Commander Hadfield talks at Liberton High School

the reason that invited Krista to Scotland is in his tweet see he said he'd been to Auburn and he'd been to a boudin and I said listen you've seen nothing until you've been in Lebanon and so so here he is it took some good pictures a lot of incidentally from there from the space station and maybe you'll appear at some of the and some of the slides no Scotland has something of a space tradition famously Neil Armstrong had Scottish ancestry and there was a freeman and Langman in the borders and I'm delighted to see that crest has got Scottish ancestry as well also from the borders and we're also and Scotland about to launch our first satellite next year that sir and nanosatellite there's Emily naught and nanosatellite as any ideas any ideas at all and nanosatellite wait let's see I've called a micro satellite what would a micro satellite be yeah that the Scottish satellites a bit less size which is great because it makes it incredibly cheap and it's at a company called clade space I'm launching it from the very same place that that crest landed in Nassau as a vehicle be launched in February and it's got a big seven early experiments unless nano satellite so we don't dominate the world of big satellites but Scotland is aiming to be dominant and nano extremely small and cheap satellites so we're gonna have one be room for unit Chris but but nonetheless Silvia over Scottish first and space and family Chris obviously is famous for arranged illusions as as the head teacher said he's been in space three times he's been both in the shuttle and in the Russian craft he's been in both say space stations is completed spacewalks it's come back again which is good because always he wouldn't be able to be here but nonetheless his biggest claim to fame international fame and 19 million hits on YouTube it's where they sing is cover version of Space Oddity which he may well do for us again today who knows if we ask him nice enough but look this is a tremendous boost for the school it's a tremendous honor for Scotland so ladies and gentlemen boys and girls can we give a huge Scottish Lebert and welcome to commander Chris Hadfield First Minister thank you very much and thank you very much for the invitation to be able to join all of you this afternoon I would like to talk about some of the aspects of Space Flight that are just so challenging and interesting and the experiences that I've had but more importantly I'd like to just have a conversation with you and see if we can answer any questions that you may have I think I'll talk about one of two things and we'll see if we get some slides up later but two of the most magnificent parts of spaceflight are space walking what it's like to put on a spacesuit and go outside of the spaceship to see the world from through the visor and the glass of your spacesuit itself and the other is a is a launch to ride a rocket ship to space and I've written three different rocket ships to take you from a chair like the one you're sitting in and get you going seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour in about eight minutes what it's like to have a chance to ride those two things so that's fine so which of those two would you like to talk about you want to talk about space walking or about riding a rocket ship space walking space walking okay so let's would you be a volunteer for me stand up here beside me if you would please what's your name Rudy Rudy Rudy Rory excuse me nice to meet you Rory okay so Rory and I are gonna make a comparison between what it's like to be here on earth and what it's like to be outside on a spacewalk so if I'm the guy on earth and Rory's the one who's in space right now when I want to breathe I inhale and the air is actually pushed into my body because there's a huge stack of air above me and there's air pressure around me as a result well if Rory's out in space he's the vacuum of space there's absolutely no air at all nothing so if he tried to inhale nothing would happen in fact his lungs would be collapsed because of the fact there's no air pressure in his body so the first thing that would kill Rory in space would be a lack of air he wouldn't be able to breathe within a very short period of time he'd start to die because of ox lack of oxygen so the first thing Rory's gonna need is a balloon around his body to keep him alive and so you could just put him inside like a big beach ball full of oxygen and Rory to be okay for a while so we'll start with that Rory's inside a big circular ball of oxygen and so are all of we really if you think about the world and the ball of oxygen around it we just have a different sized ball but now Rory's going to go outside on a spacewalk for a reason and that's to go fix something or build something so we need a suit that gives him some dexterity with his hands so we're not just gonna have a ball around and we're actually gonna put a suit on him that has the pressure on the inside of it sort of like wearing a custom-made balloon and that's really what a spacesuit is here's a custom-built balloon but if you put a balloon around Rory it would sort of be like this and he'd be all stiff with the stiffness of the balloon it wouldn't be able to bend at all whereas here my clothes are flexible if this was made of tin or of steel then I'd be stuck like that and to have an inflated suit is sort of like that way