The life of a NASA astronaut

It is estimated that over 4 million people have been abducted by alien lifeforms. But only one of them asked for it. This is Elio of Earth. If any aliens are listening, come and get me. From Disney and Pixar. Yes, it's really happening! He'll go where no one has gone before welcome to the community These are the lava tunnels You're listening to Brains On, where we're serious about being curious. Brains On is supported in part by...

A grant from the National Science Foundation. Careful, Sandin. Careful! I know, Mark. I know. This last connection is of the utmost importance. By Jove, I think we've done it. Oh, yeah. Dream Team strikes again. Hey, Sandin. Hey, Mark. What's that you got there? A spacesuit? Not just any spacesuit, Molly. This is our latest invention. It's a one-of-a-kind, custom-made, full-body suit with enhanced flatulence extractor.

We're going to pitch this idea to NASA. Wait, did you say a flatulence extractor? Yes. Flatulence. Like a fart? Yeah. So this is a spacesuit with a fart vacuum? Is that what that tube on the butt is? The fart vacuum? Molly, please. This is serious stuff. Look, there's no breeze when you're floating around inside a space station.

Flatulence lingers. And those unpleasant odors can be a distraction from serious astronaut work, like conducting experiments. Okay, so you built a suit that gets rid of fart stink. Oh, it's a...

Toot suit. No, no, no, no. A whopper stopper. Molly, focus. Yes. When there is flatulence. Harding. The suit uses a smell-triggered engine to pull the aroma out of the rear area and capture it in this here flatulence container. Oh, wait, wait. Smell-triggered engine? Who should call it? The odor motor. Wait, and this is a tank of farts? It's a steak tank. This is important work, Molly.

I know. I know. But it can be important and funny. Hang on. I got to get a picture of this. Let me get my camera. Stay right here. I'll be right back. So immature, right? I mean, Whopper Stopper is a pretty good name, though. Oh, so good.

You're listening to Brains On from APM Studios. I'm Molly Bloom, and my co-host today is Vincent from Greenwood, Indiana. Hi, Vincent. Hi, Molly. Brains On is a public media podcast. That means you keep us going. Without you, there'd be no us. Help out by donating, signing up for SmartyPass, or buying merch at BrainsOn.org slash fans. Thank you so much.

So, Vincent, today we're tackling a colossal collection of questions about life in space. Yeah, questions like these. I was wondering, how do astronauts train for low gravity? How do you become an astronaut and work at NASA? Can you get sunburned in space? What happens when astronauts fart in space? Thanks to Blake, Mark, Margo, and Ike for sending in those excellent questions. Vincent, I'm curious, would you like to travel to space one day?

Yeah. Yeah? Where do you think you'd like to go? Mars or the moon. And how long do you think you'd like to stay up there? Six to seven months. I don't want to spend too much time up there. So what is it about Mars or the Moon that you think sounds fun? For the Moon, looking back at Earth. But for Mars, it'd be more like a colony building mission if I were to go there.

Colony building mission. That is very cool. Can you tell me more about what that means? Basically just creating an outpost on a planet or maybe a long-term base. Colonies on other planets are hard just because of logistics. But if you can get the basics down, hydroponics, mining, and other stuff, then you can stay for longer.

So you'd figure out how it would be possible to build a structure on Mars that people could actually live in. Xenocivil engineering. Whoa. I love that word. So do you think... you would be interested in being an astronaut one day? Yeah. That's amazing. It sounds like learning how to build a colony on Mars could be a really interesting thing to do one day. Mm-hmm.

We're going to find out more about living in space in a bit, but first, let's tackle this question from Andreas in New York, Maine. When astronauts land on the moon, how do rocket ships keep the air from escaping when they open the door? Good question.

It's a lot to unpack. First off, the last time humans went to the moon was over 50 years ago in 1972. That was way before smartphones, before the World Wide Web, before Spongebob. People listened to music on big black discs called records. They wore bright colors and bell-bottom pants. And if you were lucky, you might have had one of the very first video game systems on your home.

Now, about those moon trips. They were planned by the U.S. space agency, NASA. There's no air on the moon, and there's no air in space either. So NASA had to think very carefully about how astronauts would breathe. When astronauts flew to the moon, they brought air with them in large tanks. As long as the astronauts were inside their ships, they could breathe just fine.

To land on the moon itself, they used a special, smaller spacecraft that left from the main ship. Once they were on the moon, and when they went outside, they had to wear special spacesuits. Those spacesuits also had air in them, and they were sealed so the air wouldn't escape. But what about the air in that moon lander vehicle? When the astronauts opened the door...

