The Astronaut Training Pool

01The neutral buoyancy lab, or the pool as I like to call it, it's a really remarkable place.

02It's so massive.

03200 feet long, 100 feet wide, and the water is crystal clear.

04And if none of the safety divers have started to get in the water yet, the top is as still as it can be.

05The water is so clear you can just see straight through and see all the models down in the water.

06And so you get to see the magnitude of what you're going to go down and work on here shortly.

07It's an amazing experience.

08When I first came down here, that was when I first put on the space suit and was lowered into the water and started floating around in the water.

09It felt like this is astronaut training.

10Hi, I'm Nick Haig.

11I'm an astronaut at NASA.

12I explore space for a living.

13This is NASA's Curious Universe.

14Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

15I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

16In this episode, we're exploring the underwater training ground where astronauts train for space.

17There are humans in space right now.

18In fact, humans have lived in space continuously for nearly 20 years on board the International Space Station.

19This International Space Station, it is gigantic.

20Imagine this space station floating around with these gigantic solar arrays, these wings of solar cells that are collecting the sun's energy, and that's how we power the station.

21It's the size of a football stadium.

22On the inside, it's got kind of the volume of a large jumbo jet, and so that's the area we live and work in.

23We're up there.

24It took 100 launches, and it took 100 spacewalks to put this thing together, and we've been up there living inside the station.

25It's been inhabited continually for two decades now.

26The space station orbits around Earth, about 250 miles above ground.

27The international crew that lives and works on board is doing critical research that can't be done anywhere else.

28We're up there trying to perform this science because on the space station, gravity isn't the dominant force.

29You know, if you look around you, everything around you is controlled by gravity.

30Everything in the room you're sitting in is held down to a table or to a floor because of gravity.

31And up there, all that goes away.

32And that's when we can make some really key scientific discoveries.

33The ISS is a unique place to study human health and medicine, on top of the more obvious scientific questions about astronomy and meteorology.

34Weightlessness helps us understand the possibilities for long-term human space exploration.

35And it helps us understand life here on Earth a little better, too.

36Our job, working on the space station, is to go up there and perform science experiments and try to discover new things, whether those are new materials that might help people on the ground, or those may be new medical breakthroughs that might help people on the ground.

37And so we're up there constantly kind of pushing the boundary of what we know, helping the scientists on the ground make those breakthrough discoveries.

38It's allowing us to learn more about ourselves, the human body, about the universe around us, and how to improve life on the ground, and also how to take those discoveries and push further into the unknown, into space.

39Before embarking to a place where very few humans have been, astronauts train for two years.

40In that short time, they're required to learn a lot more than you might expect.

41Astronaut training, in a nutshell, is you need to be a jack-of-all-trades.

42You need to be able to do a little bit of everything.

43Repairing and servicing the International Space Station, learning Russian, and receiving medical training.

44Astronauts must be prepared for every possible scenario.

45But before an astronaut ever sets foot aboard the space station, they have to train somewhere you might not expect.

46This isn't just any old swimming pool.

47It's the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, located at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

48This special pool contains 6.2 million gallons of water, enough to fit nine Olympic-sized pools inside.

49It's where astronauts like Nick come to train.

50So the pool is this gigantic pool.

51It's 200 feet long, it's 100 feet wide, and it's 40 feet deep.

52It is enormous.

53It's still not big enough to fit the entire space station in it, but it fits full-scale, large chunks of the station so that we can practice.

54And that's our training ground.

55The pool is where astronauts first get acquainted with the armor that protects them from space, their spacesuit.

56And that can be its own challenge.

57First thing, you've got to suit up.

58It can take about 45 minutes, and the assistance of multiple suit technicians to get the suit on, checking to make sure that every piece is fitted and working properly, from the helmet locking into place to the gloves fitting around every finger.

59You have to learn how to use the spacesuit because it's not like wearing clothes.

60It's constraining, and it limits some of the things you can do.

61It's fatiguing because of the pressure of having it stiff.

62And so you have to learn how to use it.

63And that takes hours underwater getting to know your spacesuit.

64Once you have the suit on, and it's been double and triple checked, you can prepare to enter the neutral buoyancy lab.

65Even though you're not out in space just yet, the pool will simulate what you might feel once you're out there.

66Why?

67Because being underwater simulates weightlessness.

68The neutral buoyancy lab is there to train us because that's one of the places or one of the ways that we can try to simulate being weightless.

69So that idea of neutral buoyancy.

70It's called neutral buoyancy because when you're in water and you don't sink, but also you don't float, you're completely neutral.

71It's like you're hovering in place.

72And so it feels as though I'm weightless.

73And I can maneuver myself around the outside of the space station and have the experience of working in a weightless environment.

74And so we're constantly trying to balance out the weight of an object with its buoyancy so that things just float in front of you.

75Weights and flotation devices are carefully combined to let astronauts feel what it's like to be weightless in space.

76When an astronaut is training in the pool, their backpack, the primary life support subsystem, is filled with air they can breathe and instruments that monitor their health.

77You've got to get everything straight because once you go underwater, that's all you've got are the tools you took with you.

78And you're going to be down there for six hours.

79That's about the amount of time it takes for a spacewalk in actual space.

80Once you're in the pool, waterproof instructions are attached to your arm and you rehearse the spacewalk as if you were doing the real thing.

81All right.

82Nick, before we get started on that, if we could just help me guide that out.

83The whole time, a team of people is watching every movement of your practice spacewalk.

84They monitor the pressure inside the suit and the temperature.

85And the test director is making sure that the whole process is going according to plan.

86Good teamwork there.