where you can't even bend your arms so we actually build a suit that has a big hinge here and a hinge here a hinge at two wrists you can turn it a helmet that's on a hinge and another hinge at the waist so that Rory could in fact turn his body at the waist and can move his arms a little bit but that's all you get inside your spacesuit so it's a custom-built suit that has hinges at the important parts so that a custom-built balloon so that you can move and then the dome on your head and then let's see what else we going to need you need really good be ability to use your hands but if you're if your inflated every time you squeeze your hand it's sort of like squeezing a tennis ball it's about that level of exercise so there's a special design of glove that comes over and actually has a palm bar in it that squeezes super hard all the time so that it holds the glove in against your hands so that Rory could then flex his fingers and not have to fight all the pressure of the suit so that's inside the suit and then Rory and I are about the same size but some of the astronauts are a little bigger a little shorter so we need custom-built suits and they've got rings in them that make the legs certain different lengths and there are three different type of or size of chest pieces you'd be a large he'd wear a large I think and there's an extra-large and a medium so Rory's wearing his large upper piece okay so now you've got a suit that's a balloon it's got palm bars it's the right size for your body and now you just need your life support equipment because when I exhale when all of us exhale what comes out is kind of used up air we've ingested some of the oxygen we've turned it in carbon dioxide we're releasing carbon dioxide if we just put Rory inside his balloon after a minute or two his whole suit would fill up with carbon dioxide and he'd start suffocating so on his back here is a big air purifying system just like here the air is pumped around the room it exchanges to the outside and the trees and the grass use up the carbon dioxide to release oxygen Rory's gonna have something on his back a chemical called lithium hydroxide that will remove the carbon dioxide from the air and then he's got a big tank of oxygen back here that's slowly leaking oxygen and just above his head so that he can keep breathing oxygen so that'll keep him alive now let's talk temperature what is it here today about eight degrees or so maybe outside I think Celsius well in space if that's the Sun Rory's chest is about a hundred and fifty degrees and his back is about minus 120 degrees because there's no air to move the temperature around at all so your suit not only has to protect you against the vacuum of space but it's some house to protect you so that this side have used plus 150 degrees hotter than boiling water and his back is minus 120 like dry ice like lying on a red-hot stove with a big block of dry ice on your back so you have to have a suit that will protect you thermally so it's multi multi layers thick and then you need a cooling system on the back and it has a little evaporator on the back and that's pumping the coolant all around your body so in fact underneath the suti is wearing long underwear that has tubes in it miles and miles of tubes and it's pumping water all the way around your body collecting that heat or cooling it taking it around to the back and running it through a flash evaporator at the back so that you'll keep your suit at the right temperature there's actually a dial right here where you can control the temperature of your suit a little bit like Iron Man you can control the temperature of his suit right there so we've taken care of his oxygen and its temperature regulation you need to be able to communicate with Houston or whoever you're talking to so there's a helmet attached that have ear cups on it and microphone booms that come around your mouth and then there's a radio mounted right here on the top and your hot mic all the time so every word you say every breath you take is constantly transmitted transmitted back to Houston what else do you need oh so Rory's working outside and he's weightless the whole time so you want to hold on right when you're working but while you're working away if your hand slips off then you're gonna float off into the universe and they name a school or something after you because you be gone forever so we don't really want that to happen so you need to somehow not float off into space so you have a bunch of tools attached to your chest including a tether or a clip that you could clip onto the station and it would be on a real sort of like a fishing reel so you could float maybe 20 meters away and then this reel would pull you back in again but if that reel failed you'd float off forever so the last thing we're gonna put on Rory's spacesuit is a jet pack and we actually have a jet pack on our spacesuits as well and it's mounted on the back and it's got little thruster holes here and for thruster holes here and it's pressurized by a big tank of nitrogen that's right down here because nitrogen is a nice heavy gas it's got a lot of atomic mass to it so if Rory got tumbled off the station and his little tether came loose then what you do is you'd pull a handle right here and a joystick would pop out in front of you a little joystick you'd grab it you turn it on and that would activate your whole nitrogen system and then