That vehicle was no longer sealed, and since air is a gas, it wants to spread. In this case, the air would spread to the outside and escape into space. And then there'd be no air left inside to breathe. Which is exactly what happened on that first trip to the moon. But don't worry, that was the plan all along. That's why they packed extra air.

Sometimes, spaceships have an airlock. This is a small room that an astronaut stands in before leaving the craft. Maybe you've seen these in movies or cartoons. They're like little waiting rooms with heavy doors. The airlock room gets sealed off from the rest of the ship. So when the astronaut exits the airlock, the air in the rest of the ship isn't lost.

But the little vehicles NASA used to land on the moon didn't have enough room for an airlock. The living space, the part with air, was only 160 cubic feet. That's barely bigger than a minivan. So instead of having an airlock, the astronauts decided to simply just let the air fly away into space. And then later, they could fill the cabin up again. That's why they brought two tanks of air with them. Spare air.

So that's the answer to the question of how rocket ships keep the air from escaping when they open the door. They don't. When astronauts landed on the moon and opened the door, the air just left the ship. They refilled it later, but they had to be careful because they only had so much extra air. Yeah, when you're traveling in space, you have to take breathing very seriously.

Yeah, you really do. And if that air gets fouled up with farts, you can't just open a window. Hmm, I guess having a fart extractor would be pretty handy.

They say there's no sound in space. Thankfully, we're here on Earth because here comes the... Mystery sound. Vincent, are you ready for the mystery sound? Uh, yeah. Okay, here it is. What do you think? Um, sounds like something water. It's not a sink. It sounded like a toilet. Hmm, interesting. Yeah, I definitely heard water for sure. Do you want to hear it again? Yes, please. What do you think? I think that it's a toilet and we're hearing it from, like, the point where it drains.

I like that idea. I think it's someone cleaning out a tank of something, a fish tank that's attached to a toilet. We are going to hear it again and get another chance to guess after the credits. So stick around. Hey friends, one of our absolute favorite things is getting fan art from you. It makes us...

So happy. Maybe you want to draw us a picture of yourself in space or your favorite planet or something totally non-space related. If you want to send us something, go to BrainsOn.org contact. And while you're there, you can send us mystery sounds, drawings, and questions. Like this one. Hi, I'm Gaines, and I live in College Station, Texas. My question is, where did Knock Knock Jotes originate?

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This is Brains On. I'm Molly. And I'm Vincent. Today we're answering your questions about space. So far, we've talked about how astronauts breathe in space, a very important part of staying alive. There's another important part of staying alive that I've been wondering about. What's that? Eating.

What's the food like in space? That's a great question. These days, astronauts can enjoy meals that aren't too different from food that you and I might eat. But space wasn't always so full of culinary delights. In fact... Wait, do you hear that? Molly, your shirt, it's becoming a purple sequined tuxedo jacket. Wait, that's my game show Molly jacket. Honestly, it looks great.

Thank you. Oh, my pants. They've gone all shiny and purple. And I have an astronaut helmet on. Oh, boy. This can only mean one thing. I've become Game Show Molly in space.

And here in the pocket of my purple sequin tuxedo jacket, I have a list of trivia questions about space food. Vincent, are you ready to play Space Scrub? Heck yeah! Okay, first I have to take this astronaut helmet off. It's really hot in here. Oh, much better. Okay, Vincent, here's your first question about space food in T-3, 2... One, how did the first astronauts in the 1960s eat their meals in space?

A, they took meal replacement pills, so like eating vitamins instead of eating meals. B, they squeezed food paste out of a tube into their mouths. C, daintily with a knife and fork, or D, they sealed their heads into a special food chute? Um, I think they had a tube. Answer B. Vincent, you are correct! Bye.

They squeezed food paste out of a tube and into their mouths. Astronauts need to avoid crumbs and messy spills that might damage the electronics on a spacecraft. Food also has water in it, and that's extra weight for the rockets to carry. NASA's earliest solution to these problems was to pack food in the form of freeze-dried cubes and tubes of food paste. Mmm, cubes and tubes. Delicious. Okay, Vincent, ready for question two?

Here we go. What two types of tube food were brought into space by the first person to leave Earth's orbit, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin? Was it a pureed meat and chocolate sauce? B, applesauce and chicken soup. C, tuna salad and oatmeal. Or D, mashed broccoli and butterscotch pudding. I think... Something simple, because you don't want something that could go everywhere. True, true. Answer A. Vincent, you are, again, correct!

