Dan Barry: Good morning, I'm Dan Barry. I'm an astronaut. Since 1992, I have been here at NASA and I just got back from a space mission FTS 72, which flew in January for 9 days.
Q: What do you need to do to become an Astronaut?
Barry: Well, you know I asked that very same question when I was just about your age, and I actually went to an astronaut and asked that question and I got an answer that I think was a very good one still today: Which is basically stay in schoool. You study hard, you study some kind of field of mathematics or science that really gets you excited and interested, so much that you really become a real expert in that field and then you are valuable to NASA as someone who has a real talent that can be used in a space program.
By working hard and doing well in that area regardless of what the science you are particularly interested in, you will develop the qualities that you need to be selected to fly in space.
Q: How much training do you have to go through?
Barry: What we do is, every two years or so there's class of astronaut candidates that come down to the Johnson Space Center. My group was the 14th group and we arrived in 1992. It's a group of about 20 people. You go through about one year of basic traing courses all together. It's actually a pretty exciting year, because it is an opportunity to learn how to fly in a high performance jet and it is an opportunity to learn all that you can imagine about the space shuttle. You study space shuttle's every single switch, we study what it does and what it means to flip that switch, when are the right times to push it and when are the wrong times to push it.
After that, when we get an assignment to fly in space, and we spend another year just studying about that particular space flight. So in order to fly in space, you have to spend one year just in basic training and at another year training for your particular space flight mission.
Q: When are you going to go to Mars?
Barry: (When we have) a spacecraft it takes to get there, which is on the order of just a half a year and maybe as long as a year. When you are in space that long, your muscles get kind of weak because you haven't been using then to walk around and you need to find ways to pack enough food and air. Those kind of challenges are the sort of things that we are going to be studying at the Space Station in the near future to develop the things that we need to have in order to safely send a person to Mars and to bring them back.
Q: Are you trying to invent something to get to other planets besides Mars?
Barry: The answer to that is we are investigating other planets besides Mars although the only other place we are planning to land anything would really be the Moon--which I guess isn't another planet. But we cetrainly are sending probes out to take pictures and measurements of a number of other planets. Particularly, we are interested in some of the moons of outer planets, Jupiter and Saturn, where there may be evidence of ice on the surface--which suggests there could be water underneath the surface and some very interesting possiblities for what could exist in that water out there.
Q: How does it feel to wear a spacesuit?
Barry: I was fortunate to be able to do a space walk on my first flight this January. We were outside for six hours, a little over six hours. The spacesuit is very big and very awkward and in fact because you are outside where there is no air and your spacesuit is providing you air, your spacesuit is pressurized. So it makes you sort of feel like a balloon. Your arms end up way out to your side if you don't do anything about it. So you have to use some force to pull your arms in.
When you try to work with the gloves that we have, in order to keep your hands warm and safe from outside, the gloves have to be thick-- which means that there is no way that you could, say, button your shirt, put on a belt, or come close to putting on a wrist watch without dropping them. So they are big and awkward to work in and we have to use special tools to make it possible to get the job done. If you want to try it at home to get a sense of what it feels like to work in a spacesuit, just find some big, big rubber gloves and go around the house doing the sorts of things you take for granted everyday in terms of getting dressed or trying to put bolts and screws together and things like that and you'll see that it can be difficult to do and we train for a long time to get good at working inside that suit.
On the other hand the suit is an incredible piece of equipment. It keeps us safe at temperatures from minus 200 degrees to plus 200 degrees. It keeps you safe from a place where there is no air where there is the possibility of small particles hitting you at very high speed like little bullets. Yet, it gives you a good view outside and can provide life support for over six hours. So, it is a remarkable piece of equipment but it is kind of difficult to work in.
Q: How much does all the equipment weigh when we are here on earth?
Barry: The answer to that in terms of the spacesuit that I use to do my space walk, it's a couple hundred pounds--which means you can't really put it on on earth and walk around very comfortably: it's too heavy. So how do we train in such a thing? What we do is actually go under water to train. We put a spacesuit on and we go in a big pool under water so that a diver put weights on us so we don't float and pop up to the surface and we don't sink to the bottom. We just float right in the middle of the water.