you could actually grab it with both hands and fly your spacesuit around so did you get yourself stopped tumbling and then turn yourself and then fire the thrusters so you could go over and grab back onto the spaceship again if you see the movie gravity it's sort of like that sort of like George Clooney's flying around in or what Sandra Bullock's flying around it same sort of idea so I think we've taken care of your complete spacesuit I think that's the whole thing one last thing that happened to me you're gonna be inside your spacesuit for about eight hours because by the time you get all dressed and then you have to go outside and work so you're locked inside your spacesuit for eight hours so eight hours without a sip of water is tough so actually mounted right in here in front of Rory's chest is a sort of a flush mounted bag of water and in the top of it there's a little spigot sticking up with a bite valve when you bite it you can then suck water out of the tank so that's for drinking mine started leaking and water started floating up around in front of my face and in front of my eyes and one of those globs of water picked up some some contamination on it and went into my left eye and my left eye went blind on my first spacewalk so I was blind in my left eye after my own partway through my first spacewalk ain't it hurt it was like someone had just put I don't know pepper oil in my eye or something so you're wearing a helmet you can't do anything about it you can't rub your eye and without gravity your tear doesn't go anywhere you know your eye starts tearing up but it doesn't drain your the way that tears work is there's there's a little tear duct right above your I did hear that that it's sort of a modified sweat gland and it releases it releases a liquid down onto your eye that is a tear and then that drains down your cheek and it also the tear duct is in right next to your nose and that's why your nose runs when you're when you tear also because that it goes into your tear duct and down into your nose so what happened to me up there is my tears collected on my eye and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger until eventually this big ball of contaminated tear got so big that it crossed across the bridge of my nose and went into my other eye and now both my eyes were contaminated and I was blind outside on my first spacewalk which was not a good place to be blind on a spacewalk and so you don't want to be blind during your first spacewalk it's no fun at all and I I didn't know what to do so I just called down to Houston and they thought maybe that instead of just that contamination coming from my water bag they thought the lithium hydroxide in my back had somehow broken into my suit and was was contaminating the air and so they had me open a valve on the side of my helmet and let my oxygen hissing to space to try and clear up the contamination so imagine if you're outside on your first spacewalk you're blind and now you're listening to your oxygen hissing into space waiting for something good to happen and that happened on my first time outside and after about a half-hour eventually my eyes just teared enough that it started diluting the contamination and it was evaporating off my eyes and eventually I could see through the contamination again and and after a while I could see again and get back to work but it was it was a pretty amazing thing to happen during my first spacewalk and we stayed outside of my first space lock for about eight hours and I think that is a lot of stuff all about walking in space and what it feels like to walk in space so how about a big hand for Rory for being my beautiful model that's that's a little introduction to what it's like to go outside on a spacewalk the only part I didn't talk about was how beautiful it is to be out in between the world and the universe and having the whole world rolling by next to you well you're holding on to a spaceship with one hand and with the whole universe out the other direction to be in between the universe and the world is a beautiful humbling place to be and it's something I'd dreamed about since I was a little kid and an amazing thing to be to be part of gave me a whole new perspective on the world so what I'd like you to now see if anybody in the room has any questions and I'll do my best to to try and answer them and we can talk about space walking or any other part of spaceflight I'd be happy to yes in my opinion what's the easiest thing to do on earth that is hard to do on the space station so you have like runners on or sneakers on you don't normally wear shoes on a spaceship because you don't stand on your feet you actually have just socks all the time or even bare feet and you can use your feet like a like a monkey and use your feet to hold on to things while you're using your hands but if you're gonna use the exercise equipment then you put on sneakers or running do you call them sneakers or running shoes or trainers okay you put on a set of trainers right so on earth when you're gonna do up your trainers typically this is how you do it right you get down on one knee you get both hands and your body's nice and stable due to gravity you don't normally do up your trainer like this because it's kind of hard to balance and a little bit wobbly if you're floating weightless and you want to put your trainer on oddly enough of course that means you're gonna