Stories from the stars: Life aboard the ISS
AccuWeather's Bernie Rayno talks with astronauts Michael Barratt and Tracy Caldwell Dyson aboard the International Space Station who answer all your burning questions while floating in zero gravity.
Transcript
00:00AccuWeather, this is Mission Control, Houston. Please call station for a voice check.
00:05Station, this is Bernie Randall with AccuWeather. How do you hear me?
00:10We hear you loud and clear. How us?
00:12Alright, loud and clear. You look and sound fantastic.
00:17And welcome to a very special edition of AccuWeather's Ask the Experts. I'm Bernie
00:33Randall. We go beyond the forecast to give you the how and the why on all of the cool
00:37and interesting stuff you've wondered about and wanted to ask in weather, space and science.
00:43Today's guests are literally out of this world. We're taking a trip to the International
00:48Space Station, about 250 miles above us, to talk to NASA astronauts Mike Barrett and Tracy
00:54C. Dyson. According to NASA, the ISS launched in 1998 and it orbits the Earth at speeds
01:01of up to 17,000 miles per hour. Thank you for taking your time, Mike and Tracy. Mike,
01:07can you describe this mission and your role as pilot?
01:12Well, it's a good question. My role as pilot was on the Dragon, the little spaceship that
01:17brought us up here with the Crew 8. And my role was really to back up the commander and
01:23to be ready to take control of the vehicle if need be, which unfortunately from my standpoint
01:29did not arise. We had a great ride up here. It's a great little spaceship. But that was
01:33our commute to work. And really the focus of our mission is here on the ISS. And over
01:39a period of about six months to conduct the research, the tasks before us, to maintain
01:43the station, upgrade it, and to do a few spacewalks. So it's a very multimedia-packed mission,
01:50if you will, from the rocket ride up here and descend at the end to the six months of
01:55hard work and just amazing science in the middle.
01:59And Tracy, what is your role in the mission?
02:02Well, like the rest, I'm what is called a flight engineer. And my job is to help maintain
02:07the space station and to help set up and run experiments, to talk to the public, to
02:14do some of the more critical dynamic operations like capture vehicles that come up, cargo
02:20ships with the robotic arm, as well as do spacewalks, just a whole host of things.
02:27And Mike, how many other people are on the ISS? How would you each describe daily life
02:35on the International Space Station?
02:38Well, right now we're sort of in our normal crewing mode. So there's seven souls up here.
02:44There are three Russian cosmonauts and four American astronauts. And there are sort of
02:51territories, if you will. There's Russian modules and U.S. modules, Japanese, European,
02:56Italian. And it really is an international station with an integrated crew, which we
03:01really enjoy quite well. All of us are here really for the same reason. And life on board
03:07is kind of a mix. There's a bit of a routine. And about when we go to bed, we get up.
03:12We try to do our exercise for a couple hours plus every day to maintain our bones and
03:17muscles. But the science and the jobs change every day.
03:20So today I started my day with about two and a half hours of doing human body science,
03:26doing scans, ultrasound scans with investigators on the ground, both in Europe and in Canada.
03:33Both of these are folks I knew in the space medical community.
03:36So it was really quite a delight for me. Characterizing how the body changes in space
03:40with this imagery is one of the great experiments that we get to do up here.
03:44And I just finished testing an emergency breathing mask and oxygen tank.
03:49So you never know quite what you're going to do.
03:51And Tracy, you've been in space on three missions now for more than 200 days.
03:57Have you developed a daily routine?
04:00Well, like Mike said, our days are pretty set for us during the work week where we we get up.
04:08We have a meeting with the control centers around the world that start our day.
04:12And then we have a whole series of activities. And then in the middle there, like Mike said,
04:18to maintain our bone mass, our muscle mass, our flexibility, those kinds of things.
04:23And then we finish off the afternoon with a whole host of different tasks,
04:28ranging from maintenance of the station to science on board to other operations,
04:33proficiencies and things like that.
04:36And then we end with another conference with our teams on the ground.
04:40And then we get ready for the evening, having dinner together, getting ready for sleep
04:46and any kind of relaxing that we can do.
04:49And Mike, we have to ask, what led you to become an astronaut?
