- Ignition.
- Houston in the blind.
- [Woman] He's engaged the override.
- Hi, I'm Nicole Stott.
- [Narrator] Nicole Stott
is a retired astronaut.
- And here's me in space!
[chuckles]
Today I'm gonna look at how astronauts
are portrayed in Hollywood.
Cracking helmet, "Total Recall."
[shouting]
[shattering]
[screaming]
[laughing]
It's trying to present this exaggerated
dramaticized kind of view of
a helmet opening up in space.
- I give up.
- The helmet itself is
really very durable.
There's parts on it, that
if you hit it hard enough
you could crack them,
if you really moved fast
towards a sharp piece
of metal or something.
[shattering]
We try our best to avoid
any contact with anything
with the helmets, because
they can scratch easily, too.
When we do spacewalks we're always talking
about doing a glove check
or a crew member check,
where you look each
other over and make sure
you don't see anything
that looks like it might
be a problem, and we each
about after every hour
we look over our whole gloves to make sure
we haven't got any tears or holes in them,
where all of your air goes spewing out
to the deadly vacuum of space.
But overall, the suits and the helmets
are really very durable
and have done a great job
protecting us in space.
Spacewalk in "Gravity."
- [Man] Hubble telescope engaged,
upgrades fully functional.
Congratulations.
Kick back, take the rest of the day off.
[hooting]
- I remember the first time
seeing the scenes in "Gravity"
and just being so
impressed by the visuals.
- Can't beat the view.
- I mean, just the movement,
and the sound of it
was so reminiscent of what
I felt when I was outside,
and what I saw.
- [Man] Do you have a
visual on just what mission
specialist Shariff is doing up there?
- He appears to be doing
some form of the Macarena.
- There's definitely not as much chatter
as what you are hearing.
We try very hard to keep it
to what the tasks are about.
- That would be just a best
guess scenario on my part.
- We might be playing music
inside of the shuttle,
but that's not something you'll hear
throughout all of the
calm that's going on.
The spacewalks themselves
are all really choreographed
down to probably about
five minute increments,
and maybe smaller, depending on the task.
- [Man] Please elaborate.
- Houston will be letting us know
how close we are on the timeline,
and then we always have somebody
inside the spaceship, too
letting you know where to
go next, and what to do.
- Am I a go to assist Dr.
Stone in removing the panel.
- [Woman] Assistance appreciated.
- The thing that stands out most to me
is that you'd never have George Clooney,
or any other crew member, just
kind of jet packing around
while the spacewalk was going on.
- Tell him I still prefer my '67 Corvette.
- The suits that we wear
though do have jet packs
integrated into them, but
they're not that big unit
that he was wearing.
- [Man] Never crossed my mind.
- And they are meant to only
be used in case of emergency,
if for some reason you do get
separated from the shuttle
or the space station, and you're tumbling
and you need to get back to the shuttle,
that's when you would use those.
You never want to have to use those.
- [Man] Mission abort.
Initiate emergency disconnect from Hubble.
- [Woman] One second.
- [Man] Not one second, now.
Shut it down.
- Yeah, that was frustrating to me.
When I watched that movie
and she didn't just stop,
like put the tools down and just abort.
- Abort.
- We need to get the hell out of here.
- When they call for that abort,
you saw how Clooney's
character immediately,
boom, boom, boom, back to
the station, disconnecting,
talking to the ground about
where all the crew members are,
how they're getting back in.
- [Woman] Houston, this is Explorer.
Copy.
[shouting]
- [Man] Explorer's been hit!
Explorer, do you read?
- We absolutely train for these,
what you'd think of, as
worst case scenarios,
where you have to abort immediately.
- Houston, I have a bad
feeling about this mission.
- Any number of things
could go wrong out there
that would require you
to immediately have to go
back to your safe place
inside of the station
or the shuttle.
- [Man] It's been a rough week.
- This situation where out
of, almost out of nowhere,
comes this massive field of debris.
- [Man] Debris from the missile strike
has caused a chain reaction.
- Is really unlikely.
There are people on the ground that track
single pieces of debris in space
that are like the size of
your hand, or even smaller,
and somebody down on the ground
would have seen that coming
way before the call that they
were given in this movie.
- [Man] We have to go, go, go!
[screaming]
Houston, I've lost visual of Dr. Stone.
Do you copy?
- [Woman] Yes, yes, yes!
I copy, I'm attached!
- [Man] Give me your position.
- Oh, I don't know, I'm spinning!