Then the tools and the equipment that we are going to use on our space walk are also set up under water, and we actually go through every single step of the space walk in our suits, not the suits we take in space, but the same type of suit, under water for the entire six hour space walk and we practice that over and over and over again untill we have it right. But it is a very big and heavy suit.
The other thing about weighing 250 lbs. on Earth is that even though we don't feel that weight in space, the mass is still there. So, if you tug on something and get yourself moving in space, you have an extra 250 lbs. equivalent of mass that you have to stop when you get to something else and it is a little bit awkward. You have to learn how to control yourself very quickly up there.
Q: What's the most fun part of being in space?
Barry: That's an easy one, the best part for me was looking back at the Earth. The colors of the Earth don't quite come across in a photograph. The depth of the colors are like gem stones. There are ruby reds, and emerald greens, and saphire blues. The atmosphere is just a thin blue line. It cuts across the very top of the planet, and in that line you can see all diffrent shades of blue, layers that go from midnight blue to turquoise blue to almost white, it's such a light blue.
The clouds are so white it is hard to look at them. They're so bright you have to put sunglasses to look at them or your eyes will just close all on their own. Sunrises and sunsets are particularly spectacular, because if you remember we are going around the earth every 90 minutes, which means we see the sun rise and 45 minutes later we see the sun set and 45 minutes later we see another sunrise. As a result, those sunrises and sunsets just po--they move so fast you can't beleive it.
Q: What is the hardest part of being an astronaut?
Barry: I guess from my perspective, that is a hard question to answer because I really love my job. I enjoy the flying and I enjoy the training and I also enjoy the teamwork that comes from being part of a crew. When I say that, I don't mean the space flight crew but our training group and all the support people that are absolutely essential to keep the space station, shuttle and space craft operating.
I guess if you have to press me and ask me what's the hardest part, I think that the space shuttle is such a complicated ship that you can never really know everything about how it operates. So, I think the hardest part is really trying to understand the function of every single sytem, every single switch, so that when the time comes you know exactly what you need to do to get the job done right.
Q: If you had a choice to go on any space flight in history, which one would you be on?
Barry: I guess if you let me think in terms of history and the future, I would pick the first flight to Mars. If you're talking about a space flight that already occured, I think it would have been incredible to have the opportunity to fly to the Moon--not necessarily even the first flight to the Moon, just a chance to stand on another surface and to explore a place that nobody had really gone before. So that would be my first choice to go on missions flown. To tell you the truth, my real choice is to go where nobody has just yet, and that target would be Mars.
Q: What's the scariest part of your mission?
I can tell you that right before we launch., you know you're thinking about that you are sitting on top of a lot of pounds of explosives on a machine that has to deal with high temperatures and very low temperatures all at once. But I didn't find that scary because in the course of the year's training and practice, we really get used to how the shuttle operates and we develop a lot of confidence in the shuttle systems.
The other thing is at that time, which is probably the riskiest part of the mission--the very beginning, the initial launch phase--you're pretty busy and you're thinking about all the things you need to do to make the mission go right. You are really focused on your job. And if there is any anxiety there. it is an anxiety that is a personal one in terms of, "I hope that I do what I am supposed to do right when I am supposed to." I think it is more of an issue with families because your family is there watching you undertake what is kind of a risky thing. They're kind of watching you take this risk.. As a result, they have a more difficult job than I do at that point.
Q: What is the most critical thing you must remember when you are in space outside the shuttle fixing something?
Barry: The answer to that is, when you are on a space walk, the most important thing to remember is where you are because since there is no gravity pulling you down to feel where the floor is, it is very easy to end up concentrating on a job that you're doing--say, putting a bolt on or connecting two pieces of hardware together. As you do the job, your body can slowly rotate around and you can end up upside down or twisted around in a way you didn't even notice you were into. That is particulary important to keep in mind, not because you necessarily get lost but because you're attached by a tether to the wall of the space shuttle.