04:53Well, I think my story is similar to many hundreds who have come before me
04:57and certainly my office mates. I think like everyone, I'm fueled by curiosity
05:01and I had a lot of varying interests. I really loved astronomy. I loved flying.
05:07I loved oceanography. I love photography. I got a degree in marine zoology.
05:12I went to medical school. And if you were to look for a place that puts all of those together,
05:17it's NASA, it's human spaceflight.
05:20And I think that's a common story with all of our folks in the office.
05:23It's an amazing slice of humanity that's just fueled by curiosity
05:28and just loving to learn new things at the same time
05:32and bringing a lot of diverse interests to the table.
05:35They all intersect with human spaceflight.
05:37So I have followed a path of basic science, medicine eventually, private flight,
05:45and then eventually went into space medicine.
05:47And you can only do that in a very few places in the world.
05:50One of them is the NASA Johnson Space Center,
05:52and I was able to make the leap to the astronaut corps from there.
05:55And Tracy, same question. What events led to you working in space?
06:00Well, my inspiration came when I was in high school,
06:04and the world was excited about something NASA was doing,
06:07and that was putting a teacher in space.
06:09And before then, I really hadn't thought much about what astronauts were,
06:12what they were doing, mainly because I wasn't around test pilots much in the military.
06:19But when a teacher was selected to go into space, it got my attention
06:23because most of my days and my life was spent with teachers.
06:27Teachers were the people who ushered me through school,
06:31as well as coached me in sports and counseled me.
06:35And so when a teacher became an astronaut,
06:38it really inspired me to look into NASA and what they were doing.
06:42And it happened to be that they were working on building the space station.
06:46At the time, it was called Space Station Freedom.
06:48It was just the United States, but then it changed
06:50and became the International Space Station,
06:53where you had to have multiple countries working together,
06:57different cultures coming together, building a space station in space,
07:02and doing all the things that at the time in my life I enjoyed doing,
07:09working with tools, working with people, and just being physically fit
07:16and having that be a part of your job.
07:19So things like that made me pursue the Astronaut Corps.
07:23And then when I was eligible, I submitted an application,
07:26and the rest then is just history.
07:29Well, it certainly sounds like you have a lot of work to do up there,
07:33but we have to ask, what do you both do for some fun?
07:37Well, we're chuckling about the things we're not going to tell you about.
07:41Well, one of which is playing with our food, which she was mentioning.
07:45You can't not play with your food up here,
07:47and we've learned that we can actually kind of hurl something along a trajectory
07:52and then go fetch it ourselves.
07:54That is just indicative of zero gravity.
07:57It's still so novel.
07:59I think I've now spent about 250-something days in space,
08:03and every day I learn something new and wonderful about zero gravity.
08:06It's magical.
08:08And frankly, any time you get to look out the window
08:11at this incredibly beautiful planet, that is just amazing.
08:16That's one of our favorite pastimes, and always will be,
08:19and to capture the photographs we can.
08:21Otherwise, we listen to music.
08:23We make things that we can't make anywhere else.
08:27We enjoy sometimes calling people unexpectedly
08:30and try to convince them that, yes, we really are up on the space station.
08:34But really, the magic is here.
08:36It's just something to savor.
08:38I'm throwing in a little wrinkle.
08:41Do you sleep better in the space station, or do you sleep better at home?
08:46We'll each answer that.
08:48It is a perception of myself and many that you keep a same level of alertness
08:54for a little bit less sleep up here,
08:56and that was certainly true on my first long flight.
08:59And once you kind of get back used to it again,
09:02you just start not going to feel the weight of your body on a bed
09:05or the weight of your head on a pillow.
09:07You're floating.
09:08After a little while, that just gets to be incredibly pleasant.
09:12And the funny thing is you don't really nod off
09:15because nodding off is kind of dependent on gravity pulling your head down
09:19and kind of catching yourself.
09:20That doesn't happen.
09:21You just kind of drift to sleep.
09:24It's really quite wonderful, and I personally really enjoy my rack time.
09:29I'm going to let Tracy answer as well.
09:31Yes.
09:32What I notice is that, like Mike was saying,
09:35I think you can sleep less with the same alertness up here.
09:38I sleep less, but I sleep deeper, I notice.
09:42I go into a very deep sleep.
09:45I'm very comfortable.
