Coming up next on Jonathan Bird's Blue World,
Jonathan goes to inner space at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab, where astronauts are trained. Hi, I'm Jonathan Bird and welcome to my world! Blue World takes me on adventures all over
the planet. Today’s adventure takes me to the Johnson
Space Center at NASA, in Houston, Texas! And, I’m standing on the International Space
Station! Well, not exactly. I’m standing on an underwater full size
replica of the International Space Station in a gigantic indoor swimming pool. Here they train astronauts to work in zero
gravity by simulating these conditions underwater. Outside, it just looks like a huge warehouse,
but inside is the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory: The NBL. I arrive early in the morning and meet Daniel
Sedej, the facility manager, who has arranged our visit. We drag all our gear inside and get our first
glimpse of the NBL. This thing is huge—a swimming pool nearly
the size of a football field! As we arrive, the morning mission briefing
is just starting. The entire team, from astronauts to support
divers to technicians, are all given a thorough run-through on the training exercises for
the day. And Cameraman Tim and I are part of this meeting,
because they are going to let us dive in the NBL today with the astronauts! Our morning starts with a quick checkup. All divers in the NBL must pass a rigorous
physical, and a checkup before the dive. Cameraman Tim and I are no exception. We pass our checkup, and next we meet up with
Sara Williams, the Dive Training Officer who gives us a dive safety briefing. What to do and what not to do in
the NBL. Just as we finish our briefing, the team is
gathering on the deck to begin preparations for putting the astronauts in the water. Getting into a space suit is no easy feat. In fact, it might be easier in the zero gravity
of orbit. But here on land, it takes assistance. The astronauts wear liquid-cooled underwear
to keep them from overheating. That’s what these tubes are for. The torso of the suit is clamped to a cage
because its too heavy to lift. That’s because this space suit is specially
modified for underwater use, and has a lot of lead weight in it. Climbing into the torso is a little tricky. It takes nearly an hour to suit up. The last thing to go on is the helmet. Underwater, a high-oxygen blend of air will
be fed to the astronauts through their umbilicals. Meanwhile, the safety divers are in the water
getting ready. They wear double scuba tanks so they have
enough air to stay down as long as necessary to complete the mission. Tim and I are getting ready too. I can’t wait to see this enormous underwater
facility! I descend into the clearest water I have ever
seen, and it looks like an underwater movie set! The pool is a staggering 40 feet deep, and
everywhere I look are full-size replica sections of the International Space Station. I take a few minutes to explore the pool. I can see from one end to the other very clearly,
meaning that the underwater visibility is over 200 feet! I could spend a few hours just swimming around
down here. It’s like a playground for divers, with
all sorts of great structures to swim through! For the astronauts--now, the moment of truth. A crane lifts them into the pool, wearing
300 pounds of space suit apiece. Underwater, the safety divers meet them and
carefully remove them from the platform. Each astronaut is carefully weighted to be
precisely neutrally buoyant. (Hey, they don’t call it the Neutral Buoyancy
Lab for nothing!) Once weighted properly, the astronauts hover
in the water as if floating in the weightlessness of space. Since fins don’t work in space, the astronauts
don’t get to wear them here. They must be moved from task to task by the
divers. The divers are also responsible for keeping
a careful eye on everything happening. Each astronaut has 4 divers assigned to him
or her. Two are safety divers. Another has a camera with a cable going to
the control room. And there are more cameras mounted all over
the inside of the pool too. In the Test Director room overlooking the
pool, 21 monitors keep the staff informed of everything that happens below. They oversee the safety of the operation. If anything were to go wrong, the divers can
get the astronaut to the surface in only seconds. In the Test Conductor room, another team is
conducting the training run. The test conductor and team speak directly
to the astronauts through communication gear in their helmets. But powerful underwater speakers allow the
divers to hear everything that is being said, even if they can’t talk back. The point of all this effort is to provide
a learning environment for astronauts where they can practice tasks over and over in simulated
zero gravity, before they are required to do it by themselves in space. Tasks that are easy on land become much harder
in zero gravity. And harder still while wearing a space suit
that has to be able to protect an astronaut from the vacuum of space. A space suit is designed to have more pressure
on the inside than on the outside, since it’s effectively inflated like a balloon in space. Here in the NBL, that pressure is backwards. Water is definitely not a vacuum. In order to keep the water pressure from squishing
the astronauts as they go deeper, the suits are inflated to a pressure just a few PSI
higher than the surrounding water. When an astronaut goes deeper into the pool,
the water pressure pushes in on the suit and tries to compress it, so the suit is given
more internal pressure to keep it inflated correctly. As the astronaut ascends towards the surface,
the air inside the suit expands and tries to overinflate the suit, so some of the air
is released. In this way, the suit always stays inflated
just as it would be in space. After a couple hours of training, the divers
move one of the astronauts over to the platform and remove her glove. This training exercise simulates a suit failure,
and it’s one of the things that astronauts practice underwater. The continuous flow of bubbles from the sleeve
shows the regulator in the suit attempting to maintain positive pressure. Soon, the astronaut is lifted from the water
after a successful training mission. Tim and I head back to the surface too. That is the coolest swimming pool ever! Later, I have the opportunity to meet Ron
Garan, a real astronaut. He has spent nearly half a year in space,
and more than 27 hours spacewalking. So you know what I had to ask him. JONATHAN: You gotta tell me what it’s like
to be in space. RON: What's it like to be in space? Well, it’s a lot like being in the pool
here….the only difference is, when you turn upside down in the pool, you feel upside down. When you turn upside-down in space, there
is no upside down, so you don't have that sensation of blood rushing to your head. And you can't beat the view. JONATHAN: Yeah, I guess that's true, huh? What did you do here, that helped you as an
astronaut? RON: Well, what we do here is we train for
our space walks. There's two ways to look at it. When we were flying the shuttle, we had very
specific, very choreographed space walks. And so for every hour that we spent outside
in the vaccum of space, we spent about 7 hours underwater, making sure that we knew exactly
how things were going to be. There's a full scale mockup as you guys saw
of the space station down there. So just to know how to get around, know the
lay of the land, know how the equipment works. But nowadays, since we don't have the space
shuttles, what we're really traning for is if something breaks. If we have a piece of equipment that breaks,
then we have to go out, sometimes in a fairly expeditious manner, to fix the equipment. And we never know what's going to break beforehand,
so we have to kind of train a skill set to learn the basic skills on how to fix anything
that can go wrong outside. I spend an hour chatting with Ron about being
an astronaut, and training underwater in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. I explain that I'm a perfect choice to join
the space program, I mean after all, I'm already good at working in zero gravity. But I don't think he was convinced. So, instead of joining the space program,
the Blue World team ended our exciting day by getting our picture taken with Ron. Sometimes my adventures in the Blue World
take me to fascinating places I'll never forget.
This does not scare me for some reason.
Been here before cause a family member worked as a safety diver.
Huh weird - there was a completely different post- with the same title -on a different subreddit, posted by a different person right next to each other on my feed
Isn't it easier to connect cameras via wi-fi?
I loved this, thanks for the submission! I'm a scuba diver (who is terrified of the ocean, embarrassingly enough), so this pool (and the massively deep one in Italy) are my dream closed-water diving experiences. What a neat opportunity!
What are they watching in the bottom left monitor at least after 06:50?
Subnautica