Yuri Gagarin got to treat himself to a tube of beef and liver paste and a dessert tube of chocolate sauce for each meal while he was in orbit around Earth. It wouldn't be my first choice for dinner, but I bet the view was pretty spectacular. Okay, next question. In 1965, an astronaut named John Young snuck some food on a space flight that he was not supposed to bring. What was it? A, a whole roast chicken.

B. A slice of pepperoni pizza. C. A waffle. Or D. A corned beef sandwich. Wouldn't anything hot just get really, really cold once you got up? To the ISS? Good thinking. I think that answer D is correct. Vincent, you are so good at this. You are correct. A corned beef sandwich. When John Young took his first sneaky bite of corned beef on rye bread, he sent crumbs floating into the air.

Remember, crumbs are really bad for the electronics on a spacecraft. Young realized this and tucked the sandwich back into his spacesuit for the rest of the flight. Okay, last one. This one's for all the space marbles. What was the first food grown on the International Space Station? Was it A, bananas, B, chili peppers, C, romaine lettuce, or D, potatoes?

Bananas and chili peppers have, I think, really specific conditions for growing. And potatoes are pretty large. So I think answer C. Excellent reasoning, Vincent, and you are correct. In 2015, astronauts aboard the International Space Station grew lettuce to test how space might affect plant growth. The very low gravity on the space station made the plants really stressed out, and they grew really bitter-tastingly.

leaves, so the space lettuce actually tasted more like arugula to the astronauts who sampled it. These days, many meals on the International Space Station are still packaged and freeze-dried. They still need to weigh as little as possible, but the food itself is much more like the food at home on Earth.

Astronauts can snack on dried fruit or beef jerky, and when it's mealtime, they can add water to rehydrate pouches of food like macaroni and cheese or cream of mushroom soup. Fresh food is delivered to the station by Space Shuttle every few months. Personally, I'm glad space food has more options than just tubes of paste and freeze-dried meat cubes. Me too. I would definitely try space mac and cheese, though. Same. Hey.

Your outfit is back to a regular podcast, Molly. Oh, that's good. Oh, but I do somehow have purple sequins in my pants pocket, though.

Speaking of stuffing your face in space, we asked you what meal you thought would be hardest to eat in space. And you sent us a buffet of brilliant answers. My name is Lulu and I live in Austin, Texas and the food that I think would be hardest to eat in space is a peach. My name is Audrey and I'm from Clive, Iowa. I think the hardest thing to eat in space would be like chunky soup because it's hot liquid and that could be bad.

and there are chunks that could get stuck in something, and that would also be very bad. It could damage something. I think the hardest thing that astronauts would eat in space... Would be curry rice because it's liquidy and they'd have to hold the bowl. Hi, my name is Warren. And I think it would be hard for an astronaut to eat soup because it's really watery. Bye. My name is Audrey from Oregon. I think the trickiest food to eat in outer space is sushi because the toppings would fall out.

Hi, my name is Logan. The hottest food that you can eat in space is hot cocoa. Why? Because it would spill everywhere. I think the hardest thing to eat on a spaceship is chips and salsa. Also, I love chips and salsa. Thanks to Lulu, Audrey, Robert, Warren, Audrey, Logan, and Julian for sending in your ideas. So Vincent, what food do you think would be utterly disastrous in space? Chicken Alfredo. Yeah.

Pretty goopy. The sauce? Yeah. It would go everywhere, and then it'd get on the wires, it would corrode the wires, and then an entire module wouldn't have power. Very smart.

Back to your space questions. We know you have a lot more, so we're going big. That's right. It's time for... Ask an Astronaut! That's right. We're talking to Kayla Barron. She's a NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the International Space Station. Hi, Kayla. Hi. My first question is, what is the International Space Station? The International Space Station is kind of like a gigantic laboratory in low Earth orbit. It's this

huge vehicle that is tumbling around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. We're basically in free fall around the planet, and that's how we stay in orbit. And we have... astronauts who have been continually crewing this vehicle. We've been living and working up there for more than 20 years now. And we spend every day maintaining the vehicle so that we can continue to live there, but ultimately doing a ton.

of amazing science experiments cool next up i have a question from blake in pennsylvania he wanted to know how do you become an astronaut

The only thing you really have to do to become an astronaut is study something in a STEM field. So science, technology, engineering, or math, you need a a college degree a master's degree in one of the tons of fields in those areas so you have microbiologists who study cave slime, planetary geologists who study distant planets like Mars. My background is engineering. I studied control systems and robotics engineering and then nuclear engineering, and then I served in the Navy.

