NASA Astronaut Breaks Down 16 Space Scenes From Film & TV | WIRED

hi i'm nicole stott nicole stott is a retired astronaut and here's me in space today I'm going to look at how astronauts are portrayed in Hollywood blackout period in Apollo 13 we have lost the radio contact Roger that expect to regain signal in three minutes this blackout period does happen it's not unique to Apollo 13 no reiteration ship has never taken longer than three minutes to emerge from blackout still today when we have Soyuz landings the Soyuz capsule coming back in it's a predicted time it's it's understood where it should happen okay like that's three minutes we are standing by for acquisition they'll let you know hey we will lose comm with the crew for 30 seconds or a minute or whatever it might be this is Houston do you read and then you'll always get the ground calling a little bit early ahead to you know see if they've regained communications or not posses for some reason even when you know that's gonna happen there's this like you know you're kind of at the edge of your seat okay we're gonna hear back from we're gonna hear back from them but it's just the physics of coming back into the atmosphere you've got this like really hot plasma coming around the ship that ionizes the atmosphere and causes this disruption of you know the ability to communicate [Music] and then it stops and you can talk again [Music] wormhole travel contact when I look at this scene I'm thinking yeah it's gonna be you know it's gonna be in the future a little bit but I think you would still have a spacesuit and a helmet on and maybe not just be in this little sea it seems like there's some more substance to what she's sitting in there when we launch to space and when we land we where they're actually called ascent entry spacesuits if you watched a space shuttle launch or landing you'd always see the crew in these orange suits the purpose of the suit was to help you survive if all the air in your spaceship went away or if you got into kind of a critical emergency situation and so you'd have the suit on it could pressurize up to keep your you know your blood flowing right you had the helmet on so that you could breathe air and I think that's going to go on for a long time the new spaceships we're building we're incorporating spacesuits into the launch and landing of those because those are two of the most critical stages of the flight I'm the control-room scene and the way they're communicating with her and preparation for launch and kind of the stages that they go through all sounds you know very familiar kind of what you would expect through a launch sequence when you can't hear ground control the crew will still continue to speak in hopes that maybe you're just you know not hearing their response to you but they can hear you so a lot of times we'll use the words like in the blind you know I'm just gonna keep talking to you and hope that you hear me and so that you can stay you know up to speed as much about what's going on with me and then hopefully at some point I'll hear you again ai on spaceships and 2001 Space Odyssey open the pod bay doors hell I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that right now I think the the current status of artificial intelligence or AI on our space missions is that we're not really saying we have AI in place I think that will come there's some things that we're testing what we do have is automated control of things open the pod bay doors and that's a great thing because then the crew isn't having to interact all the time to maintain the systems or ensure that everything is good that can happen automatically even when we're flying the spacecraft there's automation associated with that a lot of it but in every case I believe we're still in the situation where we can manually take over if we need to either as the crew members on board or from the ground through the control systems that they have I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do our hope is that the AI whichever ones we do employ at some point are not set up that they could take control this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it asteroid belt and get it buddy hang on just a little yeah this is one of those scenes that I think shows there's there is a lot that's far fetched in Armageddon land might not be the right word to use with Astrid I think it's more like you're docking with it you're intercepting it and then keeping pace and attaching somehow just because of the you know the physics of an asteroid and the way it moves through space and we're looking at how you do that right now we have missions that have gone to asteroids and you know small spacecraft that have gone there and done that and taking pictures and landed on it I suppose there's a lot of work going on right now into how we track asteroids how we identify them and then maybe even more importantly once we know they're there what do we do about them if they're like in the scenario in this film if they're actually coming towards Earth and could be a real threat to us and they're looking at missions that could you know resolve that for us I think one thing is a crew member that bothers me when I watch scenes like this is this is absolutely a time when you would have your helmet on some of the the terminology that's used like Mayday Mayday you know I get what they're what they're doing it's like hey they're gonna go down but Mayday Mayday implies that somebody could get there to rescue you and that is not likely at all in this kind of scenario I mean I was excited by watching this movie though too so on the two missions that I flew in space and the ones that we have done even going to the moon we're not flying through asteroid belts we have not as human beings done that yet when I think about an asteroid or a meteor perhaps is more appropriate for the kind of mission I've had is I'm thinking about these single small pieces of debris that might have the potential of hitting my spacecraft versus ever considering the idea that I'm gonna have to fly through this massive you know belt of huge and small pieces of debris g-force training in space Cowboys this thing moving [Music] sure we'll take the wrinkles out so we have the opportunity as shuttle crew members to go experience the the centrifuge so this machine that kind of spins you around and simulates not just the g-forces that you'll feel you experience them like you would as you were launching so it takes you through the same trajectory