have one foot in both hands busy at one time and it's really hard to stabilize yourself without gravity just with your one toe hooked under something so one of the hardest things to do I found on the space station was to put on my running shoe to put on my trainer because no matter how hard I tried partway through I would be floating and tumbling around the spaceship and bumping into things with one of my trainers floating off into the distance just while I'm trying to get this one you'd be always bumping into somebody else in apologizing for being so clumsy even after five months I couldn't put my shoes on properly oddly enough so weightlessness is not always just a benefit sometimes it's a burden any other questions yes how do you eat well let's just talk with water simply to start with water is the most important thing you need this water came out of the tap and there's some big water purification plants somewhere at Edinboro that that provided the water for this so we need some sort of system on board that provides us water so we have a whole water purification plant on board that takes our sewage and turns it back into drinking water so that's where our water comes from from a sewage treatment plant on board and it's our own sewage which is a little personal but it but it works and then when it's time to eat you'd go to the pantry because there's no refrigerator there's no fresh food and there's no oven so you just go to the pantry and you bring out say I don't know what do you like to eat Pizza okay so you go to the dehydrated pizza and it wouldn't be it would have been made years ago and it's a dehydrated pizza in a little slice and you take it and you'd go over to the wall and out of the wall there's a little needle sticking out of the wall that looks like the type of needle that you blow up a basketball with and you take your little package and it's got a little septum on it a little soft spot you'd slide that over the needle and you'd read on the package of pizza and it would say like three ounces hot so you dial three ounces you push hot and it would squirt three ounces of hot water into your little pizza bag and then you gently shake it up in the pizza which had been dehydrated would soak up the water and then you'd let it sit in there for it would say wait 10 minutes so you'd wait 10 minutes and then you'd carefully cut it open and peel it back and now you have rehydrated slightly warm pizza it's not very good and that's how almost all our food is done we rehydrate it with water out of the wall and it works okay we have a little warming oven too just to warms things up there's no fresh food and there's no really complicated food it's all little packages of food tins of food that type of thing but every ship that comes up brings up brings up fresh food so maybe once every six weeks you'll get an apple or something like that but otherwise the food is it's sort of like being on a camping trip forever on a sailing trip or something like that the whole time all right yes sagen jelly no jelly like jam and jelly yes you tell ya ya we have actually have little packets of stuff because the food gets kind of boring have you ever squirt now in the bag and then like sort of like chased after it we do in fact if you think about it every time you open a little thing of jelly like that there's often one tiny little bit of it that falls on the just do it over your plate a little bit falls on the plate if you open it in zero-g that little bit of jelly will tumble off into the wall and in our kitchen the whole wall and ceiling and floor is covered with little specks of jelly and honey and ketchup and all the little things from all little things that you've opened and every after every meal you take one of the wet wipes and you go around and you just clean parts of the wall because there's nothing falls on the floor so it's it's a perpetual sort of fountain of mess that you have to clean up but if you take one of those and you squeeze it yeah it'll just float in front of you so then you can just go around and then pick it like a fish you know where you've dropped fish food into a tank and you can eat the food that way with with all different types of food we have squeezy cheese and you know whatever is handy anything that will keep a long time what was it like coming back to earth I came I came back on two different spaceships I came back on the American space shuttle and on the Russian Soyuz they come back quite differently the Space Shuttle has wings and wings are no good to you through your whole flight until you're coming back to land up until then they've just been dead weight so if you're designing a spaceship you need to decide if you want to have wings or not because wings are a lot of extra penalty and they only serve you a purpose for landing but the beauty of them is in a space shuttle when you come in first you have to slow down and we use friction with the air to slow down and so the shuttle comes in actually with its nose 40 degrees in the air so kind of a big flat plate and it's quite gentle at first and it's kind of bleed off the heat through or he bleed off the speed through heat and only as you start slowing down then you start pointing into the wind and it flies like a big glider to come around and land again and it's not that much different than landing on an airliner it feels somewhat the same a little higher G but it's just