But the thing that I think makes us most similar is we are looking for people who know how to work really well on teams because you can't go to space and succeed in space by yourself. It's a team sport. Very cool. Mark from Maryland asked us, how do astronauts train for low gravity? It is kind of weird training on Earth to work in microgravity because there's no... perfect environment that mimics that. We call them analog environments.

Sometimes we just train in normal Earth gravity and kind of try to imagine what it would be like to be in microgravity. We can go on these special kind of flights called parabolic flights where these fancy airplanes fly in the shape of a...

parabola and when you do that it allows you to have about 15 to 30 seconds where you feel like you're in microgravity you feel like you're floating and you can fly within the aircraft cabin that gives you a sense of how it's going to feel to have your body in that environment

but it's only for a very short chunk of time. One really cool place where we practice being in microgravity is in our facility called the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. It's a giant indoor pool, one of the biggest indoor pools in the world. It's 40 feet deep. you

And submerged in it, we have a model of the space station that's the size of the real space station. And that's where we practice our spacewalks. So we actually put on real spacesuits, go underwater, and then there's this team of scuba divers who helps.

put weights or foam on our body to make us feel like we will feel when we're in space on a real spacewalk. And we practice full spacewalks for like six or more hours. We practice being in our spacesuit, leaving the airlock, doing all the work we're going to do. on a real spacewalk and then coming back inside. So we try to find all of these different ways to simulate.

what it might feel like to do our job in space so that when we get there, there's a little bit less to learn. But no matter how much you practice, you can't fully prepare yourself for how it's going to feel and some of the challenges you're going to face. But that's why we practice being adaptable and resilient.

and helping each other because it helps us overcome that challenge when we first arrive and we're getting used to this new environment. This one's from Margo in Nebraska. She was wondering, can you get sunburned in space?

You can absolutely get sunburnt in space, and actually a lot faster than you do on Earth, because here on Earth, the Earth's atmosphere protects us from a lot of those UV rays that cause us to get sunburnt. And so when we're in space, we actually do have windows to look out at our beautiful planet Earth and then the stars, the solar system around us. Those windows have special protective coverings to...

kind of help protect our skin and eyes. But if the sun's really bright, you have to wear special glasses to keep your eyes safe from getting harmful impacts from the sun. But if you're at the right sun angle, people can get sunburned pretty quickly. And I don't even think that sunscreen perfectly applied by your mom even would save you from this kind of a sunburn. So you do have to be careful. I don't want his face sunburn.

Yeah, if you watch out correctly, you'll be fine, though. There's precautions you can take, just like on Earth. All right. And Ike from Texas was curious to know... What happens when you fart in space? Nothing all that special. I think it's probably the same as farting on Earth, to be honest. What about... If you fart in your space suit, does it go up into like the top of your space suit and then you have to smell your fart?

Luckily, no. The spacesuit is kind of like a tiny space vehicle. You take everything out with you that you need to stay alive, including fresh air, fresh oxygen. And so we breathe out carbon dioxide. But if you have too much carbon dioxide that you're breathing in, it can actually make you feel really sick and hurt your body. And so when you're in a spacesuit, we flow 100% pure oxygen from the back of our helmets towards the front. And that delivers...

fresh oxygen for us to inhale. And then when we exhale carbon dioxide, it pushes it down towards the bottom of our spacesuit. Everything's flowing down from your head to your feet, basically, and then being reprocessed so that it removes removes anything that's stinky or any carbon dioxide before it blows back over your face. So it would be a pretty safe spot to have some stinky spells in your spacesuit because they'd never make it to your nose. Okay. I am.

One more question for you, Kayla. What happens if astronauts get sick while they're up on the space station? So we are actually really well trained for all sorts of things that can happen. When you're living up there for six months, you have to be ready for everything, including getting sick. So we do a couple of things. We take precautions before we go to try to be as healthy.

healthy as we can be. So we actually have this process called quarantine, which everyone is more familiar with now that we face pandemics like COVID-19, but basically in the two weeks before we launch. Everybody who's going to be anywhere near the crew members has this like strict protocol where you don't go out in public. You're kind of like in a little bubble of people. So we try not to take any colds.

or germs from Earth with us to the space station. And that's mostly to protect the crew that's already there. Because once you're there, your immune system, it changes due to the space environment. It becomes less strong.

writing things off, but you're also not exposed to the normal everyday things that help train your immune system to keep you healthy. And so we don't want to get the astronauts who are already on the space station sick when we bring up all of our germs from Earth. So we try to... as healthy as we can and then once we're there we have

kind of our own pharmacy, and we have this amazing team of doctors on the ground who specialize in supporting us from Earth. So we're able to do telemedicine. We have a lot of diagnostic equipment, whether that's testing for certain kinds of illnesses. we can do ultrasounds, all sorts of different things.

