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 scenarioses,

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 scenarioses,

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]