Wanna be an astronaut?
I hope you like spelunking!
Hey moon walkers, Trace here for DNews.
Training to become an astronaut takes years.
They have to be ready for anything, which is why they take courses in engineering, medical
sciences, public speaking, even Russian if they’re going to be aboard the ISS.
All those things you can learn easily down here on solid ground, but when you’re on
Earth, how do you train for all the possible scenarios in the far-off isolation of space?
You may not realize it but space is a stressful environment.
To prepare for its rigors, the ESA sends astronauts through the CAVES course, which stands for
Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills because
the ESA doesn’t understand acronyms.
During the course, astronauts from all over the world spend two weeks in a cave.
They’re deprived of natural light and familiar surroundings while the instructors throw new
problems at them to keep them under constant tension.
They have to learn to work together, which is not easy when you’re stressed, your body
clock is messed up, and you’re dealing across cultural boundaries.
Training in harsh environments is a running theme for astronauts.
Astronauts-to-be have been left stranded for days in deserts, frozen tundra, and chucked
out of helicopters into the mediterranean sea.
Part of the goal is to learn to survive in case of a crash landing, but more importantly
it helps astronauts learn to get along when they’re stuck in space with only each other.
Learning to work together is all well and good, but how do you train to work in a weightless
environment?
The most well known tool to get astronauts ready for that space oddity is what they call
The Vomit Comet, a modified cargo plane with an empty padded interior.
The Vomit Comet can simulate a zero gravity environment by flying in parabolic arcs.
At the top of the arc when the plane starts to descend again, it does so at the same rate
as gravity.
Inside the astronauts start to float, or at least that's what it looks like.
Really they’re just falling with style.
After 25 seconds of falling they start heading up again, experiencing 1.8 gs before starting
to float.
They’ll do this about 30 times a flight.
I think you see where it gets its name.
Floating for a few seconds at a time is good preparation for what it’ll be like inside
the ISS.
But they can’t exactly wear bulky space suits inside the plane, I mean, what would
you do if you threw up inside the helmet?
So, to get ready for spacewalks, NASA built a giant swimming pool.
It’s called the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or NBL.
At the bottom of its 23 million liters of water is a mock-up of the ISS -- although
not quite as large.
In the NBL astronauts can practice the missions they’ll be doing in full space suits.
We recently spoke with Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria to ask about his training experience in the
NBL:
"We would do the tasks that we were gonna perform on a planned spacewalk underwater
several times before we would do it for real.
You know they have lightweight mock ups of things or neutrally buoyant mock ups and it's
actually extremely helpful because when you get outside it feels pretty comfortable."
The suits the astronauts wear in the NBL are weighted in such a way that they are neutrally
buoyant underwater, meaning that even though they and the suit can have a combined mass
of almost 160 kilograms, underwater they don’t sink or float.
They just hang out, like they would in space.
There are some important differences though: the drag of the water means that some tasks
are easier and are others are harder.
And the astronauts aren’t weightless inside the suit, so if it isn’t fit well and they’re
in an odd orientation like with their head upside down, it’ll be very uncomfortable.
And comfort is important, when you consider that for approximately every hour an astronaut
will spacewalk, they’ll spend approximately 10 in the pool.
When astronauts are in space they’re dealing with something completely new to the human
experience, and the stakes are high if they get it wrong.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why space agencies go to such extremes to prepare
them here on Earth.
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We spend all this time preparing for what space will feel like, but what would actually
happen if you went into space without a space suit?
Find out here.
You think you could handle a ride on the Vomit Comet?
Let us know in the comments, make sure you come back here everyday for more DNews and
thanks for watching.