Astronaut Q&A With U.S. Students Abroad: Have You Ever Seen a Black Hole in Space?

And station, this is Houston. Are you ready for the event? And Houston, I am ready for the event. ACR, this is Mission Control Houston. Please call station for a voice check. Station, this is Houston ACR. How do you hear me? ACR, I've got you loud and clear. Please stand by for opening remarks. Yokoi, greetings from Quadrant High School in the Marshall Islands. We are honored and excited to participate in this NASA in-flight education downlink as a part of Expedition 72. Our school is located on Kwajalein Atoll, a unique and beautiful place in the Pacific Ocean. I'm Megan Hensley. And I'm Jay Corder here on Kwajalein. We're inspired by the vast skies and endless possibilities of space exploration. This opportunity reminds us that no matter how remote we may feel, we are all connected through science discovery and innovation. Thank you, NASA, for inspiring students like us around the world. We are thrilled to learn from the astronauts aboard the International Space Station and can't wait to ask our questions. What do you miss on Earth other than your family? I first want to say it's awesome to be able to speak with you today. I look forward to answering all your questions and sharing a little bit about what it's like to live and work in outer space. So what do I miss other than family? Absolutely, I miss my family. But the other thing that I think I miss is weather. So inside the space station, it's always 70 degrees, about 70 degrees, and it's always not really humid and it's controlled. But I miss wind. I miss rain. I miss the feeling of water hitting my skin and actually moving because here in space, water floats. And so let me just show you. It's easier to just show you rather than to try to describe what you're seeing. But water just floats up here. And that's why we're here. We're doing experiments because we can take gravity out of the equation just like I've done with this water right here. And so this water floats. And if it gets on my skin, it just goes all over. It doesn't move, and it slowly becomes the temperature of my body, and then it's almost like it's not even there. And so I miss the feeling of cold rain falling on my skin and running across my skin rather than water just kind of floating, but it's mesmerizing up here. This is the amazing reason. This is the reason we're in space on the International Space Station doing science. Awesome question. If you could share one lesson about being in space for the next generation of astronauts, what would it be? If I was going to sum up the one thing that you need to be really awesome at in order to be an astronaut, it's teamwork. You don't do it by yourself. My station commander, Sunny Williams, Sunny's here, and she's a great example. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we're going to live in close proximity to each other up here, work together, and live together. We had the opportunity to do that, actually, with Colonel Morgan, and Sunny and myself spent 10 days in the mountains of Wyoming in a tent, surviving, learning how to live together. We spend lots of time trying to figure out how we work together, and I think that's probably pretty similar to what life is like on an island in the Pacific Ocean. You depend on each other to be successful, so you guys are already learning that lesson. What has been your biggest challenge that you've had to overcome in order to become an astronaut? That's a great question, and it's hard to think about what's the biggest challenge. Nick hit the nail on the head about teamwork. I think just working with teams takes away some of that challenge. If you feel like you can trust your teammates, that makes everything easy because things are difficult up here, just like he was talking about the water. I think challenges, like you mentioned earlier, being away from home, being away from things you're familiar with. You guys living on an island sort of understand what we're talking about, but you have that camaraderie that makes those really challenging times of missing family, missing friends, missing things that are normal in the United States palatable and easy because you have friends that you can work with. Did the stars look even more beautiful in space than on Earth? Well, so my home is in Houston, and there's a lot of city lights in Houston, and so that light pollution makes it really hard for me to see a lot of stars. I think on a clear night when you don't have a lot of clouds over Kwajalein, you probably see an amazing night sky full of stars. But I can tell you I have never seen more stars than when I've been here on the station, and it's nighttime outside, and you let your eyes open up, and you just see more and more stars. The entire sky is cloudy, full of things out there for us to go explore. How do the changes in your sense of balance and orientation in space affect your daily tasks and decision-making skills? Balance, wow, that's a good point. It takes a little bit to get used to being up here and the sense of balance. You know, we don't have that at all. Like, I can do something upside down, and it doesn't matter. I don't feel anything in my head that I'm upside down. So once you get used to not worrying about it, it is actually really freeing, and it's really cool. And we have experiments all over on either side, on the ceiling, on the floor. You can do that, and you don't even worry about it, and you just get used to it. I'll just make one comment about the stars. You know, because we orbit around the planet, we not only see stars, what we're used to in the northern hemisphere, we also see stars in the southern hemisphere. So it's pretty spectacular, maybe close to what you guys can see. Can anybody be an astronaut with the right amount of training? Absolutely. It takes a lot of hard work, I'm not going to lie, and it starts with an educational foundation. So you need to have a really strong understanding of STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics. But it's not just that, and I think that, you know, we talked about teamwork. Teamwork is not one of those topics, right? Teamwork is about how to be a good person. So there's a lot more than just STEM that's required, but absolutely anybody can do it. You just got to put in a lot of hard work and effort and be a little lucky. What is it like knowing that you're paving the way for generations of people to one day live and work in space? You know, it's a huge honor, and it's really humbling if you feel like that's really true. And I do feel that's true because we are doing some of the most cutting-edge science up here. And really, you know, maybe we're not producing a ton of, like, production results, but we're, like, setting up those processes for how people would live and work in space, how they would be very productive to be up here. Like, just to give you an example of some of the experiments, you know, stem cell growth, understanding genes, RNA, and understanding, you know, DNA sequencing. All of that's going to help us understand how to actually live in space longer and help produce, you know, the industry that will bring people to space to make it more affordable for more and more people to come to space. So when you stop and think about that, when you get out of the detail and you stop and think about all the big-picture things that we're getting the opportunity to do up here, it's awesome. And it's why we're doing it is to, you know, inspire the next generation of explorers so you guys can, you know, go further than the International Space Station, back to the Moon and on to Mars. So we're expecting