Encore: A Day In Space

You're listening to NASA's Curious Universe. I'm your host, Patti Boyd. Above Earth's surface, an international team is living in a space station, conducting scientific research and orbiting Earth at five miles per second. And here's the really cool part. That sense is old news. This fall, the International Space Station reached 25 years of continuous occupation. Think about how incredible that is, an unbroken streak of humans living hundreds of miles above Earth's surface. That's 25 years of sending astronauts to space and back, 25 years of international cooperation, and 25 years of science that is paving the way for humans to return to the moon and take the next giant leap to Mars. So to celebrate the big anniversary, we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes. It's called A Day in Space, and it lets you experience the ISS through the ears of astronauts who live there. This episode was recorded in 2021, and some details you're about to hear have changed since then. The number of science experiments on ISS keeps going up, it's now over 4,000. And some of the experiments from back then have changed, or are no longer active. After you listen, you can catch up on the latest ISS news at NASA.gov/station. Okay, here we go. Hello everyone, I'm actually in the Dragon spacecraft now called Endeavor. This is the vehicle that we flew up on, and just wanted to give you some sounds of this vehicle. All right, welcome to safety tour space station, I'm your captain today. Right now I'm in the node 1 module of the International Space Station, which is where we prepare and eat our meals, and node 1 is right next to node 3, which is where we typically conduct our exercise. We have a treadmill. High curious universe listeners, we have a very exciting episode for you today to finish out season 3 of NASA's curious universe. Right now, in August of 2021, there are seven people living and working aboard the International Space Station. A few weeks ago, we asked some of those astronauts, NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Megan MacArthur and European Space Agency's Tomah Pesquet, to take their microphones and walk us, or should I say, float us through a day in space. We're excited to share the audio that they recorded in this episode. So let's listen in on our explorers on the International Space Station and find out what a day in space really sounds like. Hello, I'm in one of the sleep stations on the International Space Station. We call it crew quarters. This is Shane Kimbrough. He served as the commander of the SpaceX Crew 2 flight to the space station in April 2021 and is a flight engineer for the current mission, Expedition 65. The International Space Station is made up of different nodes and modules, a lot like rooms or hallways in a house. Right now, he's in one of the crew cabin modules, taking us through the steps and sounds of his morning routine. This is where it's kind of our private space. It's where you get a chance to sleep, of course, but other things as well. The crew quarters on the space station look kind of like a padded pod. On the inside, there's a sleeping bag for each astronaut to zip into, and space for personal items like laptops. But here's a sound that this makes. As I get ready to come out, so we're getting in the sleeping bag, it's mounted to a wall and it's connected to the wall so that we don't just bounce around in here as we're trying to sleep at night. We want to get a good night's sleep. So that's where we mount this thing to the wall and then you just climb in, zip it up, and then hopefully have a good night's sleep. Also in here, you have some personal items. You usually have pictures of your family. I have a computer here that I can do my email on or I can check the schedule out for the day. You can watch movies, you can watch TV shows, those kind of things as well in here. But it's a nice space. So when I close the door, it gets really quiet, it's a really private space. So you can kind of get away from everybody if you need to, which we all need at some point. And then when you open up the doors and you get the sounds of the International Space Station, which in general, just some background fans running, it's not very loud at all, which is really impressive with all the things that we have going on up here. And there is so much going on up there. The International Space Station has been continuously occupied since November of 2000 by astronauts from 19 different countries. During that time, the station has evolved from an orbital outpost into a full-fledged orbiting laboratory, an acre of solar panels power the orbiting lab, which is larger than a six-bedroom house, containing around eight miles of wire weaving through the station, keeping all the science running. We come out of our crew quarters and flow through the lab here. You can hear some fans a little louder here than our sleep stations for sure. And then once we get through the U.S. lab, we'll be heading into node 1, which is where I usually get my breakfast ready to go before I go do anything else. All right, we're in the galley now, which is in node 1, and give you a few sounds of what it's like to go get our food out of our pantries. So these are your medical containers that we get from the Russians, and we just pull out our food. We'll pull out some oatmeal today, and then put that back and do the same thing with the drink. We'll have a hint of orange to drink. So then we come over here, we have packaging that we have, most of our food in, I'll open this up, I'll hydrate it here with our machine, put in 75 milliliters, and you hear kind