tv Sophie Co RT August 25, 2017 8:29am-9:01am EDT
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into the show great to have you with us now chris you were the first officer not it was to actively use social networking streaming your space experience for millions of those back at home now it was a tremendous success was a your idea or was that some kind of mission you'd been given by the command and well i think for all astronaut sophie the experience is so fantastic it's so richard so different that you try and share it any way you can on my first space flight all i had was ham radio amateur radio and a film camera so it's really hard to share but i might third space flight as you say when i was commanding the international space station we had internet or at least primitive but but internet on the space station and digital cameras and high speed video and so i could share the experience like never before and the reaction as you say was huge i think it's too good an experience too to just keep to yourself where it said the guitar he used to play space out of the onboard the i
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assess was put on board the station by the psychological team what for i mean how did the guitar help you in space just saying take your mind off work. when i was on board. the space station mir in one thousand nine hundred ninety five there was a guitar on mir made in st petersburg and when i played that guitar upon media i realize just how how important and warm and human that music is and i think the nasa psychiatrists recognize the same thing and so when the world was building the international space station with all fifteen different partners they agreed that not only should we have all the scientific equipment in the health and food but but maybe some some mental and and soulful kind of health and that's why they put the guitar on the international space station this time it's
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a canadian guitar which is nice made in vancouver and it's still up there right now sophia it's on the space that it's been up there must be for one hundred thousand orbits now the most traveled guitar in all history but it was lovely to have a chance to to play and think about where we are both in a place and in history and music is a wonderful way to do that well talking about where you are and talking about psychological dangers i mean through one of the port holes you could see home so to speak right and then through the other that's an endless voigt was that difficult to cope with i mean what mental issues did you face while working on the s.s. . i think that's really a matter of perspective sophia because here standing on the surface of the earth if you look down your home but if you look up it's an endless void so it's it's kind of how you use you you are to the environment that you're in onboard
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a space ship the world is is in the distance and you're surrounded by by the eternity of the universe but there's there's a great beauty to it and sort of like an infant leaving the home where you're taking your first steps and and starting to experience the rest of everything else and and there's a great sense of wonder and a lack of understanding but also dawning awareness of just how small your home is and how we norma's everything else is and i think that perspective is what really sits in your mind and and overwhelms your feelings is the newness of it the beauty of it the opening of understanding that comes from it that's that's what's in your mind most of the time as an astronaut or a cosmonaut onboard the space station now as a commander on the ass sas you're juggling your responsibilities here between
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machines and people all stuck for months on and in very tight living conditions right so how difficult was that part of your job. to command the crew of the international space station like the six people that are approach there right now and it's a big responsibility the space station is very complicated it's it's a machine that keeps you alive that's going a kilometer is a second twenty eight thousand kilometers an hour but it's also life or death all the time the crew on board is counting on each other with their lives with every single decision and every action so that's quite a challenge for the leader for the person who's the commander of that crew to understand the technical complexity of the ship but also the psychological complexity of the crew and to keep all of that working in harmony and that's why we take it so seriously i train and work as an astronaut for twenty one
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years i was nasa is director and russia i lived in star city for seals who was the go to dark for about four and a half years and got to know my crew as well as i possibly could we trained together for years before launch just so that when we got away from earth and were trusted with all of the responsibilities of running a space ship that we would be as not just technically competent but as completely competent as a group of human beings as possible and my job as their commander it was through that whole period selection training launch the whole time in space and then afterwards and i'm very happy with the level of success that we had as a group of six human beings now you're talking about that that as well other missions are all multinational but with all kinds of political tensions on earth right now does that create into the mission how do you manage that or all those
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issues are just left behind. astronauts are not infants or. ignorant about most of the things that are going on around the world it's a very competent and interesting group of people like the on board right now i think there are three or four different nationalities and that's normal. but we recognise that politics are transients and and often the most exciting noisy types of politics are the most transience. but meanwhile we're exploring the rest of the universe we are finding a way in despite the the transience disagreements of of cities and townships and counties and countries and and continents meanwhile we are also finding a way to cooperate to explore the rest of the universe and yeah there are
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appropriate city there are some pretty serious tensions down here on the surface and some of them very well founded but there are also some things that are bigger than that and sometimes you really need a good example you need a good shining clear. example of where human beings are cooperating and the space station is as good an example i think as exists right now and the beauty of the space station is anybody on earth can walk outside at dawn or at dusk and watch the space station the it's the brightest star in the sky over top of their heads so maybe when people need that type of symbolism the most if it's nice that it actually exists with six human beings on board finding good ways to cooperate now chris a lot of studies are performed on the i assess but most of the time is actually the officers who are being saved by scientists back on earth that forgive my ignorance