And we also get our own medical training to support each other. So sometimes we have doctors who become astronauts and they go to space with us. So on my crew, we had Tom Marshburn, who was an emergency medicine physician before he came to NASA. lucky because we had a doctor with us on our crew, but that's not always the case. But if we were ever really sick, we could always come home early in our spaceships. All right. Thank you for answering your questions, Kayla.

Of course. Thank you for your amazing curiosity. It was really fun talking to you today. Bye. Bye, Kayla. Thanks so much. This has been Ask an Astronaut. I'm just curious, Vincent, now that you heard all those answers, does this make you want to be an astronaut maybe more? Yes. Cool. What about it made you want to be an astronaut more? Mostly the farting part. I don't want to smell my own parts while on a six or seven hour spacewalk. Yeah, so now you know. You'll be fine. It's perfect.

Traveling to space takes a lot of preparation. There's no air, so you have to bring it with you. And if you go outside the ship, you need a special space suit to keep the air from escaping. And you have to think carefully about what food to eat. In the early days, food was eaten out of a tube, but it's gotten much better since then. Today, there's even fresh vegetables grown on the International Space Station.

And if you want to become an astronaut, study STEM, get a master's, and most importantly, learn how to work on a team. Because being an astronaut takes teamwork. That's it for this episode of Brains On. This episode was written by Sandin Totten and Anna Goldfield. It was edited by Shayla Farzan. Fact-checking by Ruby Guthrie. We had engineering help from Rachel Breeze, Jess Berg, and Adam Gross with sound design by Rosie DuPont.

Original theme music by Mark Sanchez. We had production help from the rest of the Brains on Universe team. Aron Woldeselassi. Beth Perlman is our executive producer, and the executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith. Special thanks to Christopher Barnett, Jaden Jennings, Mr. Landy, and Dr. Green.

Brains On is a non-profit public radio program. There are lots of ways to support the show. Head to BrainsOn.org to sign up for the Brains On Universe newsletter for bonus stuff, reading recommendations, and more. While you're there, you can send us mystery...

sounds, drawings, and questions. Again, that's BrainsOn.org. All right, Vincent, are you ready to listen to that mystery sound again? Yep. Here it is. Thank you. I hear a whistling in the background. I heard that too this time. What do you think? It could be, like, sucking something out of it. tube or a tank using a tube, but not completely. Okay, what's your final guess before we hear the answer? Emptying of the back of a toilet. Hmm. Maybe someone's doing some plumbing.

That's definitely what it sounds like. Oh, right. I love that guess. Ready for the answer? Mm-hmm. Here it is. Hello. I am Paloma from San Jose, California, and that was the sound of me flushing the toilet. Yeah! Hey, I'm giving it to you. I was so close. So close. I think that's what you said the first time you heard it. But it was the whistling.

That got me. Because the whistling, I'm like, well, that's got to be a tube. Yeah. Well, maybe there's a tube in the toilet, like in the tank. Possibly. Maybe. I actually don't know anything about how toilets work. I know less than you do. We'll do research together. We'll go on a plumbing journey together. Excellent work. Now it's time for the brain's honor roll. These are the incredible kids who keep the show going with their questions, ideas, mystery sounds, drawings, and high fives.

We'll see you next time. Thank you. Greenwood, Nova Scotia. Olivia from Louisville, Kentucky. Iris from Memphis, Tennessee. Logan from Healdsburg, California. Jin from Guangzhou, China. Patrick from Dublin, Ireland. Emma from Arlington, Massachusetts. Jasper and Perry from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Bexley and Guyton from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Henry from Geelong, Australia. Sawyer from Mounds, Oklahoma. Alice and Elizabeth from Lynchburg, Virginia. Sarah Kate from Salt Lake City. Michael and Lillian from Dallas, Georgia. Nico from Brookline, Massachusetts. Jasper and Sage from Columbus, Ohio. Jet from Pittsburgh. Ellie from Silver Spring, Maryland. Lucy from Black Mountain.

Carolina. Rahema and Gigi from Grapevine, Texas. Elowen and Maya from Topanga, California. Owen from Boulder, Colorado. Estelle and Clark from Arlington, Massachusetts. Lyra from St. Paul, Minnesota. Lila, Juniper, and Azalea from Chicago. Akash from Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson from Vancouver, Washington. Thank you. Bronx, New York. We'll be back next week with an episode all about octopuses.