Former NASA Astronaut Answers Space Questions From Twitter

Question for astronauts:

Where your poo poo go?

I'll translate, Where does the poop go?

What happens to the poop?

Hi, I'm Mike Massimino.

Today, I'm going to answer your questions on Twitter.

This is Space Support.

[upbeat music]

@Happygrampy asks,

NASA, what do astronauts do as they're blasting

into infinity and beyond

at 37.3 bazillion miles per hour

under 27.2 G's?

That's the only part one of the question,

there's more to follow.

but with those numbers,

I'm not sure what you would do.

Blasting into infinity and beyond,

don't sign up for that!

We go to definite places.

I went to the Hubble Space Telescope,

you can go to the International Space Station,

have your pick.

37.3 bazillion miles per hour seems

a little bit too fast.

I think that's over any speed limit.

Now, I feel like a slowpoke.

We actually...

In orbit, we go 17,500 miles an hour,

and it says under 27.2 G's,

which I don't think that would be pleasant either.

We take up to three G's.

Are they telling jokes?

Throwing up?

Praying?

Holding onto their seats for dear life

until they're in orbit?

Pretty much all of the above.

I would say you hit just about everything.

Joke telling is more for the launch pad

before you go to space.

So you're like sitting there,

lying on your back for a few hours.

Typically, it was the responsibility

of the pilot to supply jokes.

That was their job.

Do I remember any jokes that the pilot said?

No.

Maybe I just wasn't paying attention,

like I should have did the jokes,

because we're about to launch into space.

I also played tic-tac-toe with my buddy

and rock, paper, scissors,

that kind of thing.

Throwing up really doesn't happen

until after you get to space.

That's more of a zero gravity issue,

so you're not throwing up during the launch.

Praying, absolutely.

Throughout the launch, I found myself doing that.

And holding onto your seats,

you're strapped in so you don't have

to really hold on to anything.

It's all those things,

but it's also an amazing experience.

@Pieterpeach asks,

Why do astronauts need belts in space?

And I'm looking at a photograph

of my friend, Megan MacArthur,

and they're wearing belts.

So why do you need belts in space?

Kind of a good question,

but I think it's just to keep your pants up.

You're not going to have gravity pulling your pants down,

but if your pants aren't fitting really well,

they'll kind of float around you.

But having a belt...

I used a belt.

In fact, look at this,

I'm using a belt now,

I wore this belt in space.

This is actual flown-in-space belt.

So I brought my own belt to space

to keep my pants on correctly,

and I think it's more of a comfort thing.

And also, it's an excuse just to get

a belt flown in space,

'cause I was able to bring it home and wear it.

This next one is from @MiguelTaveras,

How do astronauts get leverage

when attempting to unscrew tough bolts?

You can use your body and gravity on earth,

so seems a little difficult while floating.

This is a really good question

and something we do think about.

As Miguel says, when we're on on earth,

you can brace yourself against something

and you're on the ground,

you're not floating away.

In space, when you push on something,

you're going to go the other direction,

so you're really not going to get anywhere if you do that.

What we do is we make sure that we are stable,

so when I was working on the Hubble Space Telescope,

my feet would be in a foot restraint.

So my feet are nice and solid

and then I could react that force through my feet.

If I didn't have my feet and foot restraints,

I would try to push the wrench

and my feet would go flying this way.

Another interesting thing,

maybe a little more advanced to think about,

is when you're undoing a bolt

or you're going through a hard stop on a bolt

and you get to the end,

it's going to give you a kick.

Well, if you're not steady,

the tool will go flying.

So we would always think about reacting it with our arm.

We're out there in our space suits,

we'd be in our foot restraints,

and I'd always had my arm in position

to absorb that kick

that we would get at the end.

So we're a lot steadier on earth

when we work with tools and work on things.

In space, it's a little more challenging,

but I prefer it.

It's a lot more fun.

@Dima_Hajj, Question for astronauts,

so only for astronauts,

Where your poo poo go?

On the space shuttles, we did have a commode.

It was not a flush toilet.

It had a seat on it.

It was fairly complicated.

You had to turn it on and creative a vacuum

and make sure everything was where it's supposed to.

And then, every couple of days,

the poop would be kind of compressed.

It was a very ingenious way they did it.

It had these different screens,

and so poop would be in there,

then one screen would go and compact it

and then more poop,

and then another screen...

But we just collected that poop

over the course of a couple of weeks.

