Space Station Crew answers questions from students in Palm Beach Gardens

station this is Houston are you ready for the event this is station and we are ready for the event question please call station for a voice check stations is Houston ACR how do you hear me Houston ACR we have you loud and clear how about us got you loud and clear please stand by for opening remarks hello to the International Space Station from everyone at St Mark's Episcopal Church and School in Palm Beach Gardens Florida I'm Deborah strange it's my honor to serve as head of school for this exceptional pk2 through 8th grade school we are thrilled to have this opportunity to ask you questions about your life as you live and work and conduct research on the International Space Station the entire St Mark's Community along with our education partners are excited to tune in for this experience and now here is our first question yeah food does taste a little bit different in space mostly because your your body changes when you get space and fluid shifts around and your taste buds change and you know we're up here for six months at a time so what you'd like on any given day changes as well but what's really interesting is how they package our food so some of our food is just right in a nice aluminum packet and some of it like this is fruit basically is rehydrated so this is a mix of a better mixture of berries which I'll add water to and I'll eat tomorrow hi my name is Michael how do you drink liquids on the space station hey Michael you know that's a really great question we um we drink liquids from these little silver bags and um they basically uh protect the fluids that we drink and then we have these little straws with little Clips on them because uh if we just open them up to regular straws stuff would just float away so what he's going to show you and see how big of a bubble we can make up here and then uh we'll see if we can get it to float around and show you what uh fluids do in space all right so check that out nice big bubble of water and now Woody's gonna try to drink that for you and see if he can drink that whole thing that's actually a lot of water but Woody's really thirsty so it's working out great nice job buddy hi my name is Ben how do astronauts sleep well the sleep up here is really great actually we keep a pretty normal work schedule we're actually on Greenwich mean time we go to bed around 10 p.m get up around 6 a.m and in terms of uh physically sleeping obviously we're all floating and we have some sleeping bags we get inside our sleeping bag and typically they're bungee to the wall or to the side of our crew quarters our crew quarters are actually in all sorts of different orientations so for example Steve sleeps on the ceiling so he's kind of up in a position like this when he's sleeping um I'm down in the floor Frank sleeps on the wall so he sleeps just kind of standing up straight but all those different orientations feel the exact same to us and the sleep is really high quality why are you doing all day right so all day on our spaceship we work if you look around we're kind of surrounded by computers and cables and there's a radiation detector and all sorts of interesting stuff and we work on experiments all day and maintain the space station so we have a very full day as they just said from 7 30 in the morning 7 30 at night we're basically working hi my name is Hudson do you grow your own food in space hey Hudson you know what we've been working on that for a while because uh learning how to grow fresh food in Space is really important especially as we transition to exploration missions going back to the moon and eventually back to Mars and so we've been working on hey how do we best grow food what's the best ratio of water to give them nutrients uh what what kind of habitats do they grow best in currently we have two different things that we use one is an advanced plant habitat and it's kind of a self-contained environment that has everything the plants need and then the other one is called veggie and it there we grow the plants on these little pillows that have clay beads inside of them with nutrients and then we water the plants every few days and I watch them grow and it's actually a lot of fun to watch little seeds grow into little plants that then have tomatoes is actually the last thing we grew and it was just a lot of fun to watch them grow hello my name is Ruth how does learning to grow plants in space affect the future well I actually think right now is one of the most exciting times in human space exploration history we're right at a transition point where NASA is going to start pushing further and deeper into the solar system than we ever have before starting with the moon and we're going to use the moon as a Proving Ground for Missions to Mars and for those missions we're going to be needing to extract resources from the planetary bodies that we visit and we're going to definitely need to do things like recycling our water and growing plants in space and so all of these are really important Technologies to our future missions and that's what's really cool about the space station right now we've had we have a 22-year continuous presence up here working and living in space and we've really used one of the key things we've done on the space station is used it as a Proving Ground for all of the Technologies we're going to use on our future missions hi my name is Elise what are the current and maintaining plants in space and that's one of the things we're looking at I'll see the uh as Frank just said the water and the nutrients there's different ways of providing them we're also trying to determine which ones are the important ones so light what frequencies of light water is there a right amount of water and the