And if you get mixed up where you are, it is very easy to get tangled up in your tether and then you have to call your buddy over and have to say, "Help. I am all tangled and I need help getting untangled from my tether." Since your buddy is busy with tasks of his own, he would appreciate you not doing that. So I think that the most critical aspect of doing a good job in space is remembering orientation whether your head is up or your head is down or just where you are in the shuttle itself.
Q: What's it feel like when you're going throught the atmosphere?
Barry: That is also a really interesting experience. When we came down to re-enter, we fired our rockets. That slowed us down and brought us back into the very top part of the atmosphere. That's at about 400,000 feet, and at that altitude when you go as fast as we were going--which is about 25 times the speed of sound or 17,000 miles an hour--it feels like the space shuttle is a boat on a lake that has a lot of choppy waves, because the space shuttle slams into the atmosphere.
When it hits one of those atmosphere waves, it shakes the whole shuttle. You feel like "Kaboom!" and the whole shuttle shakes a little bit. If you look out the back window when that's going on, you see a great big ball of orange fire pop off the tail and then about maybe 2 seconds later, Boom-- you hit another one and then another ball of fire pops off the tail. That happens for about 2 or 3 minutes. You keep hitting these pieces of the atmosphere that are a little more dense than the rest of the atmosphere. It is just like riding on a boat on a lake with a lot of waves--just boom, boom , boom. It shakes the whole space shuttle.
Then as you come down deeper into the atmosphere, the whole shuttle is surrounded by a grey-like fo--that is what is looks like--but it is actually air being heated up. That air turns into almost a yellow glow. It is like sitting inside a neon light bulb, and the heat from that is so hot. You can feel the heat coming in through the walls, and you can't talk to mission control because the air is heated so much around the space shuttle it won't let radio transmission through. As the space shuttle comes through that, there are even little electric discharges that go off inside our windows. You see violet little sparks of lightning crackling all around the windows.
It is a very exciting experience to land in the space shuttle. I thought that our liftoff was going to be the most exciting part of the flight, but in fact the landing was just as exciting and has just as many surprises there. Then, of course, as we come down, all the heat goes away and we fly in over the Kennedy Space Center and do a big circle around. We come down to a landing. We land at night and since the space shuttle has no lights--they burn off during reentry-- the runway is lighted instead. Only the part of the runway you're landing at is light and since it takes 2 miles for the space shuttle to slow down after it touches on the runway, you are very far away from those lights. I was impressed with how dark it is two miles down the runway.
Q: Is it hard to digest food in space?
Barry: In fact, the food that we eat is pretty good. We get a chance before we go up in space to sample about 100 different types of food that they will prepare for us for our space flight and choose the ones that we like and actually set up a whole series of meals. My favorites were M&M's and I also liked the macadamia nuts. So I said, "I'll just take the M&M's and macadamia nuts." But the dietician said they were not going to let me do that and that I had to have the right amount of fat and nutrition in order to stay healthy up there. So they made me bring along my broccoli and other vegetables as well.
What it tastes like is TV dinners. If you have ever had a frozen dinner that is reheated, it's kind of what it tastes like. We take the food out-each package has a real dried vacum-packed food--and we put water into it to get it back to a normal consistency. Then we can also heat it up to make it taste a little better. In terms of digesting the food, that is really no trouble at all. I asked one of my friends before I flew, "Can you really swallow without the help of gravity?" And the answer is yes, you swallow your food and digest it just fine.
Q: Can you grow things in space?
Barry: Absolutely. In fact, often on space shuttle flights we bring along some experimental plants that are growing not in dirt, but in a liquid that is designed to support plant life. I certainly hope that as we learn more about how to grow plants in space we can learn to successfully grow some food on space stations and take food with us in the form of seedlings and plants to grow on the way to Mars. It is the only way that you're really only going to be able to have any kind of fresh food. Plants grow in an interesting way. Since they don't have gravity to orient them, they seem to orient toward light. It is possible to direct which way the plants are going to grow and it's fascinating to see how quickly the plants are able to grow in the environment of space.
Q: How much time do you have between work and relaxation time on the shuttle?
Barry: A shuttle flight is very tightly booked. They have us doing tasks for most of the time that we are up there. Because it is so expensive to launch people and payloads into space, it is really important to use every minute you can. On the other hand, people do have to sleep and so we do get a total of about 8 hours a day to sleep and take care of washing, meals and that sort of thing. There are not really relaxation times built into everyday. When you have a flight that goes nine days or longer, you do get a half day of advertised relaxation time--the idea being that you're pretty tired after about 8 or 9 days in space and if you are going to do a good job during the really critical parts of reentry, you need to be rested.
So we can get a half day off at the end of flight day 8 and we really use that partly to take time off and look out the windows and enjoy the ride, but also there are a lot of things that accumulate during the 8 days. The space shuttl has to be cleaned up and polished and you don't want to bring home a shuttle that has stains on the walls, for example. There is a lot of catching up to do on your day off. In terms of relaxation time in 9 days, maybe there are just a few hours in there to just really relax and enjoy looking out the windows. I tended to use meals times to do that so I would have the chance to see as much as the earth as I could.
Q: Does it feel different up in space than on earth?
Barry: The answer is absolutely. In space the opportunity to float and see things upside down as well as rightside up is really remarkable. Your body senses that and when you first get there, you start to do all your tasks with your feet pointed to the floor based on all your practice on earth. As days go by you are just as happy to work on the ceiling as you are on the floor. In fact, my bunk for sleeping was right on the wall tucked up next to the ceiling. On day 1, that felt a little strange but by day 9 that was home.
Q: How light are you when you land on the Moon?
Barry: Because the Moon is smaller than the Earth, it exerts less gravity. In fact when you're on the Moon, you and the things you bring with you only weigh about 1/6 of what you would weigh on the Earth. That is why it was possiblle for the astronauts who walked on the Moon to be able to walk with their space suits. Remember I told you on Earth, the space suit weighs a couple of hundred pounds and it would be very difficult to walk. In space, of course, that's not a problem. On the Moon because they only weighed about 1/6 of what they weighed on Earth. it was like carring about a 40 lb. backpack, and that is why the astronauts were able to walk on the moon wearing those heavy spacesuits.
Evanston: What is a standard weight for astronauts?
Barry: There really is no answer for that. We have astronauts that vary in size from small and light to big and bulky. I would suspect the weights of people in our office run from possibly about a hundred pounds up to over two huindred pounds, so there's no particular weight. Astronauts do need to stay in good physical shape, we spend a fair amount of time at the gym, running, playing ball, excercising, keeping ourselves in good shape to be able to fly.
Syracuse: What were your thoughts in zero gravity for the first time?
Barry: Well, I can tell you that we have about 8 minutes from engine ignition to when the engine finally cut off. You're very quickly, almost instantly, in 0G. I guess my first thought was. "I can't believe I'm really here." It took me forty years and I was thrilled and excited to be there. My second thought was when I looked out the window I was absolutely thunderstruck by the beauty of the earth.
Syracuse: What provisions are made for medical emergencies up in space?
Barry: I'm a doctor so one of my jobs was to be the medical officer of my flight. I am familiar with the things that we have to deal with in emergencies. In fact, we have a medical kit which would allow me to take care of most of the little problems that come up on orbit. Say someone has a stomach ache, headache, or gets a cut or an infection-- that sort of thing. That's very easily handled.
If someone has a serious medical problem, say they get appendicitis or they have areally bad cut or someone gets bumped on the head or has a heart attack. For those kind of problems, what we would do is sort of equivalent to what you wold have on board an ambulence and we would start on the space shuttle at that point as we would on an ambulance. Fortunately, if we really need to get home, we have a number of landing places around the world. If someone is seriously injured and we need to get him home right away, we an get back within an hour. We prefer not to do that, but we thought about those issues for space flight.
It's going to be a much bigger issue if we want to go to Mars. There is not going to be a quick return home. We will need to take care of much more serious medical possiblities on those kinds of flights. We are going to work those procedures out as we learn to live on a space station.
Mendocino: What are the other jobs, besides medical officer, on the shuttle?