87So I need to float a little bit higher on this end.

88Okay.

89Okay.

90So that's good alignment.

91Trained scuba divers guide you around a replica of the outside of the International Space Station.

92Yeah, and I can...

93Looks good here.

94Yeah, we're aligned down here.

95Okay.

96Having this full-size mock-up of the space station underwater allows us to essentially memorize where every handrail is, where every handhold is.

97And if I'm going to work in a particular location on orbit, I will have seen that and understand that location on the ground.

98Astronauts are explorers.

99And a pretty big part of their job is going on spacewalks.

100We practice doing spacewalks so that when we need to go outside and fix something or increase a capability, add some new piece of equipment, we're ready to do that.

101During a spacewalk, the only thing that stands between an astronaut and the vacuum of space is their space suit.

102And while they're attached to the outside of the International Space Station, they're orbiting the Earth at five miles a second.

103That's like driving from Boston all the way to Philadelphia in just one minute.

104It's difficult to replicate the sensation of being in space.

105But with the neutral buoyancy lab, NASA can get pretty close.

106I got to tell you, when I did my first spacewalk, shortly after we went out the hatch, the sun set and it got dark.

107And it felt exactly like I was in the pool.

108To the point where I remember having the thought go through my head, you know, where are all the bubbles?

109Because normally in the pool, you see all the bubbles from people breathing underwater.

110It was one of those things I was like, wow, this is so close to what we're doing underwater in the NBL.

111It's just amazing training.

112Space is unforgiving.

113Without the protection of the Earth's atmosphere, the temperature can either soar or plummet by a range of over 500 degrees.

114And there's only a little bit of time to get through your to-do list.

115Six and a half hours is the usual ballpark for a spacewalk.

116And that might sound like a lot of time, but remember, there's a finite amount of oxygen in your tank.

117You need to keep track of the power in your battery and monitor water for spacesuit cooling.

118And most importantly, you have to watch your carbon dioxide levels.

119The longer you're in space, the more likely you are to get hit by flying debris.

120Micro- meteoroids are a spacesuit's worst enemy.

121Even a piece of metal that's as small as a grain of sand can puncture your suit, which could cause air to leak out.

122Astronauts train for a wide range of scenarios they might encounter during all phases of their journey, from launch to the return to Earth.

123There's a lot that could go wrong, and Nick knows that firsthand.

124Three, two, one.

125And there is liftoff of the Soyuz MS-10 to the International Space Station carrying Nick Haig and Alexei Obchenin.

126This again is Nick Haig's first launch to space and Alexei Obchenin's second.

127We train so that we can respond to the unknown.

128We are constantly not just training for when things go right.

129We're constantly training against what we can predict will go wrong.

130In the training scenario, we're fighting five or six different major failures so that we have the bandwidth to be able to, on a real flight, to handle the one big thing that's thrown at you.

131Hearing there that there has been an issue with the booster and we're standing by for information as we continue to get it from the Russian flight control team.

132I can tell you in that moment when life throws something at you like that, it is amazing how you just revert into that mindset of, hey, I was being vigilant up to this point.

133I've diagnosed something that's wrong.

134We know what we need to do.

135This is our best way of being successful.

136And then you follow those procedures as best you can.

137And you're able to kind of block, you know, a lot of the other stuff out and focus on just what you need to do to survive.

138Everything seems to be fine with the crew.

139We had good calm with them and they are okay.

140Continue to wait for more information.

141At that moment, Nick remembered his training.

142We had an in-flight abort.

143We recovered from that one and I was able to launch successfully to the space station.

144About five months after that.

145Nick ended up having a successful and productive trip to the International Space Station, thanks in part to his training at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab.

146The International Space Station, that international aspect of it is really a powerful part of the program.

147You've got astronauts that have been from 19 different countries, astronauts and cosmonauts, working up there together.

148We've been able to perform 2,800 different experiments from researchers, you know, like 4,000 researchers from over 100 different countries.

149It has this ability to bring all of these very different people together in pursuit of that common goal of increasing human understanding.

150Nick returned to Earth last fall and he treasures his memories from his time in space.

151What it has really taught me is that when we understand this common purpose and when we work shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow with each other, we start to realize we have so much in common.

152And that gives us the foundation to be able to not necessarily look past differences, but to look at those differences and the diversity that comes to the team because of those differences and to celebrate those differences.

153And so the approach that we've taken on the station in the two decades of collaboration in space, in the pursuit of knowledge, that's something that we're going to continue to carry forward as we go to the moon, as we develop the Artemis program and we start to explore the surface of the moon and as we take what we learned there and we push on to Mars.

154I think ultimately that is, that's the amazing part of going to space.

155That's the real motivation is it's such a powerful, positive example of pulling us together and accomplishing something great.

156In the coming years, astronauts will continue to push the boundaries of human space exploration.

157The Artemis program will send the first woman and the next man to the moon.

158An important part of NASA's Artemis program is setting up sustainable architecture on the moon's surface.

159Here on Earth, astronauts are already practicing how to move around, set up habitats, collect samples, and deploy experiments just like they will on the moon.

160We have a lot to explore on the moon and Mars, but the Artemis astronauts' first stop will be the pool.

161The Curious Universe team includes Elizabeth Tammy and Michaela Sosby.

162Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

163Special thanks to Thalia Petrinos, Eric Land, Gary Jordan, Brandi Dean, and Ryland Hegey.

164If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving a review, tweeting about it at NASA, and sharing it with a friend.

165And join us next week as we meet NASA's spacecrafters, who use some surprising tools to prepare missions for space.

166NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology,