Astronaut Answers Space Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

hi I'm former NASA astronaut scott kelly and today i'm gonna answer some of your questions on twitter the first one is from Dirk so what is the speed of the ISS well the ISS is in low-earth orbit and things in low-earth orbit are travelling generally at a speed of around 17,500 miles per hour which is 25 times the speed of sound so really really fast since C next question from Cece Takato with the people on the International Space Station be able to see the effects of the eclipses well we are traveling in orbit around the earth we orbit the Earth every 90 minutes so if you were in the right place at the right time you would see a big black spot over the earth which is the shadow from the moon on this last Eclipse we had the astronauts were able to get a picture of it and it was it was really impressive next question if I died in a spacesuit and was released to drift through space would I decompose or just be a floating corpse forever asking for a friend yes you would decompose rather quickly it would I think quickly get kind of not too Pleasant in microgravity and I'm not exactly sure why but things seem to decompose much quicker but if you were in low-earth orbit and you were doing a spacewalk from the space station and drifted away eventually you would you would re-enter the earth to be you know a shooting star hopefully your friends would be able to see you I miss Scott Kelly's tweets from space me too and is that flower still growing up there when I was on board the space station we grew some stuff in space we grew some lettuce and after that we grew something a little bit more complex which was flowers zinnias the idea is if we can grow a flower maybe we can grow a tomato and eventually going to Mars we could use that as nutrition unfortunately you know I had to harvest those flowers and send them back to earth I actually have one at home pressed into a book but they we've grown other stuff since then and and our plan is to continue to try to grow more complicated stuff unfortunately space flower is no longer with us let's see next question how many times do you think someone on the bridge of the space shuttle said punch it Chewie when the launch sequence started I would imagine for launch because it's so complicated risky incredible experience that I would guess zero time someone said punch it Chewie but you never know if I was flying this actually wouldn't say punch it Chewie because it's not the Millennium Falcon Chewie wasn't in here I'd say punch it r2d2 he's right there okay from Jason Garcia planned on sleeping tonight but now it's 5 a.m. and googling quote how do astronauts make new oxygen up in a space station for years I need answers well Jason I have answers on the space station we have a few ways of making oxygen one is we use a process called electrolysis so we take water this was a water molecule we would have one big hydrogen to smaller o two modules or I'm sorry I messed that up this is the O and these are the h's the two little ones are the HS electrolysis will will separate the two H's from the O and with another o we can create Oh two two oxygen molecules like this oxygen which we then breathe of course if you're in the International Space Station what time is it this isn't a riddle I'm genuinely genuinely curious how they keep time so we're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes so we have a sunrise and a sunset either or every 45 minutes generally speaking and we have these control centers that are that are all around the earth we have in Houston and Huntsville Alabama Cologne Germany Moscow and in a place called scuba Japan you know we need a standard of time of course so we operate on Greenwich Time and the reason we chose Greenwich Time was because the people that work in the control center in Moscow most of them have to get to work on the Moscow subway they don't really have an option to drive or walk or ride a bike so the time we use Greenwich Time was very conducive to the folks in Moscow using the Metro which is not open 24 hours a day so that's why we use grant time because of the subway schedule in Russia is suspended animation a viable option for space travel say the planets like Mars we're further well I think when we go to Mars the way we're gonna get there is gonna probably take around 200 days to get there you'll spend a year on the surface and I'll take around 200 days to get back now certainly if our technology improves you could potentially get there faster so I think for Mars it's not really something that's necessary you know if you were gonna go to Jupiter or Saturn the moons of Jupiter or Saturn or even further away and it's gonna take many many years to get there in many many years to get back if you could develop a technology like suspended animation that would be really really good but I'm not sure if anyone's actually working on that I think at this point that might be more you know science fiction and science fact but you never know we'll see any physical mental residual effects that are still with you after your year in space I don't think so as at least as far as I could tell which you know I don't have any symptoms I don't have physical symptoms of being in space for a long period of time mental issues I don't know I probably deny it if I did but then there are the things that you can't see like when I was on the space station I got a lot of rage for instance perhaps there are effects from that that I don't even know about and hopefully I'll never find out I don't think just a simple question could astronauts hold their breath in space instead of wearing the whole uniform no you couldn't do that without any atmospheric pressure out in space all the gases that are in solution in our blood they come out of solution and turn back into a gas kind of like when you open a carbonated bottle of soda the pressure is decreased and that's why you see all the bubbles coming out that's exactly what would happen with our blood if we didn't have a spacesuit on which would kill us within a few minutes not to mention without the pressure holding your breath would be really hard you ever wonder what happens to your your organs in space like other floats around do your organs float around your body or that everything floats including your guts you can feel that I mean you could feel like your insides don't feel quite normal certain you know processes that we have to deal with every day particularly you know using the restroom takes time because our body likes to have gravity telling us which direction to push stuff so when everything's floating including your organs and everything inside you it creates some challenges also the blood floats inside us and that's why you see at times astronauts in space have really big their heads are swollen initially because all the fluid is redistributed throughout our bodies and you get this big head at astronaut you know eventually you get rid of some of that fluid and you go back to maybe almost looking like normal next question what was the most exciting or fascinating science experiment you conducted in your year in space it's kind of hard to choose you know I would I would offer two experiments one was we did some experiments with rodents where we dissected them and we we appreciated them giving their lives to us for science and that science was involved in understanding the physical effects that occur when we're in space like bone effects on our vision which we have some negative effects we're trying to study yeah that was challenging I would say fascinating sort of exciting because it's very meticulous work that takes a really long time and it's important to us on earth understanding processes that occur in space at a very rapid rate very similar to how we age on earth we lose bone mass muscle mass as we age but in space it happens much more rapidly the other experiment that I really liked was the the flowers that we grew I think it's very very relatable to people on earth and also has implications for exploration as we go further out in the space having living things I think it'll also help from you know psychological aspect so you know those two growing plants and working with the rodents were for me the most exciting or fascinating science experiment that I did in my year in space you know how people get vacation blues how two astronauts cope with coming back to Earth after seeing space it's not easy you know when when you get back from space after you know working there for either short or a long time you generally miss it but you I think you deal with it like people deal with every thing that is a challenge in your life you know you appreciate the experience you had and then you move on one of my former astronaut colleagues you cannot eat padalka he says when we are on earth we miss space and on morons when we're in space we miss earth you definitely miss space when you're back on earth maybe someday I'll get to go again maybe with you Lenny that was our last question and thank you for your attention and thank you for all the great questions

Channel: WIRED

Views: 2,595,139

Rating: 4.9343581 out of 5

Keywords: astronaut, astronauts, international space station, iss, mars, nasa, scott kelly, space, space flight, space station, space travel, space walk, tech support, twitter, twitter support, twitter tech support, scott kelly astronaut, astronaut support, wired tech support, floating through space, being an astronaut, scott kelly nasa, nasa astronaut, living in space, scott kelly interview, astronaut interview, naut, answers questions, wired, wired.com

Id: 5GNcAkpN9tA

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/spacek8ie]

I don’t think it’s to do with the subway schedule. Most spacecraft operate on either UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which happens to be the same as GMT or GPS time which is essentially the same but differs by a number of seconds as GPS time doesn’t account for leap seconds. So basically, GMT is the standard time zone for almost all spacecraft.

[u/[deleted]]

I thought Moscow was in a different time zone.

[u/Landlubber77]

Ешьте Cвежие