Barry: One job is to be the commander, which means that you are responsible for overall mission. You're also responsible for flying the shuttle, particularly during the landing portions, but also during the time that we are picking up satelittes. The second job is the pilot, who sits right next to the commander and basically is responsible for helping the commander to fly, to keep a number of the orbiter systems working, such as the electrical systems and the hydraulic systems.
There is also a job of robot arm operator. On our flight a Japanese astronaut drove the robot arm that's attached to the shuttle and we use it to attach to satellites that are flying in space and then bring them down into the payload bay of the space shuttle. We also use the robot arm to attach to space walkers. I was standing on the end of the robot arm planted in with a special boot clamp, and then it drove me around to the diffrent places I needed to be to do some of the tasks during our space walk.
There are other jobs. Obviously, space walking is an important job for astronauts. There are other series of jobs depending on what particular payloads you're carrying, so we divide up the responsiblities among the crew to operate all the different payloads. There's lots of jobs to be in space.
Mendocino: When did you first want to be an astronaut?
Barry: I can tell you that I wanted to be an astronaut since I was six years old. For as long as I can remember this was the job that I wanted to do. I think that the reasons that I wanted to do it changed a little bit from the time I was six to the time I was thirty-six when I finally came here.
When I was growing up was when the Mercury and Apollo astronauts were flying, and pretty much everybody my age wanted to be an astronaut because it was exciting to go places that no one had ever been before. Rockets that were loud and powerful and exciting to look at, much less to fly on.
As I got older, the astronaut job brought a lot more than just that--you learn mathematics and physics, and geology, geography and atmospherics, and oceanography. I love studing science, so that was an opportunity for me to learn a lot more baout the world and about science in general. Also, another part of the job that's real fun is the teamwork part. When I went into space, I went with 5 other people. You learn how to work with an intergrated team. You're not just up there by yourself. It is really fun to be part of that kind of a team.
Beyond the teamwork that we have as a crew, we get to work with our training people and the support people that help to build the shuttle and keep it flying and the people who take care of our payloads and things like that. So people that I am working with are really fun to interact with and to get down and get a job done right. So the combination of enjoying sort of the things we study and the people that I am working with and the excitment of being able to fly in space and see the earth from a diffrent perspective.
Lexington: Do you ever get claustrophobia?
Barry: The answer there is, "No." Bbut when you when you come down here to be selected forthe astronaut program, they test to see whether or not you are a person who becomes claustrophobic because we certainly work in very closed spaces. One of the things you get to do for your one-week interview to be selected as an astronaut is there's this little ball about the size of a very large beachball and it has a zipper. You crawl inside the ball and you zip it up and they have a monitor on your heart and a little microphone that you can talk to. And it's dark inside that ball. You are all curled up because it is not big enough to straighten up in and you just sit there. They don't tell you how long your going to be in and they just sort of find out whether or noty ou have a problem with being claustrophobic.
For me it was a break in the day: I went to sleep. But for people who are claustrophobic, I guess it is not a very good experience and they learn that right up front.
Q: When will spacecrafts go to Mars, and will there be an astronaut on board?
Barry: Very soon we will be launching our first in the series of spacecraft to land on Mars and rove around the surface. We are planning to launch this fall. Then we willl continue to launch those spacecrafts at each opportunity. Since the earth and and Mars are in diffrent orbits, about once every two years they get pretty close together and we have an opportunity to fly from Earth to Mars with the shortest distance possible. So, everytime that happens we are going to be launching a spacecraft up there that can go up and land on the surface and gather fishfeed about Mars.
In terms of sending an astronaut to Mars, the earliest we would be doing that would be around 2018, which may provide an opportunity for some of you all to fly to Mars.
Evanston: When do you expect to have the space station built?
Barry: We are currently ready to launch by the end of next year the first parts of the space station. That process will continue for about 5 years until the space station is complete. Long before it is complete we will have people up there living and working in space, and it's going to a really exciting time for us to be able to live in space for long periods of time. The Rusians have operating a space station for over a decade and this new space station to really give us an opportunity to build on what they learned, to cooperate with people from all over the world, space agencies from all over the world, and to live long enough in space to understand what it takes to fly to Mars.