I can't, I can't!
- Spinning off like
that I think is probably
one of the greatest
fears of any spacewalker.
- Houston, do you copy?
- This hasn't happened
to anybody in real life,
on the shuttle or on the station.
But we do train for that as
one of our emergency scenarios,
and we do that in the
virtual reality simulator.
- All right.
Let's get out of here.
- Ludicrous speed in "Spaceballs."
- Ludicrous speed!
Go!
[zapping]
[screaming]
[chuckling]
- I have seen that in a lot of films.
The stars that you see all of
a sudden becomes these lines,
and I think it's just
to give you the feeling
of going really super fast.
- My brains are going into my feet!
- I would say that the speed
of the space shuttle is
in the grand scheme of things,
a little bit ludicrous,
I mean it's 17,500 miles an hour,
which is about five miles a second.
- They must have hyper-jets on that thing!
- And what do we got on this thing?
A Cuisinart?
- You don't get the lights like
streaming by you like that,
but you know you're going fast.
- They've gone to plaid!
- And of course we're orbiting the earth,
we're about 250 miles up.
We don't really have like a gas pedal
for accelerating or increasing speed.
I guess you could make it equivalent,
we've got this little handle
that can cause the thrust to increase
that look like what you would
fly the robotic arm with,
we just push on it, and it
gives us little bursts of thrust
out of the back of the thrusters.
[shouting]
Of course, launching, that's kind of this
controlled explosion happening below you,
so the crew really doesn't
have a button or a throttle
or a handle for that.
- Whoa!
[crashing]
- Robotic arm on the ISS in "Life."
- I used to play catcher,
but only in tee-ball.
Not now.
Not now, no come here, come here,
come on, come on, come on, come on!
[crashing]
- On the space station, and
then even on the space shuttle
before, we had this robotic arm,
big white long
crane-looking kind of thing.
And we could move
equipment around with it,
we could move whole big
modules around with it,
we could even strap
people to the end of it
and move them around with it
during a spacewalk and things.
What's different in this film.
- So let's all agree, we made
our first and last mistake.
- I mean, there's a number of things.
But in this scene though
too, you know that spacecraft
is moving really fast.
The arm itself, while it
could I think physically
be controlled to grab
the spacecraft moving in,
I think the way it was
moving in, the speed
and the difference
between what was going on
with the station, it probably
would have just ripped the arm
right off of the space station.
[laughing]
- He got it.
- [Man] Point and shoot mother [beeping].
- Yeah.
We do grab vehicles like
this that are flying
to the space station with cargo in them,
and I had the chance to do that one time
with the Japanese cargo vehicle.
It was the first one that flew up,
and then we had to grab it with the arm,
because most of the time
they dock automatically
to the station, so that was really fun.
That was the first time we used the arm
and flew it in a totally different way.
Probably as close to
this as you could get,
but the vehicle flew up
and just kind of hovered
next to us.
I did like the way they
moved through the station.
They show them floating
and flying several times
and that felt very real to me.
That little metal rectangular thing,
that's a drink bag, kind
of like a big Capri Sun bag
or something, that happens sometimes
when you let go of something
and don't Velcro it down.
And the view through the
window is really good.
In these movies I don't
know how they do it,
make it look so real.
Really looked good.
Astronaut training in "First Man."
- Multi-axis trainer was
designed to replicate
role-coupling on three axes.
The kind you might encounter in space.
The challenge is to stabilize the machine
before you pass out.
The first victim, Armstrong.
- I like that, first victim.
[laughs]
And so in this scene,
you see Neil Armstrong
in what was called the multi-axis trainer.
And this was used to train astronauts
to get into all kind of
disorienting configurations.
That might happen because in
space there is no up or down,
and if you start these different rotations
you might have to fly yourself out of it.
And you can see that he's
having to complete a task
while going through this
really dynamic simulation.
- If you work the math, it follows.
- That is absolutely
what we would have to do
as part of any astronaut training.
[retching]
That is absolutely what you will feel like
when you're going through
something like this.
I will say, though, I'm
thankful that these days
we don't use the
multi-axis trainer anymore.
We have different kinds of simulators
like through virtual
reality, we can get thrown
off the space station
like during a spacewalk
and spiral around and have
to use little jet packs
to get ourselves oriented.
- I'm just thinking about this lecture.
It's kind of neat.
- Neil Armstrong never
actually used this trainer,
but it was used for other programs
during that early space flight time,
and so it does represent
what the astronauts
would go through as
part of their training.