09:46And as Jeanette, one of our other crewmates had said,
09:49I heard her say that her dreams were more vivid,
09:51and I have to agree that it just seems like dreams become more vivid.
09:55At least that's been my experience.
09:57Our conversation from space is just getting started.
10:00Up next, we're asking about the impact of space travel on the human body.
10:06That's a really big question with a really big answer.
10:10Coming up, Mike Barrett explains the toll space travel takes on the body
10:14and how to adopt to an out-of-this-world lifestyle.
10:18Plus, what is it like to walk in space?
10:23On a professional level, it's one of the most rewarding
10:26and very challenging parts of our job.
10:28Any astronaut will tell you that we spend a lot of effort in our training
10:33throughout our career learning how to do a spacewalk.
10:37Hear what they experience as soon as they step out into the atmosphere.
10:41You'll also hear how a total solar eclipse looks from the perspective of an astronaut.
10:47All of that and more when Ask the Experts continues.
10:59And welcome back to AccuWeather Ask the Experts.
11:03I'm Bernie Raynaud.
11:04Let's get back to our conversation with NASA astronauts Mike Barrett
11:08and Tracy C. Dyson aboard the International Space Station.
11:13Mike, you're a physician as well as an astronaut.
11:16Now, we have a viewer question.
11:17Tom from New York City has this question.
11:20What is the impact of space travel on the human body?
11:24Well, I don't know if you can see my fingers,
11:26but this is the thickness of a textbook that I'm the senior author or editor on
11:32about space medicine.
11:34And let me just tell you that that's a really big question with a really big answer.
11:39Every system in the body changes.
11:41And it's really quite amazing how adaptable we are.
11:45You know, we start losing bone and muscle mass,
11:48which we try to counter with exercise.
11:51But we also lose some blood volume.
11:53We lose blood mass.
11:54We lose plasma volume.
11:56Our lungs change shape.
11:57Our heart changes shape.
11:59The diaphragm moves up.
12:00The organs move a little bit.
12:01The immune system changes.
12:03Your sense of balance changes like crazy.
12:06So cardiovascular regulation, I mean, basically everything.
12:09And really, that's kind of my passion is how we adapt to zero gravity.
12:14Most of them are very adaptive.
12:16Some of them are probably less.
12:19Friendly to the human body, but it shows the resilience,
12:22the plasticity of our bodies and how amazing we really are to challenge it
12:28and put it in an environment like this.
12:30And we still become really good workers,
12:32but we're now three-dimensional workers who can function in a very novel
12:37gravitational environment and bring the human capacity for creative thought
12:42and observation into bear.
12:43I mean, it's really an amazing thing.
12:46So that's a really short answer to a really big question,
12:50but I encourage people to go out and learn more about it.
12:53And, Tracy, you are also a chemist.
12:56What is your research focus and what kind of experiments are you doing?
13:01Well, I'm not doing any chemistry per se up here,
13:04but what I have been involved in are various studies that were developed
13:10on the ground, spent a lot of time with biofabrication facility
13:14where they're printing actual tissues, samples of organs.
13:22And so my job is really just to help set up the experiments
13:26and to exchange samples and help basically take care of the facility.
13:34Various other experiments, like Mike was mentioning,
13:37we're human subjects for.
13:38And so we either attach electrodes and send signals down to the ground
13:45so they can see what kind of changes there are in our body,
13:49but also donating samples for later analysis,
13:55which also, by the way, utilizes some really interesting other facilities,
14:01like our minus-80-degree freezer.
14:04We've got some pretty hardy freezers up here on the space station
14:08to preserve all this science so that it could make it home for further analysis,
14:12which I think is just a testament to what a fantastic laboratory the space station is.
14:20It's fully equipped with not just novel science, but novel support for the science.
14:25Not to mention these gigantic solar arrays,
14:27which are generating a ton of power for running all of these facilities.
14:31Mike and Tracy, we feature astronomy stories here at AccuWeather.
14:35Can you describe how the total solar eclipse on April 8th looked?
14:40Sure, yeah, it was spectacular.
14:42I'll just start up front with that.
14:44Our focus was really on the shadow across the ground rather than looking up at the sun.
14:49Our big windows of observation are really pointing downwards at Earth,
14:53so that wasn't a view that was that good for us necessarily,
14:57but the shadow moving so quickly across the surface of the Earth
15:02just really reminds you that there's planetary neighbors out there
15:06and that the solar system is so much bigger than the Earth.