different nutrients and how they affect each of the different plants hi my name is Brooke I'm wondering how do you put on clothes in space hey Brooke well we put our clothes on pretty much just like you do back on Earth the only difference is that we can actually put our pants on two legs at a time because we can just float you just kind of let your legs come up uh stick your legs in the pants and then you pull your pants up the problem is as you do anything in space any movement has an equal reaction right so as you push off even on your clothes you're going to create a little bit of momentum and so you just have to learn how to push back and push yourself back to where you want to be but it's kind of a fun game of push and react to every every movement that you have up here hi my name is Finn how do you keep your toes from floating away well that is a great question we have a number of things we use to keep everything from floating away you're you're exactly right if we uh if we don't keep our tools attached to something they will float away and disappear and often they end up in an air Inlet duct that's where we find them but Steve's demonstrating here some one of the tools we have is just a simple tether so we can tether our tools to ourselves so they can't get very far another thing you notice my pants I have velcro strips on my pants and this is an iPad that I use for procedures and so I can just velcro that to my pants we use a lot of velcro all over the space station there's some here on this desk and I can just velcro things temporarily that I need to hold in space and then one other thing we sometimes use is just little strips of tape we can actually tape small little Parts down and keep them from floating away my name is Rex and I would like to know what it feels like to float in microgravity yeah floating a microgravity feels great it never gets old once you get used to the environment up here and living up here you just get very comfortable just kind of hanging out my name is Olivia how was the feeling of liftoff the same or different to the feeling you had when you were training Hey Olivia you know what liftoff was a lot of fun um we I think all wanted to always lift off in a rocket and so when you finally get to do it it's really cool um the one thing that's really surprising is how quiet it is and that's because all that energy is dissipated away from the spacecraft because you don't want the waves that are associated with that sound to damage the aircraft as you're lifting off and so we use special structures to push all that energy away from the spacecraft and it's actually really quiet but the people standing around you they're actually a couple miles away from you they feel all that energy and they feel it going through their body and they hear a really loud boom as you take off and then you start off really slow and you quickly pick up a lot of speed and before you know it you're going over ten thousand miles an hour hi my name is Reed what is training like before traveling to space well the training is really fun all three of us found out about two years before the start of our mission that we were going to be flying on this Mission and so we do about two years of training devoted to this specific mission on the ground and it's really varied we have training centers all over the world actually with our International Partners where we go to train on their uh we have modules from our International Partners on the space station and we train on those then back in Houston we have a lot of training facilities we have one dedicated to sort of the inside of the space station and all of its systems we have another that's a very large pool it's called the neutral buoyancy lab and that's where we practice space walking we fly t-38 Jets as part of our training and in general every day is different in training but it all kind of comes together to prepare us for ultimately flying the mission yeah my name is Chris and I'd like to know what materials are used in the bottom of the spacecraft to handle the heat from re-entering Earth's atmosphere yeah entering the Earth's atmosphere with the speeds that we're flying is a very difficult problem and so Through The Years they've tried a number of different things and usually they come back to the idea of ablation where the material on the bottom of the vehicle just wears away as it heats up and it comes off so right now we use a material called Pika which is a phenylic impregnated carbon ablative and that just slowly Burns away on the shuttle we had a tile system that was similar and they would be used tiles over and over again on the same vehicle this is one of the big problems when we're going to the moon the return velocities are even higher than what we experience on entry and so that material that we use on our return from the moon is going to be pretty impressive yeah hi my name is Ethan what are some pros and cons of microgravity hey Ethan we're on a personal note um the biggest Pro is that it's a lot of fun to be in microgravity and floating around and just have fun uh but we're not just up here to have fun we're actually up here to do science and microgravity allows us to do a lot of things that we just can't do on Earth uh specifically with different materials like proteins Metals crystals glass and without the different forces that we see on Earth especially gravity and actually convection's another one right because hot air tends to rise because of gravity and so we get rid of all those here and we're able to make much better crystals and proteins and materials and hopefully develop methods that will allow us to make those things much easier much cheaper and then improve life on Earth for all of our friends uh the downside is that unfortunately