Now, training montage from "Armageddon."
- [Man] United States
astronauts train for years.
You have 12 days.
- [Instructor] Gentlemen,
welcome to our weightless
environmental training facility.
["Sweet Emotion" by Aerosmith]
- When you train in the
big pool, there's divers
all around you, safety
divers, divers that are
helping you with the equipment, all of it.
Getting you in and out of the pool.
The underwater work looks
just like we would do
if we were training to do a spacewalk.
- So we're going swimming
on this asteroid?
Is that what this is for?
- Thankfully, in space
it's easier to move around
in those suits, and you
just gotta figure out
how to get yourself stopped
if you get moving too fast.
But the reality of what's
going on in that pool
is just like I remember it.
The underwater training for one spacewalk,
I think I did seven or eight
six hour runs in the pool.
- [Man] You have 12 days.
- They couldn't do, I don't
think, all of this training
and testing in 12 days.
But I don't think they would need to
for this kind of mission, either.
For the movie, I think
what they're trying to do
is just give them
familiarization with what things
would feel like.
- Go easy on me, okay?
It's my first time.
- I love that they included the training
in the T-38 jets.
That's the airplanes we
used, and that we still use
for astronaut training.
- [Man] NASA's got some
of the finest pilots
in the world.
- We do that because
you wanna get familiar
with what it's like to work
in a really complex system,
like a space shuttle would be.
The airplanes provide that.
You're in a real extreme environment.
You're doing very challenging things,
I mean they're flipping you around.
- You think we'll get
hazard pay out of this?
- It's almost like the multi-axis trainer,
where you're having to be
a little bit disoriented
and still work safely.
[screaming]
Every movie where they have
people flying in airplanes
like this, jets, the mask is always off.
One of the first things you
do when you strap into the jet
is put the mask on and
start breathing the oxygen,
and that's one of the things
that keeps you the safest
in that airplane, and so
never would we be flying
in these jets with the mask off.
- [Man] We need you to
train them down here.
- You wanna send these boys into space?
Fine.
I'm sure they'll make good astronauts,
but they don't know jack about drilling.
- There's kind of a futuristic
possibility in this.
As we start to fly more in space,
we really are gonna be looking at going
to the people that have these trade skills
to fly them in space as astronauts.
- United States government just
asked us to save the world.
[dramatic music]
- Talk about the wrong stuff.
- Removing helmet in
space, "Mission to Mars."
- Wait! Wait! Wait!
Please god, no!
- Yeah, if you remove your helmet in space
that's a really bad day.
[laughs] And I think in this scene
they are trying to give
you like the ultimate view
of what it would look like.
Sadly, it would take a
little bit more time.
In the vacuum of space, all
of the fluids in your body
are gonna want to escape,
and they're gonna do that
in a way that's like
they're boiling off of you
which is not probably a good feeling,
and then you will
ultimately freeze like this,
but you'll suffocate
before that ever happens.
Docking a spacecraft, "Interstellar."
- Cooper what are you doing?
- Docking.
[dramatic music]
Get ready to match our spin
with the retro-thrusters.
- It's not possible.
- No, it's necessary.
- I love the way they did this scene.
It's really an extreme
example of a docking scenario
and an emergency situation like this.
- [Man] This is no time for caution.
- Case, if I black out,
you take the stick.
- We do a lot of training
where they're trying
to put you in that extreme situation,
and to understand the capabilities
of your own spacecraft
and how you can manually fly.
- [Man] The durance is
hitting stratosphere.
- [Woman] He's got no heat shield.
- And I just love that
they spoke through it.
- Ace, you ready?
- [Man] Ready.
- And then visually they showed you
how those two spaceships almost looked
like they weren't moving at all
when they finally came
together, when in fact
they were still really just
like spinning like crazy.
- Main engines on.
[dramatic music]
[engine roaring]
Come on, baby.
- So we use a lot of different
thrusters on our spacecraft
to move, you know, to
thrust and move higher
up into orbit, or I think in this scene
they use the term retro-thruster.
- Get ready to match our spin
with the retro-thrusters.
- Which is one that would
actually thrust in a direction
that would cause you to slow down
and kind of back into orbit again,
or to drop down in orbit,
to go from high to low.
- Pushing out of orbit!
- And again, I liked that
they used that appropriately
in this film.
- Initiating spin.
- I just really think they
did a good job on this,
in portraying the physical
load that you would be feeling
on your body while that's happening.