a glider coming back from space on wings the Soyuz though is is wildly different the Soyuz looking for something that's Soyuz like here hmm it'll be a nice prop I'll use this so this is my soyuz spaceship coming back to earth and we're sitting inside this little can it's actually more shaped like this and it's got a big flat bottom on it and the kind of a small top and we turn it around backwards and we fire the engine to get slowed down and then instead of having a circular orbit around the world we have a slightly crooked orbit and the low part of the orbit starts getting into the atmosphere so the Soyuz instead of going around the world part way around the world it starts to touch the atmosphere and that drag sort of like sticking your car hand out the window of your car that drag of the air starts to slow the Soyuz down and you're going so fast that you know in your car if you're going on a highway or a motorway and you stick your hand out the force on your hand is huge imagine if you were in a Formula f1 card you're stuck your hand out you could you could wreck your elbow and break your arm just by sticking it out the window on a Soyuz if you stuck your hand out the window the friction from the air would burn your arm off it would just melt your arm off it's that much friction and heat just like rubbing your hands together so this thing coming into the atmosphere with you sitting in it it has a blast furnace of heat around it about 3,000 degrees coming into the atmosphere and as it comes in of course it's slowing down it could flows you're kind of squished down into the floor of it because it's it's almost like falling into water so you're squished about four or five times your normal weight coming back in so if you can imagine sitting in your chair right now with four or five people lying on top of you that's the kind of weight that's on your body and it's quite violent too as it forces way is through the atmosphere but then finally as it slows down and gets a little to the surface a parachute opens and then you're just dangling under the parachute coming down until just before you hit the ground and then it's got little Rockets on the bottom like like gunpowder pyrotechnics and they fire just to cushion you just before you hit the world so you don't hit the ground like that so instead you hit the ground and survive it and you and your vehicle doesn't get crushed and you don't get crushed with it but you land in Kazakhstan in in a windy place with no trees so you don't just come down like this and land you're actually coming down a little bit sideways and you hit the ground and tumble so when you hit the ground your spaceship tumbles end-over-end so imagine you've been weightless for half a year and now suddenly you crash to the earth and your vehicles going to bang bang bang bang like someone through you know through a soda can on the ground and tumble to a stop it's a really violent way to come home and when you finish you're just laying on your side in the dirt of Kazakhstan waiting for someone to come and open up the hatch and drag you out and start readapting to living on earth again it's a violent way to come home what's the worst defects you get from space depends how you measure worst initially you feel really bad you feel really nauseous you're dizzy your body doesn't know how to balance and so you just you feel like throwing up a lot so initially it's nausea is the worst and then you can't balance properly for three or four days so you're all when you're trying to walk you keep bumping into things and falling over you can't balance with your eyes closed at all and it's because your body's gotten used to being weightless so so it takes a while for your body to remember what to do with gravity and I couldn't run for about four months after I got back because just the the pounding of running your legs on the ground is sort of like throwing your blood down towards the ground and your body can't get the blood back up to your head again so it took about four months before I could properly run and maybe the worst though is still going on right now and that is my body dissolved some of the bone while I was in space I lost about 8% of the bone across my hips and then the big bone that's in your leg my femur it dissolved about 8% of the bone out of there because it just didn't need it and I'm slowly growing that bone back now and it's called osteoporosis osteoporosis you know poorest with holes in it so I had a osteoporosis that is slowly reversing now my bones are starting to become dense again but that'll take about a year for me to get back to my original bone density so I think that might be the worst is the long range and then finally we don't know maybe I have higher radiation it's like getting an x-ray a day living on the space station so I may have a slightly bigger chance of getting cancer than I would have if I'd stayed you know here in Edinburgh the whole time close to sea level and we think maybe because of the radiation we may have problems with our vision when we get old maybe higher chance of cataracts or something like that but we don't think so we think we've kept the levels low enough that it'll be okay so there's a lot of changes to the body yes what does the universe look like from space it's hard to see because you go around the world every 90 minutes if you want to see the night sky you can't just run out from from