- Space is an incredibly dangerous place.
If you do something wrong, it's game over,
so the stakes are very high.
To keep everyone safe, we practice routinely
emergency procedures.
I think the biggest emergency is
is loss of depress, or depressurization.
If something's coming at you and hits the Space Station
then that's gonna cause a breach.
And it can be something as small as two centimeters
in diameter that could do a lot of damage.
Everyone would go to their respective vehicle
and close the hatches because initially, if it's
very fast, you only have so much time
to get in that vehicle safely
and be ready to go home.
Another situation we train for is
fire.
If a fire alarm goes off
on our computer screen you would see
the actual module where the smoke detectors
think you're seeing a fire.
And then you would actually physically go there
to see if you actually have identified smoke,
or flames, or anything coming out.
And the solar flare, the sun kind of burps
every so often, and sends out high energy particles
from the sun.
The dangers around solar flares are that you can
accumulate too much radiation in your body.
If there's a solar flare, all of the astronauts float
up into the doghouse, we call it
that has a ton of water bags
surrounding it.
And the water will absorb and keep the radiation
from coming into our bodies.
And we can just wait until
Houston gives us the call to say everything's clear.
As astronauts, you're trained to not be alarmed
by things.
You're trained to go into a mode of
how will I save the day,
how will I fix this,
how will I do all the steps required
to make sure that, you know, we come home safely?
(gentle music)