So when I talk about load,
like feeling the load
when you accelerate,
it's like this feeling
of weight on you, and so
you're loaded up with G's.
And on the shuttle when we
launch, it was like three G's,
is what you would feel, so it
would feel like three of you
were sitting on top of you.
In this "Interstellar" scene,
where they start spinning
as fast as that space station
was, you think about it,
some of those carnival
rides that you're on
when they spin you, all
of a sudden you feel
like you're pinned back, because
there's this increased load
on your body.
[dramatic music]
- Easy.
- You know, you see the
one character is just
really leaned over in her seat,
and ultimately passes out.
I think that's interesting,
because you've got McConaughey
flying the spacecraft, and
I've always noticed this.
When you're the one flying,
you physically can overcome more
than if you're the passenger,
or you're the person
that's kind of just in
a benign position there,
and that doesn't mean that
ultimately you might not
pass out too if the
load gets to be too much
and you're not recovering properly,
but somehow you respond to it
in a way that allows
you to get through more.
AI on spaceships in "2001: Space Odyssey."
- All right, Hal.
I'll go in through the emergency airlock.
- [Hal] Without your space helmet, Dave,
you're going to find
that rather difficult.
- Hal, I won't argue with you anymore.
Open the doors.
- [Hal] Dave, this conversation can serve
no purpose anymore.
Goodbye.
- Hal?
- Right now I think the current status
of artificial intelligence
or AI on our space missions
is that we're not really
saying we have AI.
- Where the hell'd you get that idea?
- What we do have is
automated control of things,
and that's a great thing,
because then the crew
isn't having to interact all the time
to maintain the systems, or
ensure that everything is good.
That can happen automatically.
- [Hal] I think you
know what the problem is
just as well as I do.
- Our hope is that the AI,
whichever ones they do employ
at some point, are not set up
that they could take control
of our spaceship.
- [Hal] I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
- Sharing oxygen in a
spacesuit. "Rocketman."
- Think if we stay on this
heading for another 20 minutes
we'll see the Pilgrim.
[farting]
[playful music]
- What?
I didn't do anything.
[farting]
- Oh my god.
- Yeah, not so accurate here.
They show the suit blowing up like that
I think to just kind of
give you a visual reference
to what is going on inside it.
There's actually pretty
good structure in that suit,
but it's just not flexible in a way,
unless it was a huge amount of pressure
blasting off inside of the thing.
Yeah, I don't think we could produce that.
It would be a really bad day.
- What?
- So we have primary life support systems
built into the suit,
that's where you're getting
your normal oxygen from.
- Primary oxygen tank leak?
We need to preserve his SOP.
[beeping]
- Solution?
- There's a secondary
tank that's pressurized
with oxygen that allows you to backfill
if you have a leak or
are running out fast.
- Don't do that. No, no.
[playful music]
Oh man!
- Maybe fortunately we don't have a line
that you can hook up between the two.
- Wasn't me.
[laughing]
- [Man] What do you mean it wasn't you?
We're 35 million miles
from the nearest person!
- Airlock, "Event Horizon."
- Okay.
[screaming]
- Captain Justin just activated the door,
it's on the 32nd delay.
- Justin!
Oh my god.
- So, similar to "Mission
to Mars," this really is
kind of an exaggerated
presentation of how the body
would react to being exposed
to the vacuum of space.
[screaming]
[splattering]
On the space station right now,
we have an airlock
module, and it's the place
that you go, and you
get all ready to go out
on your spacewalk, and it's
a place that allows you
to isolate from the main
spacecraft where you still
want to breathe regular air,
and you still want to live and survive,
and maintain a normal
atmospheric pressure,
and the airlock gives you the capability
to dump all of that pressure and equalize
with the vacuum of space.
- I've got him!
Standby, people!
Standby!
- We've got to close it.
- Come on, Justin. Hurry.
- The commander gets in and
he's got him back inside,
and they close that outer
hatch, and then it's like
almost immediately they're
opening the inner hatch
and going inside.
- There's a lot of things
happening around here
that I don't fully understand.
I need time.
- It takes about half an
hour for in a normal reentry
for the airlock to re-pressurize.
There was a case of a
guy who was doing a test
like a spacesuit test,
and somehow got exposed
to the vacuum.
- Gotta find out what
happened to the other crew
before the same thing happens to us.
- He reports that he
felt boiling of his spit
on his tongue, and in the end he was fine.
I have no idea how long that was.