15:09It was really amazing to see this black, what I almost consider like a menacing shadow,
15:16creeping over this beautiful blue and green and brown Earth surface at pretty high speed.
15:22We were actually faster than it.
15:24It was moving, depending on where it was on the Earth, a few hundred to over 1,000 miles an hour.
15:29We're going 17,000 miles an hour, so we overtook it.
15:32And we saw it best at Eastern Canada.
15:35We were all crowded up in the cupola to watch it, all four of us,
15:39taking pictures, just kind of giving our verbal impressions to it as well.
15:44It was just really awe-inspiring to see.
15:46Speaking of awe-inspiring, Tracy, I understand that you've been on three spacewalks,
15:51totaling more than 22 hours.
15:54How would you describe those experiences?
15:58In some regards, it's very surreal when you think about it,
16:02that you yourself become your own satellite,
16:05and you are outside the space station in the harshest environment almost imaginable.
16:11And you're not only alive and functioning,
16:14but you're actually productive and doing something important for the space station.
16:20But on a professional level, it's one of the most rewarding and very challenging parts of our job.
16:25Any astronaut will tell you that we spend a lot of effort in our training throughout our career,
16:31learning how to do a spacewalk.
16:34And when you actually get to go outside and do one,
16:36it's one of the most rewarding experiences in our field.
16:41And so when you're out there, you almost can't believe what you're doing.
16:45But also a testament to our training, the facility, the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory,
16:49where we do our training, or the majority of it, has a replica of the space station underwater.
16:56And when we come out the hatch, it's definitely a different environment outside the space station.
17:02But the space station itself is very familiar to us.
17:05As we translate around on handrails, we're seeing very familiar surroundings,
17:11and that also is a great comfort.
17:13But then when you get a very quiescent moment, which is also brief, out in a spacewalk,
17:19when you get to look at the beautiful planet and the stars, if the lights are down low,
17:28it can take your breath away, and it can also take your focus away.
17:32So we try to limit those moments so that we stay focused and on the timeline,
17:37but it can be some of the most memorable moments of your life.
17:41We'll have more on our conversation from space with Michael and Tracy just ahead.
17:47Ask the Experts returns after a quick break.
17:58And welcome back to AccuWeather Ask the Experts.
18:01I'm Bernie Raynaud.
18:03Let's get back to our conversation with NASA astronauts Mike Barrett and Tracy C. Dyson
18:08aboard the International Space Station.
18:11And Mike, here at AccuWeather, we're interested in space weather.
18:15In your ISS environment without atmosphere, are there impacts from the changes in space weather
18:22In your ISS environment without atmosphere, are there impacts from the changes in the sun's radiation?
18:29When we're above the Earth's atmosphere,
18:32we lose a lot of protection from the atmosphere that shields us from radiation.
18:37So I'm showing you a little radiation dosimeter that we all have to carry around continually.
18:43We're basically like radiation workers at a nuclear power plant or a hospital.
18:50So anytime you're using radiation at a higher dose than normal, you carry one of these.
18:55And we actually get quite a bit higher than those industries that I mentioned.
18:59But another big thing is just the effect on our equipment.
19:02A lot of our electronics are very sensitive to radiation.
19:05And that includes our cameras.
19:07Anything that has densely packed chips basically is going to be vulnerable to radiation and single event upsets
19:15where you might actually bit flip a switch or a signal input.
19:19So it's something we deal with every day.
19:21And it's just something really interesting to us.
19:23Station, this is Houston ACR. That concludes the event. Thank you.
19:27NASA astronauts Michael Barrett and Tracy C. Dyson,
19:30thank you so much for joining us and sharing your experiences aboard the International Space Station.
19:37Thank you for joining us on AccuWeather's Ask the Experts.
19:40I'm Bernie Raynaud.
19:41Don't forget, when you have a question about weather, space or science,
19:45you can write us or send us a video question at AskTheExperts at AccuWeather.com.
19:50You can also call us at 888-566-6606.
20:15NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
20:46Thank you to all participants.
20:48Station, we are now resuming operational audio communications.
20:51Station, this is Houston ACR. That concludes the event. Thank you.