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of what do they offer and cost when it's actually do on a station besides maintenance. the space station has about two hundred experiments running. and part of the experiments as you say sophia are studying the human body just because when you take away gravity it significantly changes how the human body works so it's a way to study our are functioning that you can study on earth like how does the human balance system actually work how does your blood pressure regulation system work how does your immune system work that out as your vision integrate with your balance there's a lot of things just because we're in that laboratory that that we can study so we take advantage of it we're also of course interested in going further we want to go and stay and live on the moon and eventually travel as far as mars so you have to somehow learn all of the details and study it and figure it out so we study the
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body for those reasons but made most of the experiments are actually for other purposes staring up at the universe trying to understand the rest of everything else we have telescopes we have a huge alpha magnetic spectrometer trying to figure out what dark matter dark energy are looking at the subatomic particles from the universe and then a tremendous amount of experimentation and recording looking at the earth itself because the station goes around the world sixteen times a day and it has been since one nine hundred ninety eight and it will be till probably at least twenty twenty eight it's a tremendous platform for understanding the world itself so it's an observatory and then we do experiments on board in fluid physics in flame and in nanoparticle behavior in capillary flow it's a really busy hot bed of of experimentation so the astronauts are our laboratory rats you know where the subjects where the laboratory technicians wear
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the observers and we're also the maintenance people keeping the whole space station healthy and we even go outside on a spacewalk. to fix things as they break outside it's a busy life fascinating life and sort of right on the very edge of research and exploration now when you take off you set the g. forces like having to have a concrete pour it all over your body and that you're under intense pressure so what does it feel like when you break free of gravity and the g. force actually goes away. i was lucky enough to fly in space three times sophie twice on the american space shuttle and once on the russian soyuz and as you say it is a punishing physical load especially the space shuttle the vibration of it and the amount of power of it was staggering it was it was like being in the middle of the most violent storm that's ever happened and yet you're flying the space ship you're
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not a a passenger you're operating this incredibly complex machine and trying to be part of the decisions that successfully get into orbit and so it's physically overwhelming it's mentally hugely demanding but it only takes about nine minutes so you put up with that you fight your way through it years and years of training and then an incredible focus of the whole crew to help the vehicle get to orbit but then instantaneously after almost exactly nine minutes the ends and shut off and you're weightless you're suddenly magically. free of gravity it's like it's like a small miracle or or like a little. like a little super power all of a sudden you can fly but what it's like is that i make somebody a ladder that you were just large what do you we'll what is the sensation like. right now you and i sitting talking to each other gravity is crushing us down and
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so as soon as gravity is gone instead of feeling butterflies are weightless and you actually sort of feel like you're being pulled up just because you're so used to being pushed down so you sort of feel like you're magically being floated up towards the ceiling and it's wonderfully liberating you can somersault you can push off with your toes and fly around the room it makes everybody laugh as soon as you get to weightlessness and you make sure your ship selfie everybody laughs because it's so much fun to be weightless and my whole six months that i lived off of the earth you play with weightlessness all the time just your watch on your wrist floats around and you tumble and fly and you're the world's best gymnast or mines and i read what he made larry lobbyists when everyone's laughing and they just you know go up in the ceiling i think it's kind of like that it was chris where they take a short break right right is it well we're back we'll continue talking to chris hadfield
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where bad what chris had failed at that's right nostra not an explorer who has literally been there all the world thousands of times to talk about life in space welcome back craze now tell me something how do you get over the more mundane changes about zero gravity like moving around it's not like you can swim through air right so do you push over the surface of the station or you must know every route around the station by heart already. when you first get away lessness when the engine shut off you're clumsy you keep banging into things here and you bump
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into stuff and when i first came onboard the space station i could just see the crew that was living there they were just cringing watching watching us come come clumsily bung bumbling into theirs knocking stuff off the wall but after a while you start to get the hang of it you start to become elegance and maybe like like a fish in the sea or a porpoise or something where where you can move delicately and you don't normally push so much as you pole you give a little tug and your balance so you pivot and turn and you become quite graceful and there's almost like a gentle ballet feeling to how you move in weightlessness and you don't want to get going too fast because even though it's easy to get going fast you still have to somehow stop and you still have the mass of your body so you've got to stop at the other end so people move quite. quite elegantly once they get used to it on board a space ship so how do you keep their arms down by your side when in zero gravity.
