from four to nine months
on the International Space Station.
And we looked at the cerebral venous outflow
looking at the internal jugular veins,
but mostly with the interest of understanding
the outflow of the blood flow from the eyes.
We had very interesting findings,
we had one crew member that actually had a blood clot
in their left internal jugular vein.
And about half of the subjects
had very abnormal blood flow in the jugular vein.
We saw a flow stasis, so no flow at all,
we saw reverse flow
where it was going in the wrong direction.
And this was very surprising incidental findings.
So what we're doing today is
we are going to be looking at the blood flow findings
on parabolic flight,
we wanna understand the time course better
because the first time we looked at blood flow
in space flight was on flight day 45.
So we don't know if this is something
that takes a lot of time to develop,
or if it happens immediately
upon exposure to weightlessness.
So understanding that time course
will help us understand the risk.
Is it a risk for very short missions,
suborbital flights, commercial tourism, flights to the moon,
or is it really just a risk for Mars
and long duration space flight?
- [Rohin] That's big implications
because potentially having a clot in such an important vein
could be catastrophic on any kind of flight.
- Absolutely.
And it's never something that you wanna hear,
somebody having a blood clot,
especially when they are thousands of miles away from earth
in standard medical care.
- Now, I was in the slightly unusual position
of being a test subject,
but also being able to do and interpret these scans.
So obviously I couldn't help but look at my results.
However, I promised Karina that I wouldn't divulge anything.
So I can't wait for the paper to be published
because I think the results are going to be amazing.
We did have a bit of a laugh
because the physiologist from NASA that scanned my neck
completed the dataset very quickly,
but then had a mid-air rendezvous with their sick bag.
So we joked that it would be useful for all test subjects
to be able to finish the study themselves.
But let's not stop the ultrasound fun there,
the nice people at Philips loaned me their swanky
Lumify ultrasound doofer,
which plugs straight into your phone.
So I scanned my heart in zero gravity.
I mean, did you really expect anything different from me?
Now, this sequence was cut shorter than planned.
Ideally, I wanted to measure blood flow
out of the heart in hyper and zero gravity
and compare the two.
The only window or angle that I can
see my heart nicely when scanning myself is here,
subcostally, right underneath the solar plexus.
There are other windows in different parts of the rib cage,
but I just don't get a good picture when I'm scanning myself
because of the position you need to be in.
Plus I don't think anybody on the plane
really wanted to see me topless.
Okay, so
I'm ably assisted by Lars here.
What I'm gonna try and do is scan my heart
in hyper and zero gravity
and see if we can spot any differences.
This is little a Philips device that they kindly lent me.
However, having just been spun really rapidly,
I'm not feeling that great.
So I'm not sure that pushing on my stomach
is really the best idea, but let's give it a try.
I have to kind of hold my breath a bit
to bring the heart down.
Here's that subcostal view, you can see the left ventricle
and right ventricle pumping there and the both atria.
[Rohin VO] If you're only feeling mildly queasy with this footage,
that's testament to Sébastian's incredible camera work
while being thrown around an airplane.
Okay, hypergravity.
[Rohin VO] I doubt I'd even have kept myself
pointing in the same direction leave aside a camera.
With the eye of faith I think you can see
less blood returning to the heart from the body
in hypergravity,
which makes sense because it's being pooled in the legs.
In zero gravity the amount of blood
the heart pumps with each beat goes up initially
within a few seconds
as fluid redistributes in the upper body.
But extended periods in space are not good for your heart
as it becomes weaker and actually changes shape.
So that is my heart in zero gravity.
Nice.
The flight doctor assessed all of us the day before flying
and when I reported to him
that I never really get motion sickness,
he gave me a tiny dose of the anti sickness injection.
After all homeopathy is very popular in France
and I was absolutely fine.
So the following day for the second flight,
I got cocky, I went full anti-vax.
These dodgy doctors always trying to make you take drugs.
I said mais non docteur, je n'ai pas besoin de ton
speciale medicine pour les bebés and I went without.
On the plane, flying up,
at this point feeling a bit like Top Gun,
I got chatting to the Novespace crew
who've done hundreds of these flights
and I bragged about my anti-jab stance.
And they just looked at me and said
they always get an injection.
Interestingly,
it's not the zero gravity that makes you sick,
it's the hypergravity.
And sticking that ultrasound probe right in my tummy
under the solar plexus meant I had to sit out a few parabola
looking distinctively green.
It was not what the doctor ordered.
I'll do on the next one.
This was one of the most amazing things I've ever done
and a real dream come true.
Thank you, Neil and everybody at ESA
and Novespace who made it happen.
It had been postponed so many times with the pandemic
I'd almost accepted it was never going to go ahead.
One slight shame is that I was originally scheduled
to go on a flight that simulated martian and lunar gravity,
as well as zero gravity.
And I had a plan to breakdance,
maybe become the first person to breakdance
in Martian gravity.
Zero gravity isn't really conducive to dancing,
but I wasn't going to let that stop me trying.
And those would have been ideal to do some breakdancing
in partial gravity.
I suspect this isn't gonna work.
It's my last parabola in the free floating area
so I'm gonna try and do some windmills,
which I haven't done for a long time.
[CRITICAL HIT]
Yeah, I don't know if that was a success,
but it went about as well as I expected.
- [Neil] Another graceful and elegant landing.
- Don't forget to watch out
for my CPR in space video soon.
As you can imagine, I had a ton more footage from this trip
that I wanted to share,
so I've put a bunch of extras into an extended cut
over on Nebula.
Instead of this ad read, the video over there continues.
Nebula is a streaming platform that I co-founded,
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Thanks for watching, you space cadets.
(upbeat music)