Syracuse: What's the best thing about being weightless?
Barry: Of course, I think I said the best thing about space is looking at the Earth and the second best thing is being weightless. It's a very interesting sensation to be able to be upside-down and rightside-up. To sleep on the ceiling. I think some of the best part of being weightless is that you can do somersaults and do them over and over again--and basically just be flying like Superman in the space shuttle. It's an exciting experience to feel really a completely different enviroment, to see how your body responds and to understand how that different eniroment affects the way you live and work.
Sleeping is a very interesting experience. What we do is, we have a sort of sleeping bag that we pin to the wall. In my case, as I said, my sleeping bag was up high on the wall near the ceiling and you float up to your sleeping bag and unzip it, crawl in, and then zip it up. The only reason to be in a sleeping bag is so that you don't go floating off and bump into other people or hit a swith that you shouldn't hit. It is just a way to kind of keep you from floating around but it is a very interesting experience just because not only are you floating, but your sleeping bag is floating. And since it is a little cold, you're wearing pajamas so your pajamas are floaitng. So you have this sense of you floating, and you clothes floating, and your sleeping bag floating and your all kind of floating up there together.
I actually found sleeping in space to be very nice. It is a very, very comfortable bed, there are no pressure points, there's no lines on your arms or anything like that. If anything, one of the things I did not like about coming back to Earth was having to go back to sleeping in a bed and having that bed pushing up on you all the time.
Mendocino: How do the planets look different in space?
Barry: I can tell you that one of the neat ways of looking at the universe is from the space shuttle if you darken the cabin completely and turn off all the lights. You're on the dark side of the Earth, and the stars and the planets are brilliant. There are just millions of stars to see. The Milky Way looks not just like individual stars but a whole band of whiteness--almost like a dim white line that extends across the sky. The stars really don't twinkle, which is pretty interesting.
The planets look like larger, brighter versions of stars. The earth at night is very interesting. You can see all the city lights easily. In one view we could see all the way from Miami to Boston, and pick out individual cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Thunder storms are very interesting. They look like light bulbs, or light flashes from a camera popping off as you see them. So the nightime view of the stars is really something that I wish everyone could see from space.
Mendocino: What does it feel like when you get back from space?
Barry: I can answer that pretty easily because my daughter did a science fair project on me. She had me close my eyes and try to balance on one foot and I could only stand on one foot for about 4 seconds on the first day back from space. But after 3 days back from space, I was able to stand on one foot for as long as I liked. She also had me close my eyes and walk in a straight line. When I first got back from space, I tended to drift to the right and I would walk in to the wall. But by about three days, that was back too.
The other thing she had me do was point straight up in the air with my eyes closed, and my arm tended not to point straight up. The other thing that happened is, I usually go running a few times a week and when I first got back from space, my running times had gotten quite a bit slower and I think it took me 3 or 4 weeks before my running times came back to what they were before.
Q: When you were a kid did you look up at the sky and wish you were there?
Barry: The question is when I was a kid did I look up at the sky and wish I was there, and the answer is all the time. Yeah!
Syracuse: What is the most awkward part of being in the space shuttle?
Barry: That's an easy answer. It's going to the bathroom. You know we have a space shuttle toilet that is built for us to make going to the bathroom in zero gravity as easy as it can be, but still you have to be careful when you use it and make sure that everything gets down into the toilet where it's supposed to go. I would say that is definitely the most akward part of flying in space.
Q: How do you take a shower up in space?
Barry: Right now we don't, we don't have a shower on board the space shuttle. Which means in the morning and the evening, the way you wash is by taking towels and putting soap and water on the towels and just rubbing all over to get yourself clean. So right now it is not possible to take a shower in space, however, there is a shower being built to Space Station. And back in SkyLab there was a shower.
It is an interesting problem because if you set up the shower like you do on Earth, thhe water doesn't flow from your head to your feet. It just balls up and you get all these balls of water just floating around in front of you. You can end up breathing them, which definitely is not good. And they can end up floating out of the shower and getting all over people and equipment, and that's definitely not good.