that you would experience launching on the Space Shuttle and they mentioned it in the film it's it's three G's is what it's limited to and you're on your back and it's coming through your chest we're so pleased I love the interaction between these guys that have been friends and like frenemies even you know throughout the years first one to pass out by severe denies they go right back to kind of this competitive yet light like friendly competition in here even in the end when they're like waking back up and it's not oh my gosh what happened it's hey who passed out first [Music] was just something very human and nice about that to me I'm getting too old for this video messages in interstellar you once told me that when you came back we might be the same age and today I'm the age you were when you left from the station we're able to talk on the basically on a phone every every day so I would have a pretty normal conversation with my son after school every day and once a week we would do a video conference and now it's amazing the family members can take an iPad with them and they can go to their kids game and show you know the crew member on board hey you know there's Joey kick in the you know the home run or whatever it is and it's really interesting to see just in that short period of time the way we've improved the communications even in a delayed timeframe to be able to have that connection you know home to our family or our friends or even just to see you know views of the planet will be really really important orbital mechanics and the Martian intercept velocity will be 11 meters per second I can make that work distance at intercept will be will be 68 kilometers apart they mentioned something about not having a you know enough velocity you know this difference in velocity and that's really important because you have to kind of match up the velocities in order to be able to intercept something in space I could use the escaping air as a semester so Watney is saying hey why don't I make that up by giving myself a little bit more thrust by making my suit into essentially a rocket engine I get to fly around like Iron Man that's why he jokes around about it being like Iron Man too cuz you use his glove and then fly little thrusters out of his hands and I like that they did this from a control standpoint might be a lot more difficult than what they show all they you know eventually show them kind of flopping around while he does it but it's looking for a solution it's like taking advantage of what the resources you have to try to overcome the problem that you're dealing with come on guys keep it together work the problem as long I think as that air is flowing by his hand it's technically not exposed to the vacuum of space just like the rest of his body isn't he's still protected as long as there's that airflow oxygen in the spacesuit Red Planet oxygen supply completed I think the the normal supply and a suit that we go out on a spacewalk with has between six and eight hours worth of oxygen and how long that lasts will depend on how fast you're breathing how hard you're working but but usually six to eight hours and then that's the normal like primary tanks in case you did get a leak or something went wrong we have some secondary tanks that are really intended for you to use them to get back into the station or to get to a safe place where you could either resupply or just you know get back in those I think lasts for like half an hour replace your o2 canister immediately the ground can monitor the systems in our suit they've got telemetry to be able to tell us how much oxygen we have left we've got little sensors on the suit itself and a little display panel right here that you can look down at that if you push the buttons right it could tell you here's how much oxygen you know you have remaining the pressure and the estimated time and then when it gets to a certain level an audible alarm will go off in your helmet let you know hey you're at this point and then you would talk to the ground or your crewmates inside to decide what what you do about it on Mars we're not going to be able to just go out without a suit on yeah the atmosphere is not one that we can just breathe without any kind of protection or or air supply that's why in this movie it's kind of surprising that they you know at the the next stage where they open up their helmet and are breathing normally they that they didn't know that I think they would have known that that was breathable air yeah we go to Mars we're gonna have to be in spacesuits all the time outside wooden rocket wallace and gromit [Music] you could definitely build a wooden rocket I don't think there's anything stopping us from doing that but just because of really because of how much energy you have to put behind it the spaceship would be at risk of catching fire anytime you ignited a thruster I think structurally the wood just wouldn't hold together as you're going through all these different loads and accelerations that you would see go into space wallace and gromit they build you know kind of that iconic looking rocket shape and we actually when we first started building rockets we built them with that shape if you look at the new spaceship that Elon Musk is proposing for going to Mars it has that very iconic smooth and then the you know the fins at the end it's an efficient way to move through the atmosphere in space just the shape of that rocket but we've found over time that there's other ways to get that same kind of efficiency so you don't have to build it that way hidden figures launch yeah max-q is something that all of our spacecraft go through it's where you reach this like maximum pressure on the outside of the spacecraft if you stay at that pressure for you know a period of time it has the potential to tear the spaceship apart so on the space Space Shuttle you know here's something okay max Q and then we would throttle back to relieve the load on the spaceship lunar rover and moon [Music] in this scene I look at the rover and it looks totally believable you know if you if you see the Rovers that NASA is developing right now for you know our return to the moon and potentially even for use on Mars they have kind of this bigger bulkier look than the little almost go-cart looking you know vehicles we had in the Apollo missions and they're meant to be vehicles that you can actually you could actually travel in and live in for some period of time without having to have your helmet on and using your