inside a building and see the night sky because your eyes take a certain amount of time to adjust right for the rods and the cones to be ready and for your pupil to open up wide it takes about 10 or 15 minutes to get good night vision to let your eyes really adapt to darkness well if you go around the world every 90 minutes that means you get a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes if you think about that being the Sun sunrise 45 minutes of sunset sunrise sunset so that means it only gives you maximum about 40 minutes of dark on the other side and if it takes 15 minutes just for your eyes to adjust then somewhere in your 40 minute night you've got to leave 15 minutes of somewhere inside your spaceship of shutting off all the lights and waiting 15 minutes for your eyes to adjust and then going to a window to look outside so you don't often do that it's like you you don't normally look at the night sky from inside your house probably because you you never shut off all the lights and just wait so it's a long way to answer the question but it's it's that we don't very often get a chance to look at the universe from the spaceship just because you go day/night so often and you're working most of the time but I did sometimes and especially when I was out on a spacewalk I did and what you see is an immensely deep blackness a blackness that it's like a black with texture it's like a black sort of like black velvet but without any shininess to it at all it's like a maybe some nights out here you can see the Milky Way where it's really nice and dark and if you let your eyes adjust and you can see the texture of the Stars and the dust of the universe and how it's backlit from the Stars the deep darkness of it and space looks like that when we were designing our crew patch there was a space for the black sky and we asked the patch to to make it really black and and he made it black we said well you know that's black but it's not black enough can you make it blacker than that and he was like well it's already black how black can I make the sky it's just that the black is so deep and textured and and it's like looking into a bottomless well of darkness it's gorgeous and then the stars are just perfect points of light like they don't they don't twinkle they don't shimmer because there's no atmosphere in the way so they're just a million tiny perfect little points of light in the blackness beautiful but do I miss the most when I'm on the space station apart from good pizza I think mostly just miss the physical contact of having your family around you know being able to hug people that you love and and just having family members close because I talked to them everyday via email and Skype and even on the telephone sometimes but you just missed the presence of people around you know like if you just think of all the people around you and how close other bodies are and just what that feels like to have people near you you get you missed that and and so I think what you miss most is just being close to your family but it's not bad I never felt homesick it was busy and challenged and active the whole time but once in a while it would have been nice to be able to give one of my kids a hug for sure I think that's what I missed maybe one more question and then we're done yes ah did we spend any special occasions in space yeah it's the International Space Station so the crews are from all around the world so they don't celebrate the same holidays in each country of course each country has different holidays based on religion or history or whatever and so if you had an International Space Station you could have a lot of special occasions right you could say today it is whatever Victory Day in Russia or a civic holiday in Canada or whatever you can have holidays all the time on Space Station because it's always a holiday somewhere but instead the space agency says we want you to work so you get to choose one special day every six weeks and as a crew we had to sit down before lunch and choose which special days we want that each person got to choose which ones they thought and then we chose those ones like Valentine's Day Christmas Victory Day you know a few others and and so we do and we try and celebrate them just like on earth so Christmas is coming up right now and I was in space for Christmas last year so we had Christmas off and so we had Christmas stockings that we hung up inside the space station we had a Christmas tree hanging down from the ceiling we played Christmas music I brought along a Christmas card for each person from their family as a surprise which was nice we had a guitar up there so we sang Christmas carols and it was nice it was it wasn't a normal Christmas but it was sort of like Christmas and for a lot of people who are away from their family whether it's military or working or whatever it was it was a Christmas away from home and just like the guys up there this year you bring the traditions and the history of the earth with you when you go and the things that are special to you and so yeah we have we have special days up there and you you celebrate them as best you can I think we're out of time so but thank you very much for all of the good questions you

Channel: Scottish Government

Views: 22,781

Keywords: Liberton High School

Id: Q7YX_na88uI

Length: 34min 0sec (2040 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2013