We need to find a way to get the water to flow from head to toe. The way that will work is with a fan. We'll set up a fan with air flow so that air is being blown by the fan form the top of the shower to the bottom. The water will flow along with that air. That still doesn't mean that the water will flow evenly and you will end up with the balls of water sort of sticking and glomming all over you. You'll have a ball on your shoulder and a ball on your knee and you'll still need to use a towel to sort of rub the water in and keep it from staying on you when you step out of the shower. I think that taking a shower in space is going to be a real challenge and I look forward to trying it out on space station.
Syracuse: What kind of missions do you do on board the orbiter?
Barry: That varies a lot depending on which particular flight your on. On our particular flight, our mission was first and foremost to pick up the Japanese satellite that had been launched about 8 months before we launched. The satellite was actually launched from Japan and carried aboard a series af about 6 diffrent experiments, ranging from biological experiments to total panel experiments, to high voltage experiments to thermodynamic experiements, a whole series that were carried for 8 months.
It was our job to go get the satellite and bring it back to Earth so that the scientist swould be able to get the data and get their experiements off, and understand the results. Part of our mission was also to launch a second satellite that studied our atmosphere. Another part of our mission was to do two spacewalks of which I did one, where we were testing components to build a space station. Then we had another series of experiments to test on human responses in space, how our orientation changes, the way our eyes work in space, so there is a whole series of diffrent experiments having to do with material science, life sciences, all kinds of diffrent things.
Q: How do you talk outside the spaceship?
Barry: The answer is is similar to the way you and I are talking right now except you and I are attached by actual hardware and telephone lines and that sort of thing. What we do outside the space shuttle during a space walk is talk over a radio. It's the same type of radio you can use on earth to talk from an airplane to the controllers that tell the pilot where to fly.
Lexington: Up in space, how do you navigate the shuttle?
Typically what we do in space to figure out where we are, is we track stars. Just like the explorers on ships way back, look at diffrent stars. We have alignment cameras right on the space shuttle and by using those stars we can get ourselves pointed in the exact direction we want to go. Then in terms of how we fire our rocket or what direction we fire our rockets, we let computers that care of that for the most part. They take us close to where we need to be. Then finally when it gets time to, say, pick up a satellite, our commander looks out the windows and takes control of the rockets of the shuttle. As he sees us getting closer, he fires the proper rockets to bring us right in and eventually to dock with the space station or pick up the satellite. In our flight we did not atually see other satellites other than the ones we picked up. We picked up the Japanese satellite, as I mentioned. We deployed and then retreived a second satellite. We did have to do an avoidance manuever: we had to fly around the path of an old satelitte that was not working anymore, but we never actually got close enough to see that one.
Lexington: Why doesn't your space ship burn up in the atmosphere on re-entry?
Barry: That's a really good question, because certainly meteors and meteorites experience a breakup for the most part in our atmosphere. The design of the space shuttle specifically looked at the question, so we have tiles underneath the space shuttle. If you've ever seen the bottom if the space suttle, it's black. Those are the black tiles that protect us during re-entry. I actually held one of those tiles up in my hand while a person took a blowtorch and hit the other side of the tile. The tile is about 3 inces thick. and it didn't even get warm. My hand didn't even get warm while three inches away a blow torch is hitting the other side of the tile. I was impressed and I felt comfortable about coming back in a ship that was coated in those tiles.
Melanie Goldman, National School Network: On behalf of everyone, Dr. Barry, we would like to thank you for such an interesting session. It was a wonderful opportunity for all of us to learn so much about what it is like to be in space from someone who's had a lot of experience. I would like to thank you on behalf of Lexington, Evanston, Illinios, Syracuse, and Mendacino. We would also like to extend our thanks for all the work that went on behind the scenes at NASA. That includes Jay Cory, Corey Logan, and Billy Deason, and also again to commander Dan Bursch for participating yesterday. Thanks, this has been a really fascinating experience.
Barry: I really enjoyed talking to everyone, and have a good day.