spacesuit and that you could go out from them and do excursions you know on the surface launch space cowboys [Music] let's have a comm check be okay ms one ms - I think the whole scene here where they're walking down the you know the walkway the crew access arm is what we called it was kind of this walkway that got you into the hatch and onto the shuttle all looked really good to me the scenes in Mission Control and launch control center looked really good the way they were speaking through the countdown was great this whole scene for launch is is really pretty accurate in the movie it bothered me a little bit that on re-entry they had the pilot flying versus the commander flying in the left seat in reality on landing it would be the commander in the left seat that would be doing all of the flying for the landing and not the pilot in the right seat a robot in space Wally [Music] Wally's here like clinging on to the side of the spaceship as it launches I think the point is that that Wally's a machine too so if this metal machine even though we want to love it is you know can clasp on to this side of the vehicle and is made of materials that will tolerate that environment then I think that's probably not an unbelievable thing I don't know if they'd ever be the satellites that you see the the spaceship going through will ever be bunched up like that but there's a lot of them circling our earth right now you know there's some in low-earth orbit and there's you know what is it like the geosynchronous this is like you know 24,000 miles above the planet and you know when we talk about going further and further off the earth to get to places we certainly have to consider that right now we do that by knowing exactly you know where they are in space and then our trajectory that takes us out further somehow misses them I don't know it's a mystery to me [Music] landing a ship prometheus for us to notice the captain brace for entry gage laying a sequence twister manual commence landing from the space station when we undocked with the space shuttle and then we're gonna re-enter and land from the time we fired those retro thrusters you know are the thrusters that would allow us to slow down and enter back into the atmosphere it was an hour from firing them to touching down on the runway but I like this scene great I think they go through some of the same sequences we would if we were landing everybody gets in their seats you know it's a little bit more in advance than what they're showing here but this is a futuristic movie - it seems to me they're doing these kinds of landings and reentry's pretty regularly we're gonna love that they use terms that we that we do like okay firing the RCS you know which is the reaction control system which is the thrusters that would allow you to either slow down or speed up or move forward backwards you know to fly the spacecraft and then they physically show the you know the thruster is moving down into a position that would fire against the earth to you know to slow them down and then let them settle onto that planet it's very future it's very sci-fi but they're incorporating some things that we use all the time I really in this film like the line right there God does not build in straight lines God doesn't build in straight lines because that's something as a crew you would notice nature is much more random and yeah that was really interesting to me that they would incorporate something like that yeah wouldn't be any good if I could do that Gold spacesuits in sunshine our spacesuits are not made out of you know all gold material but we do use the gold visors when we're going to be in the Sun to protect our eyes from that solar radiation so when you're in space and in you know in microgravity floating where nothing really weighs anything it doesn't matter how much the spacesuit weighs you're still gonna be able to move around in it easily so we're not so worried about that we're more worried about the materials and how it's going to protect you in that environment I don't know that we're ever gonna send people to the Sun but if if we did they might need gold spacesuits Muppets pigs in space cleaning the space station happens all the time I think we are just kind of perpetually doing it you really get into the mode of just clean up after yourself as you go and then on the weekends we would have like a whole list of housekeeping tasks that we do you know the vacuum cleaner was a lot of fun kind of fly around on the vacuum cleaner don't worry my little seminar you don't have to take out the trash because I just send it out the hatch yesterday the way we deal with trash on the space station is that we have these these cargo vehicles that have come up loaded with new supplies for us and we when we unload those we put all of our trash that we've collected into them most of those ships burn up in the atmosphere what I mean it's really a very clean effective way to get rid of your trash we have to do this job anyway conclusion I hope you've enjoyed this kind of comparison between what goes on in the movies and what happens in real life as much as I have I am so thankful for the science fiction that we are presented with I think it gives us an opportunity to think about what our future could be like already we've seen so much sci-fi that's turned into SCI fact that I am really hopeful for what we'll see in the few and I hope that we can continue to compare over time what we're doing in real life and how we're imagining it in the sci-fi movies [Applause]

Channel: WIRED

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Rating: 4.9104476 out of 5

Keywords: arts & entertainment, ott technique critique, technique critique, wired technique critique, astronaut, astronaut breaks down space scenes, astronaut breaks down wired, wired astronaut breaks down, wired interview, nicole stott, nicole stott wired, nicole stott astronaut, nicole stott astronaut interview, wired nicole stott, real astronaut, astronaut reacts, astronaut reviews space scenes, astronaut review, astronaut break down, wired

Id: xW_847wnZVA

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DrivesTooMuch]

This is a great video; she does a great job.

I saw this on YouTube about 4 hours ago. I'm not sure if I found it from just surfing YouTube (I subscribe to Wired on there) or from this post (I subscribe to r/space).

Now, I can't decide to watch the replay of the events of Apollo 13 from some website or rewatch Ron Howard's dramatic movie of said event.