I mean, it had to be
quick, because as soon as
that started happening, they'd be looking
at how do we get back in
there and get this guy out.
- I'd like some answers, doctor.
- And you have the potential
of popping eardrums
and hurting yourself by
that pressure change,
so you want to bring that change on slowly
so that your body can
react to it in a good way.
- Hold his head still!
[blood sputtering]
- [Woman] Okay!
- Delightful scene, isn't it?
[laughs]
Self-destruct button is "Star Trek III."
- [Announcer] Awaiting final
code for one minute countdown.
- Code.
Zero zero zero.
Destruct, zero.
- [Announcer] Destruct
sequence is activated.
- Really, there's nothing
like this on board,
but the range safety guys
do have this capability.
An air force team that's on the ground,
and they watch, they're monitoring
whenever a spacecraft
is launching, they watch
to make sure that it's
maintaining control,
and so they have the capability
of flipping the switch
and terminating the flight.
- Computer, destruct sequence one.
- Which would take the crew as well.
If there was the possibility
of it coming back
and causing harm to a greater population.
- [Announcer] Destruct
sequence completed and engaged.
[explosion booms]
[all screaming]
- It would be an explosion, yeah.
And they would do that in a way
that it was as safe as possible in the air
before the vehicle came
back and impacted the land.
- Turned death into a
fighting chance to live.
- I think you learn
about it, right going in
to flight training.
You're learning about how
the flight is controlled
and managed, and that's one part of it.
[explosion booming]
- What have I done?
- [Man] What you had to do.
- G-force training in "Space Cowboys."
- First one to pass out
buys the beer tonight.
- You're on.
[whooshing]
- She will take the wrinkles out.
- So we have the opportunity
as shuttle crew members
to go experience the
centrifuge, so this machine
that kind of spins you
around and simulates
not just the G-forces that you'll feel.
- What the hell's going on in here?
- You experience them like you
would as you were launching.
So it takes you through
the same trajectory
that you would experience
launching on the space shuttle,
and they mention it in the film.
It's three G's.
- It was three G's!
- And you're on your back,
and it's coming through
your chest, which really
is a lot easier to handle
than in an airplane where
you're doing aerobatics
and pulling a lot of G's, and
it's coming through your head
and you're having to
squish down like this.
- I'm sure you people think
you're putting on a great show,
but this is not a toy!
- Getting sucked into space in "Aliens."
[sizzling]
[roaring]
[air whooshing]
On the space station we had what we called
three primary emergencies,
and it was fire,
toxic atmosphere, like
high concentration ammonia
getting into the air,
and depressurization,
which was like a hole in your spaceship.
And you didn't even want a little hole,
because little holes mean
the air is going out,
and if you can't find
that hole and isolate it,
it means that you're gonna
have to get in your spaceship
and head home, because
all the air will be gone
and you won't be able to
breathe there anymore.
[roaring]
If you get a hole, it's gonna
rush out really quickly,
and so in doing so, it'll
pull things towards the hole.
So if the hole is big enough,
it can pull you right out with it.
Same thing is true in an
airplane, when you're flying
in a plane, you'll hear
about depressurization,
or in movies you've seen
like the door fly open
and people get sucked out too,
and that happens in space as well.
Another scene in
"Gravity," crying in space.
- Will you say a prayer for me
or is it too late?
I mean, I'd say one for myself
but I've never prayed in my life, so.
[sniffling]
Nobody ever taught me how.
- Yeah, you can cry in space.
You can cry pretty much anywhere.
It's a little different, in
that you know you're floating,
you're in microgravity, and
when you squirt out water
in comes out in like little spheres,
this like equal loading all around it.
The tear just kind of coats your eye
or builds up in like a little pool
in the duct of your eye, but
there's nothing causing it
to get pulled out of your eyes.
She was moving around a
little bit so it could,
I mean, if she had been crying enough
and the tears had built up
enough and squeeze your eye,
if it separates from your eye or your body
it will be like little balls
of tears floating away.
- [Narrator] Conclusion.
- Yeah, I hope you've
enjoyed this comparison
between what goes on in the movies
and what happens in real
life as much as I have.
I am so thankful for the science fiction
that we are presented with.
I think it gives us an
opportunity to think about
what our future could be like.
Already we've seen so
much sci-fi that's turned
into sci-fact, that I am really
hopeful for what we'll see
in the future, and I
hope that we can continue
to compare over time what
we're doing in real life,
and how we're imagining
it in the sci-fi movies.
[applauding]
[laughing]