Everybody's poop went into the same thing.

We brought all that poop back with us

for no reason other than

we didn't know what else to do with it, I think.

I don't think there was any science behind it,

but that poop came back to earth

and it was serviced on the ground,

never to be seen again, as far as I know.

The Space Station is a little bit different.

The toilet is a can

with seat on top of it

and a plastic bag as a liner.

So you poop into that can,

you close up the bag,

and then you get it to the bottom of the can

and you put a new liner in for the next person,

clean up and you're done.

Once that can fills up,

you take the seat off, you cap it,

and you put it in a cargo ship

that is now a dumpster.

There are certain cargo ships that come up

and then they don't return to earth with anything.

They're used as dumpster,

so all your waste, garbage,

things you don't need, go in there.

It gets sealed off after a while.

It reenters and everything burns up during re-entry.

That is a much better way to go.

The shuttle toilet was very expensive and complicated.

This thing is a can and it works really well.

So that's where our poop goes,

or poo poo, as it says.

@vwbee58, Why do astronauts have mirrors on their gloves?

This is a really good question, I think.

We have mirrors on our gloves

when we launch into space in case

there's an instrument or a panel or something

you need to see behind you,

it's really hard when you're launching into space

or when you're landing,

to move your head around, you have a helmet,

you can turn your head a little bit,

but you can't really see behind you so well.

So having a mirror right on your wrist makes it easier

to see behind you.

If you look closely at a space walking suit,

the EMU, the EBA Mobility Unit,

and you look at the way these controls are labeled,

they're reversed

so when you hold up the mirror to it,

it all is in the right orientation.

Another thing about the mirrors

I thought was interesting is

they're not actually glass

because you don't want to have glass around the spacesuit.

It could shatter, it can cut things.

No good.

So they're actually highly polished metal.

They polish the heck out of them to make them shiny.

So that's why we wear wrist mirrors.

They're very, very helpful,

particularly during the spacewalks.

@WilTaft asks to, @Astro_illini...

Astro_Illini is my good friend, Mike Hopkins, by the way.

Real good guy.

Mike, if you're listening, how are you?

Hope you're doing well.

Miss you.

All right.

Does NASA put any time in the schedule

to give first time spacewalkers

a minute to take it in?

Yes and no.

The first few minutes of your spacewalk are considered

to be translation adaptation

of your very first time space walking.

It's the first time you're out there,

you're in the big suit,

just like you were in your training,

but we typically train underwater.

So when you're underwater and you're moving around,

you move differently than when you're in air,

or also when you're in space.

We call it space walking,

but really what you're doing is using

your hands to move around.

So as you move around with your hands,

you want to go very, very lightly

and very slowly.

If you put too much oomph into it,

that's not a good thing, you'll go flying.

Now, in the water, you need that extra little oomph

because the water viscosity slows you down

and makes you more stable,

it requires a little more forced to move around.

You get to space, there's nothing.

There's not even any air to slow you down,

there's no resistance at all.

So the same type of motion that you would use

in the pool will send you flying

somewhere you don't want to go in space.

So the first 15 minutes or so are

usually dedicated to you just

to get used to moving around.

It's not really, Look around, take it in, have fun,

it's, Get used to that environment

so you can do your job.

@freethestones asks,

Space travel question:

It's about fuel.

Once you get your spaceship pointed

in the right direction and get going,

do you need to keep your engines going?

In other words, do you only need to save fuel

to either change speed, direction,

or to slow down?

If you're in an orbit around earth,

let's take that as the example here,

there still is a little bit of drag.

Now, if you're familiar with the drag equation,

it's velocity squared.

If you have a large amount of velocity,

like 17,500 miles an hour,

you square that that's a really big number.

So even just a little bit of resistance can give

you enough drag that eventually

the orbit will decay from atmospheric drag,

even though it's just little traces of it,

that's still a little bit,

and you'll get lower and lower

and eventually reenter the planet,

which is what happens.

Sometimes, some spacecraft will slow down enough

and they'll come back into earth.

Usually, they'll burn up in the atmosphere on reentry,

or if anything makes it through

to land in the ocean or someplace

where people aren't around.

So it typically isn't a problem,

but that will happen.

The only way to prevent that is

to increase your altitude and go back up,

and give it a boost over.

For example, when I visited the Hubble Space Telescope,

we gave it a boost

and it raised its orbit,

and it kept it up.