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if you've ever seen the image of an infant before they're born. of a fetus in the womb and you see the posture that their bodies in where their arms are sort of floated up on their knees are floated in their heads tipped forward that's the natural resting position of our bodies when it's suspended you know in the fluid or when you're weightless so if you just completely relax your body in space your arms will actually float up to about here it's just the relaxed position so you don't ever have your arms down by your sides in space that's a gravity thing and if you don't believe it stand on your head and your arms won't be down by your sides so you just get used to the fact that everybody's arms are floating here or or you're deliberately holding on with one hand and then your other arm is doing something it's just it's just a new normal it's different and you just live with a different posture but i prefer it weightlessness is much easier and gentler and
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maybe even more natural somehow than than always being crushed down under gravity so sleep is a big topic for me as say ten hours a day right so i'm very worried for you at how do you guys sleep strapped to the bag over there do you find it tough to get a good night's sleep in space. when it's time to go to sleep and of course since you go around the world in ninety two minutes you get a sunrise or a sunset every forty six minutes so you can't go just off the the regular pattern suit just go off time of day we chose greenwich time same time as london england so when it's bed time in london england here's what you do you you put on pajamas because because you might have to respond to a problem during the night and then you float down to where your tiny little bedroom is and floating on the wall is your sleeping bag and it's just tied with a string and you float up and around your feet into the sleeping bag and then your arms through the armholes you zipped up your sleeping bag you close the little door
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and then you shut off the lights and now you're in a small perfectly quiet perfectly dark place and every muscle relaxers your arms float up your head tips forward and you're not strapped to anything you're floating just gently constrained by just the cloth of years of your sleeping bag. and you don't need a pillow and you don't need a mattress you never have to roll over you don't you know your shoulder doesn't get sore you're just come every single muscle in your body is relaxed it's the most comfortable sleep you you've ever had almost at home from work or effect imagine a farm and you love it. if you love it it's good for your back i think when we went on mosque and company figure out a way to make space flight a little more affordable i think people will really enjoy the experience of space flight just just for the way it was sleeping so i mean we're talking about all the
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apps eyes right now but i know that you walked three times in space and you went temporarily blind during your first spacewalk but other than that what goes through your head when you fly through nothingness are you too concentrated on the task at hand to think about bigger picture or do you actually constantly look around at all . when you're flying on an airliner you know on aeroflot or someone part of the crew on board the pilots up front are extremely focused on operating the vehicle and they're paying attention and they're professional so that the passengers in the back can relax and look out the window space ships right now are like super complicated airliners so that most of the time everybody on board has to be very focused on operating the ship just like the pilots of an airliner a big ship or something but sometimes the ship is working fine as you say you're
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you're flying through nothingness at twenty five times the speed of sound and you let yourself relax and you can pull yourself over to the window and see the magnificence of the world where you cross russia in ten minutes from one side to the other biggest country in the world around the whole world in ninety two minutes so you really start to get a sense of the beauty that surrounds you and you're focused all the time on listening to your machine and being ready to react there's no passengers on board a space station yet but eventually there will be and will get artists and and people up there that that can really express the magnificence of it for now we have to be able to be the crew we do our best to explain it to everybody and even to explain it to ourselves but it's still kind of a busy professional technical place to live and work now another auster not scott kelly said that it's surreal to realize that there is nothing but the space