of a click when it's done, and then you know it's safe to, we always put this in the off position so that if water's coming out, it doesn't spray you. It's a good safety tip for us, and this oatmeal takes about five to ten minutes to kind of be ready to go. Some food on the International Space Station doesn't need to be rehydrated, because it can be sent up in the natural form, like fruit and brownies, but most of their food starts out dehydrated, and you can't just sprinkle on extra seasonings as you want. Shaking salt particles in space could mean trouble for instruments on station. Instead, the seasonings come in liquid form. So we'll head over and I'll show you what I do in the mornings as well to just get ready for the day, brush my teeth, and go to the restroom and that sort of thing. Everybody has their own little station where they keep all their items. The sounds you hear are coming from all the tinkering that has to be done to get Shane's morning items ready to go. With everything on station experiencing the condition of microgravity, things need to be latched down to keep from floating away and unlatched when you're ready to use them. Now let me just briefly show you over here to the restroom, and I'll only show you a whole lot, but I just want to turn it on so you can hear the sound that it makes. So that's the fans cranking up. I was good to use the restroom, but as the system cranks up, then while you're using it. Microgravity can make doing things we normally do here on Earth really complicated in space. The first modules of the orbiting laboratory were sent into space in 1998, and since then scientists have worked to create and upgrade the different systems humans need to live in space. When upcoming space missions for the Artemis program, NASA plans to build another outpost. This time, it will be orbiting our moon. The research we're doing in low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station continues to provide important new information on what humans need in order to survive and thrive in space. The ISS is a critical stepping stone for NASA's further exploration of deep space. The other NASA astronaut we miked up for this episode was Megan MacArthur. Megan is an oceanographer who flew her first mission in 2009 on Space Shuttle Atlantis to service the Hubble Space Telescope. She serves as pilot of the SpaceX Crew-2 mission, and she's also a flight engineer for Expedition 65. Right now I'm in the node 1 module of the International Space Station, which is where we prepare and eat our meals. And node 1 is right next to node 3, which is where we typically conduct our exercise. We have a treadmill and the advanced resistive exercise device in node 3. So the sound that you're hearing is the sound of the treadmill. It's less impermanent. Exercising is important in space because it prevents bone and muscle loss while in microgravity. So one of the things that we have also in node 1 in the deck is a toolbox that people are getting into all day long to get tools they need to accomplish various tasks. So Aki is about to put away a socket that was used earlier. Aki is Aki Hoshide, a Japanese engineer, astronaut, and current commander of the International Space Station. He works for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, called JAXA. As Tomah begins setting up for his workout, let's pause and listen to how the device sounds as it's getting prepared for activity. Tomah works for the European Space Agency, or ESA, and was born in Rulong, France. Okay, between sets, what do you usually like to listen to during your workouts? Some really cool music, cranked up, sometimes by Megan, sometimes carefully curated by Mark, as he has just ran the music from the internet. Alright, well we'll let you get to that and enjoy your workout. Even though the names and faces change, people from all around the world have been living and working together continuously while they're sharing the close quarters of the International Space Station. A day in the life of an astronaut includes many of the normal things we do here on Earth, exercising, eating, chatting with coworkers, but the majority of an astronaut's day is spent doing important research that can only be done in space. They also participate in video interviews with schools and the media. On this day, the astronauts kicked off an experiment growing peppers for the first time in space, performed combustion research, and even set up a camera that allows middle school students on Earth to take pictures of our home planet from space. I'm in the U.S. lab now, which is a location that we do a lot of experiments, obviously. It's also a location for some of our exercise. There's always an ambient sound of fans and pump noise in here. This is probably one of the loudest places on the International Space Station. And like I said, we conduct science in here. We also conduct a lot of our conferences with the ground. We communicate with ground throughout the day for all of the activities that we do. They give us permission to proceed in different places. They answer our questions. They maybe make changes to procedures, so we really need that communication with them throughout the day. And it's very important that we're able to hear that. While they work, space station astronauts are talking to mission control centers around the world. Here's Shane checking in on some of the research he's conducting. Here's the station on two forward triple A. Go ahead, Shane. Hey, yeah, I'm ready to get going. Wait and just check over the U.S. 7-1-1. There are also opportunities for astronauts to connect with people on the ground to hear