especially on a health level microgravity can tend to mimic Aging for humans and that you know you see muscle wasting and Bone wasting and that's just because we don't have the resistive forces that gravity provides on our body you'd be surprised how much just standing and walking does for your body and how good those things are so up here we're kind of missing those things and we have to make up for them with things like exercise hi my name is Summer what do you do to adjust to life back on Earth after going so long without gravity well that's a great question as Frank mentioned uh we're exposed to kind of an extreme environment here in that we don't have the normal loading on our skeleton that we do on Earth we have a lot of fluid shifts and so that process of adjusting to life back on Earth actually starts while we're up here with a lot of exercise that's really key to a good rehab when we get home and then once we get home we have an amazing team of uh they think basically strength trainers and rehabil Rehabilitation Specialists that walk us through a dedicated program to rehabilitate us to life in 1G on the surface of Earth and so that process plays out over a few weeks to months and that first couple weeks is really critical to having a good outcome my name is Lawson what types of workouts did the astronauts do to keep their muscles from weakening so that's a very good question because you know for most of the time we're up here 24 hours a day if we did no exercise we'd put no loads on our bodies and our muscles and Bones would attribute they'd waste away so every day we work out to two about two hours two and a half hours of load bearing exercise and that's really important because that helps with maintains your bone density and muscle mass which helps us when we get back to Earth to stay healthy and strong and they do a very good job of as we go through our mission over the six months or so they keep changing it and improving it making sure it's still difficult so you can maximize your strength when you return hi my name is Mary is appeared in Acts and astronaut has been in space hey Mary well you know that some people have spent a long time in space uh the longest was actually by a Russian cosmonaut uh Valeri poliakov and he was up here for 438 days as far as American astronauts go the record holder is one of our good friends Mark vandehei and he was up here for 355 days and the really cool part is the uh the record holder for the longest time in space now she did it over multiple missions I guess Peggy Whitson and she's actually up here hanging out with us now and she's over 670 days and we'll see how uh how much longer she stays up here for to add to the her total record but yeah people have been living in space for a long time and some people for a little bit longer than others hi I'm Ellison what are some of the different jobs people have on the station well that's actually one of my favorite parts of being up here is that we have a lot of different jobs every day we're doing something different so being up here for six months we all get to do a lot of different things we are all flight Engineers on board the space station and that kind of means that we all do everything so on any given day we might be maintaining the equipment up here we are space plumbers we're space electricians fixing all the hardware keeping it in good working order we do a lot of scientific research so sometimes we're working in glove boxes or carrying out scientific experiments often on ourselves another thing we occasionally do is get to go outside for a spacewalk and that's where we do some maintenance activities on the outside of the space station so every day is just very different and varied and it's a lot of fun getting to do all those different things hi my name is Elizabeth so Elizabeth uh there are windows on board space station so if you're fortunate enough you can be near one you can look out and see if it's night or day what's interesting is that we actually have 16 nights and days every single 24-hour period so we can't just look at the clock and say oh it's noon it must be Sunshine outside and that doesn't work but fortunately on our schedule they do tell us at the top of the schedule when it's going to be night and when it's going to be day or we can just go out look outside the window hi my name is Catherine is it easy to recognize the continents on earth from space hey Catherine you know what um we're only 250 miles above the surface of the Earth which really isn't that far we would have to be probably closer to a thousand miles to start seeing an entire continent but after you've been up here for a couple months you start to really recognize what each continent looks like because they all looked very different Africa looks very different from South America which looks very different from Asia and so between the coastline and just the way that the dirt looks you can actually learn to recognize where you are pretty well and it's kind of fun to play a game with you go out and look out the window and see if you can guess where you are thank you NASA for this amazing opportunity and thank you astronauts for your service to humanity through your work on the International Space Station as St Marks prepares the next generation of leaders they can look to your example of how to best be stewards of our planet and Beyond well thank you so much and good luck to all the great students at St Marks station this is Houston ACR that concludes our event ideal Communications [Music]

Channel: PalmBeachPost

Views: 310

Keywords: Palm Beach County, Palm Beach Post, West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Gardens, Boca Raton, Florida, Gold Coast

Id: _CXkhG_kyuU

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023