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separating you from instant death just a few inches away have you ever thought of it like that. yes and like a few other astronauts and including scott i've done some spacewalks i think what's really sort of thought provoking in a spacesuit is that it's just made of cloth and it's only you know a little bit thick and it's it's an inflated balloon around you and just on the other side of it is that the emptiness the vacuum of space that would kill you really in one breath so you do kind of recognize that it's a very fragile little human invention that is allowing you to stay alive but you know that when you're driving your car down the highway at one hundred kilometers an hour that's kind of sort of the same thing or if you're scuba diving and you're twenty or thirty meters under the water you recognize you could be dead in one breath down there too so at some point you have to say ok the technology is good
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enough and i'm trained and competent and and and ready enough that even though this is an unnatural environment for me to be in the technology is good and i'm trustworthy and therefore now i can be in a place that otherwise i could never be scuba diving or even more magnificently on the outside of a space ship you know holding on with one hand with the whole world just pouring by beside you. you get over the danger of it and you accept it so that then you can really let yourself be immersed in the wonder of it but i do legend you experience some sort of cognitive dissonance all the time because i mean you miss earth when you're in space and you probably miss the sense of being in space when on earth which senses stronger. i tried not to live in dissonance if i can i i try and except where i am and not wish that i were somewhere else and and i
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think that helps. especially when you're doing something very complex because if a large part of you is worried about just being there or if it's wishing that you were somewhere else then it's hard to properly exist where you are concentrate on what you're doing or make the most of where you are. try and be as accepting as i can and open to what's going on so that i can contribute the most and hopefully i can receive the most also know chris ask oaken to several people who've been to space or who study space and they all believe there rees life out there do you really were alone in the universe. it's not really a belief issue so if i mean it's like do you believe that that this is a shirt well either it is or it is it's not a belief you know it it's it's it's kind of an interesting way to phrase the
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question if they do believe that one and one equals two well it's either a fact or it isn't it's not really a belief the real question is have we found any evidence of life yet and the answer is no we haven't we're looking that's why we're driving around on mars and and actually why we're going to dive close to the rings of saturn here shortly and why we're looking on the moons of all the other planets and why are our telescopes are looking at other stars for other planets were trying to answer that question so that it's not just some sort of weird belief but it's just a fact like whether there's life on earth or not yes or no so far we haven't found any evidence the the statistics the odds are pretty overwhelming the more we look the more we find and we've pretty much shown that every star has planets and we can see almost guess how many stars there are just by looking through our best telescopes the numbers are staggering lee huge somewhere like a septillion which is such a big number it may as well be infinite and if there's
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a septillion planets out there and billions of years of time to think that we're the only life in the universe seems just kind of arrogance and ignorance but until we found any evidence nobody knows so i don't know the answer to the question that's why we're exploring that's why we're looking it's why the six of us are up on the space station right now we're trying to find out amongst all the other things whether we're alone in the universe or not we just don't know chris it's been so wonderful toggle to. bring me back the news about the life in space sometimes good luck with everything for a topic craze had failed astronaut and space ship commander and best selling author of disgust. experience onboard space craft and outer space and talking about the future of space faring that's it for this edition of sophia call see you next time .
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coming her children stranded at an orphanage in iraq set to be reunited with their loved ones in the chechen republic. he launched a campaign to help with that safe return. plus emergency services in the iraqi city of mosul continue an extensive cleanup operation pulling hundreds of bodies from the rubble of the devastated city responded. to. the destruction and still in ruins already show you what we also heard about the thousands killed and civilian.
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