that of you, and you guys have a big responsibility just like we do. What did it feel like to look at the Earth from space the first time? I think for most everybody up here, it's a really emotional event. You look down, and you go into the cupola, and you're surrounded by windows, and I can look 1,500 miles one side, 1,500 miles to the other side. You can see so much in just one view. And what is amazing is just how all connected it is. And you're going by, you know, five miles a second. You're moving, and it's just gliding underneath you peacefully. And when I think about all the time I spent in school studying geography, most of the things I looked at had all these borders, and they had all these divisions and showed you where the countries were and where cities were, and that wasn't the thing you noticed because you don't see the borders. You just see the Earth, and everything is connected. It's a moving event. How do you fix something outside of the spacecraft if it needs a replacement part? So outside, luckily enough, we actually have, I would say, like tool belts, big, huge tool belts outside on the space station. So folks have thought maybe, you know, of all of the contingencies of what could break outside or at least how to fix outside, you know, whatever the box is or whatever the solar array, whatever it is, for a temporary fix until we can get other parts up here if we needed them. But we do have some manufacturing capability up here. We do have some 3-D printers. You know, it's in its fledgling state, but we're learning how to do that because when you guys, like, take the long trip like I was talking about, we're going to have to do that. We're not going to be able to get supplied from the ground, so we're going to have to figure out manufacturing. So we're in the first steps of doing that. It's a great question. How do you manage the psychological and physical effect of prolonged space travel? It's really important because there is this demand on your body, being in weightlessness, floating around, not using my muscles all day long. And so from a physical perspective, we have to work out. We work out two and a half hours every day. Half of that is aerobic activity, either running on a treadmill or a stationary cycle to keep our hearts and our lungs and our cardiovascular system healthy. The other half of it is lifting weights. And we've got a machine up here that simulates, just like if you were in a weight room on the ground, lifting weights to keep our muscles and our bones strong so that they don't wither away while we're up here on these long-duration missions. Psychologically, that preparation starts well before we're ever here. It gets back to that teamwork. It's how do we work together, how do we support each other. You're in a small community of astronauts, and as you're selected as a crew, you come together and you become the foundation of support, as well as being able to reach back and talk to your friends and family on the ground. So maintaining that connection is really important psychologically. What was humanity's motivation to explore space? Well, you know, I'm a Navy background, and I think of it a little bit in those terms. Like, what was their motivation to actually get in a boat and sail across the Atlantic Ocean and see what was on the other side? It's sort of the same things. I think it's innate in our human beings to want to explore and find out what's out there. And what's really cool about doing that is you don't know what things you're going to encounter, and so you learn along the way. I think the process of actually us building the space station, you know, it is not the picture-perfect station. It was put together over a decade of time and more add-ons. You can probably see a lot of wires and stuff like that. It's not perfect, but we've learned so much along the way. And so exploration is in our heart to maybe go back to the Moon and figure out how we're going to live there sustainably. We're going to learn so much so we can take the next steps, because sometimes we don't even know the questions to ask because we haven't taken that step. So I think that's sort of our motivation is just being able to take that next step and learn along the way. Have you ever seen a black hole in space? You know, personally, I haven't. Have you? No. It would be a little scary if we did. But outside the space station, we actually have some sensors that are looking deep into space, and they're trying to look at things like black holes to understand how is space created? How does space behave? What are these things that we don't really observe directly and aren't close enough to visit? How do we explore those at a distance and try to understand more about the universe? So we're doing that kind of research up here as well. What does Earth look like at night? Oh, great question. We have been taking a lot of pictures at night and trying to identify places at night. Actually, I think nighttime is the coolest, really. Daytime is beautiful, like every single color. It's incredible. But once it becomes nighttime, you can really see where humans live, where they don't live. If I was going to explore another planet, I certainly would want to go there at night to see what was going on there, because it's a whole other event. But another cool thing, besides where humans live in lights, is lightning. Nick was talking about looking at the planet, and when you see lightning as you're flying by, it's all connected, like Nick mentioned earlier. You'll see a lightning flash over here, like 500 miles over here. They go back and forth, obviously like a balancing of charges. And it's really actually very beautiful. So nighttime is incredible, and when the moon is out, that's another really amazing time at night. It's like this moon glow across the Earth, and it's just incredibly silver and beautiful. So there's all sorts of things to look at, not only in the day but also at night. Can you bring any souvenirs with you to the ISS? If so, what did you bring? We can, and I've got something to show you. But first, I just want to say it's been a thrill for us to be able to speak with you today. It means a lot to be able to speak with you because, you know, there on Kwajalein, the mission that you're doing is so important to the nation. The mission that you're doing actually keeps us safe up here and keeps things from colliding with us. We move out of the way. And so what you're doing, what your families are doing there is so near and dear to our hearts. So thank you so much for that. You know, it is a special home in the Pacific. And for the kids at the school and the staff and the faculty, I just want to say that, you know, the school system is kind of the heart of what makes that happen. You support the mission happening, and you also bring the character to the island. So it makes it a special home. So thank you to the faculty and staff, and thank you for the students for what you do to support your families. So, yes, we do get to bring small little souvenirs. And so I was fortunate enough to be able to bring one of these along. So go Spartans. I think Colonel Morgan's got a special gift to give to everybody there in attendance today. So thank you so much. Thank you, NASA and the astronauts of Expedition 72, for this unforgettable experience. We are inspired by your dedication and courage, and you've shown us that the sky is not the limit. It's just the beginning. From all of us at Kwajalein High School on the Marshall Islands, komo tara and safe travels as you continue your mission. Keep reaching for the stars. Station, this is Houston ACR. Thank you. That concludes the event.