from curious space enthusiasts and talk about their life on station. Hi, my name is Olivia and and I'm from North Carolina. My question is, what does the earth look like from outer space? Thanks for the question. The earth looks absolutely amazing. It's really beautiful. The colors are just striking no matter if you're looking at the Bahamas like a beach or the desert to me, that's very special. Being able to communicate in space is critical, not only with the ground, but with each other. And with all the background noise of fans and systems running to keep things operational, it can get pretty noisy on station. Research projects like the ISS Acoustics Experiment have been conducted on station to monitor these sounds and make sure things don't get too loud for the astronauts. One of the things that we talk about before we come into space is what the sounds of the environment are going to be like. We don't really exactly model on earth the amount of background noise that we have up here, but we do work in a variety of noisy environments as part of our training. So for example, we fly in T-38 jets, which are quite loud, of course, on their own. And so, thinking about how to communicate effectively in a loud environment is really important. When I first came to space station, the sound that surprised me was actually here in the lab, and it's the thermal and mean scrubber. And if we're lucky, we might hear it make this noise, but I was floating through the lab directly underneath it, and it makes kind of this big, it's almost like an exhale. It sounded like something very large, exhaling right next to me, and it really startled me. Fortunately, Shannon Walker, who was outgoing crew, had been up here for six months. She said, "Oh, don't worry about that. It does that all the time." The unique features of the space station, like microgravity and proximity to extreme temperatures, create a prime opportunity for experimentation in the different labs. Since the year 2000, there have been over 3,000 experiments conducted on the International Space Station, and each astronaut plays a role in making sure these experiments are successful. On any given day, they could be developing new treatments for diseases, or even testing concrete for future space structures. Today, Shannon's working on agriculture and space. On his last trip to the station, Shane grew lettuce, and made a bit of a name for himself as a microgravity gardener. If all goes according to plan, this experiment could add some spice to the astronaut's daily lives. Let's listen in. Alright, I'm working on Plant Habitat now, which is going to be back in here. I'm going to refill some water into that system so we can grow some chili peppers. Good, you're beast. Snuff and name. Good. I'm almost done. Almost done. Yeah. Thanks. Huntsville station on 2 for water refill. So we do a lot of talking to the ground. They have a lot of data that we don't have, so they're checking right now to make sure they've put enough water in and if not, we'll add some more. Get these plants growing. Okay, Huntsville, that's one more surround, so let me know what you think. The quietest places on space station are probably our sleeping quarters. You have some sound proofing, but you can still always hear fan noise in there. The cupola is a little bit quieter and that's nice when you're watching the Earth go by to have a little bit of calm, but that's probably the sound that I miss the most from Earth. Because really the lack of sound is just that quiet and we don't ever get true quiet up here. And so we listen to music or maybe we watch programs with headphones in to try to really be able to hear well what we're trying to listen to. The other things, the other sounds I miss from Earth are natural sounds, so the sound of rain or the sound of really strong wind, those are some of the things that I miss from sounds on Earth. Of course, birds singing, you know, that kind of thing. We don't get any of that up here. Living in space is a dream come true for these explorers, but it can also be challenging. They're isolated away from your family and can only access a limited living space. With such a small team working so closely together, it's important to keep morale up. And over the years, astronauts have found some pretty fun ways to shake things up. This is astronaut Chris Cassidy on a mission in 2020. Having our Russian crewmates over for dinner, so preparing a bunch of drinks, apple cider, grapefruit juice, lemon lime drink, other grapefruit juice. Here are astronauts aboard the station, marking an important birthday celebration. And this is current astronaut Tomah Piscay showing off his saxophone skills in microgravity. Thank you so much for joining us for our listen-in on a day in space. And a huge thank you to the astronauts of the International Space Station for giving us a backstage pass into the out-of-this-world experience of living in space. Tomah, if you wouldn't mind, would you play us out? Alright, I think I can lose our tour, thanks a lot for flying with us today on Air ISS. This is NASA's Curious Universe. This episode was originally released in 2021. It was written and produced by Christina Dana. You can find the latest information about the International Space Station at NASA.gov/station. The executive producer of Curious Universe is Katie Cohnins. Our team includes Christian Elliott and Jacob Pinter. Christopher Kim designed our show art. Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santiguita of System Sounds. If you enjoyed this episode of NASA's Curious Universe, let us know. 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