We'll keep it up in space for a longer period of time.

If you're on your way to another place,

going to going to the moon

or to Mars or something like that,

it's going to be a little bit different.

You would just need to coordinate your speed,

use your fuel to maybe slow down,

to enter the orbit correctly,

but you're not necessarily worried

about the orbital decay that you would experience

on earth when you're not in orbit.

If you're traveling somewhere else,

then you do have to manage the fuel usage

not only with your straight trajectory,

but when you encounter whatever

the target is you're going to,

you would need some fuel to slow down

and enter into the orbit correctly.

@ChristoCS asks,

Do space suits fit well?

Are they even remotely comfortable?

Eh, as best as you can get them.

You're not going to a tailor,

but they do their job.

I think they're adequate.

Are they even remotely comfortable?

Yeah, they're all right.

You wouldn't want to wear one around town necessarily,

but for what their function is

and what they need to do to protect you,

yeah, I would say they are comfortable.

@Kyopjinkook, #AskNASA

as an astronaut,

how many languages do you have to learn

to be able to communicate with the crews

from other kinds countries?

It's not just English, right?

That's true.

It's not just English anymore

for going to the International Space Station.

If you're going to operate and work there

as a NASA astronaut,

or as an astronaut from the European Space Agency,

or Canada, or Japanese Space Agency,

or the Russian Space Agency,

you need to be able to speak two languages.

Because it's Russian...

The Russian segment and the US segment.

In the US segment,

we speak English as the primary language.

On the Russian segment, it's Russian.

On the US side,

you needed it to be able to get along pretty well in Russian

and the same for the Russians in English.

So yes, two languages required on the Space Station.

@Christine 12272 asks,

My wife just turned to me and asked,

Baby, do you think space smells?

I have no idea how to answer this question.

So if you're inside the cabin,

you're in a pressurized environment,

and space will smell like things smell here on earth.

If you're smelling food or each other,

use your imagination,

it'll smell the same.

The question might be more of what does space smell like,

this requires a longer answer

but we're not doing a longer answer.

We're going to do a short answer.

[mumbles]

I got to go with the long answer.

When I was a new astronaut,

Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut,

had just come...

He had been on Mir a few times on the Space Station

where had just come back from a shuttle flight,

and he said there was very distinct odor.

You come inside the airlock,

you close the door to space,

and you open the door to that spacecraft inside.

When you enter that airlock,

is what Sergei told me,

it was the same smell on Mir

as it was on the space shuttle.

It doesn't last for long

because that air starts to mix

with the air and the cabin

and the smell goes away.

But on my first mission, I wanted to check this out.

So sure enough, after the first spacewalk,

I was not outside,

I was inside for this first space walk,

helping the guys outside,

as soon as the space walk was over,

I opened up the hatch, I went in there,

started to smell...

I've got a good nose for smelling,

and it was this very metallic smell,

almost like a burnt metal smell.

It's very distinct,

and I'd like to think that's what space smells.

@Almiraamrcl asks,

Mike Massimino was in Big Bang Theory, ah!

Yes, I was on The Big Bang Theory, ah!

Hey, Fruit Loops want to hit your fan switch?

That was a very cool experience.

I got a chance to be on the show.

The way that happened was NASA called me up, said,

Hey Mike, do you know about The Big Bang Theory?

And I said, Yeah, it's this big explosion.

And the universe is expanding.

He goes, No, no, no, no, no, the show!

And I was like, Yeah.

I think, at that time, I had it...

I wasn't that familiar with the show,

I'd kind of heard of it.

But he said they were wanting to speak

to an astronaut about sending a person to space,

and I was having to be in Los Angeles,

maybe a couple of weeks later,

and I went by the Warner Brothers Studio

to the writer's room, which was extraordinary.

Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre,

the creators of the show,

and their writing team was there,

and I told them stories,

kind of like I'm telling you now,

and he wanted to work some of these ideas

into their scripts.

So I helped them a little bit with that.

I went to see a taping

and about six months after all this,

they got a note from Bill Prady,

one of the creators,

and he said, Hey, Mike, we'd like you to do a cameo.

What do you think?

And I was like, Okay.

So I went in and I did a cameo

and that led to six more,

and a lot of good friendships out of that

with the cast and the crew.

And it was a great experience.

The point of all that is

sometimes you just need to say yes.

Thanks for all your questions.

This has been Space Support.