I'll translate.

Where does the poop?

What happens to the poop.

Hi, I'm mike Massimino today, I'm going to answer your questions on twitter.

This is space support at happy Graham.

P asks Nasa, what do astronauts do as they're blasting into infinity and beyond at 37.3 bazillion MPH under 27.2 Gs.

That's only part one of the question is more to follow.

But with those numbers I'm not sure what you would do glancing into infinity and beyond.

Don't sign up for that.

We go to definite places.

I went to the Hubble space telescope.

You can go to the international space station.

Have you picked 37.3 bazillion MPH?

Seems a little bit too fast.

I think that's over any speed limit Now I feel like a slowpoke.

We actually in orbit we go 17,500 miles an hour and it says under 27.2 Gs, which I don't think that would be pleasant either.

We take up to three Gs.

Are they telling jokes, throwing up, praying, holding on to their seats for dear life until they're in orbit.

Pretty much all the above.

I would say you hit just about everything, joke telling is more for the launch pad before you go to space so you're like sitting there lying on your back for a few hours.

Typically was the responsibility of the pilot to supply jokes.

That was their job.

Do I remember any jokes that the pilot said no, maybe I just wasn't paying attention like I should have to the jokes because you know about to launch into space?

I also played tic tac toe with my buddy and rock paper scissors, that kind of thing, throwing up really doesn't happen until after you get to space.

That's more of a zero gravity issue.

So you're not throwing up during the launch, praying absolutely.

Throughout the launch, I found myself doing that and holding on to your seats, you're strapped in so you don't have to really hold on to anything.

It's all those things, but it's also an amazing experience at Peter Pietsch asks why do astronauts need belts in space?

And I'm looking at a photograph of my friend Megan McArthur and they're wearing belts.

So why do you need belts in space?

Kind of a good question, but I think it's just to keep your pants up, you're not gonna have gravity pulling your pants down, but if your pants are fitting really well, they'll kind of float around you.

But having a belt, I used the belt, in fact, look at this, I'm using a belt.

Now, I wore this belt in space.

This is actually flown in space belt.

So I brought my own belt to space to keep my pants on correctly and I think it's more of a comfort thing and also maybe some excuses to get a belt flown in space because I was able to bring it home and and where this next one is from, at Miguel Tavares.

How do astronauts get leverage when attempting to unscrew tough bolts, You can use your body and gravity on Earth.

So seems a little difficult while floating.

This is a really good question.

And something we do think about as Miguel says, when we're on on Earth, you can brace yourself against something and you're you're on the ground, you're not floating away in space.

When you push on something, you're gonna go the other direction, so you're really not gonna get anywhere if you do that, what we do is we make sure that we are stable.

So when I was working on the Hubble space telescope, my feet would be in in a in a foot restraint.

So my feet are nice and solid and then I could react that force through my feet.

If I didn't have my feet and foot restraints, I would try to push the wrench and my feet would go flying this way.

Another interesting thing, maybe a little more advanced to think about is when you're undoing a bolt or you're going through a hard stop on a bolt and you get to the end, it's gonna give you a kick.

Well, if you're not steady that, you know, the two will go flying.

So we would always think about reacting it with our arms were out there in our space suits will be in our foot restraints and I always have my arm in position to absorb that kick that we would get at the end.

So we're a lot steadier on Earth when we work with tools and work on things in space.

It's a little more challenging, but I prefer it's a lot more fun at Dema hajj question for astronauts, only for astronauts.

Where your poo poo go on the space shuttles, we did have a commode, it was not a flush toilet, it had a seat on.

It was fairly complicated.

You have to turn it on and create a vacuum and make sure everything was we're supposed to.

And and then every couple of days the poop would be kind of compressed.

It was a very ingenious way they did.

It had these different screens and so poop would be in there and then one screen would go and compact it and then more poop and then another screen.

But we just collected that poop over the course of a couple of weeks, everybody's poop went into the same thing.

We brought all that poop back with us for no reason other than we don't know what else to do with it.

I think.

I don't think there's any science behind it, but that poop came back to Earth and it was serviced on the ground.

Never to be seen again, as far as I know the space station is a little bit different.

The toilet is a can with a seat on top of it and a plastic bag as a liner.

So you poop into that.

Can you close up the bag and then you get it to the bottom of the can and you put a new liner in for the next person clean up and you're done.

Once that can fills up, you take the seat off, you cap it and you put it in a cargo ship that is now a dumpster.

There are certain cargo ships that come up and then they don't return to earth with anything.

They're used as dumpsters.

All your waste garbage things you don't need go in there and get sealed off after a while it reenters and everything burns up during re entry.

That is a much better way to go.

The shuttle toilet was very expensive and complicated.

This thing is a can and it works really well.

So that's where poop goes or or poo poo as it says at v.

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58.

Why do astronauts have mirrors on their gloves?

This is a really good question.

I think we have mirrors on our gloves when we launch into space in case there's an instrument or a panel or something, you need to see behind you.

It's really hard when you're launching into space and when you're landing to move your head around, you have a helmet, you can kind of turn your head a little bit but you can't really see behind you so well.

So having a mirror right on your wrist, makes it easier to see behind you if you look closely at a space walking suit.

The E.

M.

U.

The E.

V.

A mobility unit.

And you look at the way these these controls are labeled they're reversed.

So when you hold up the mirror to it it all is in the in the right orientation.

Another thing about the mirrors I thought was interesting is they're not actually glass.

You don't want to have glass around the space suit that could shatter it can cut things no good.

So the actually highly polished metal.

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

So that's why we wear wrist mirrors.

They're very very helpful particularly during a space walk.

At Will Taft asks to astro align I astro align i is my good friend Mike Hopkins by the way.

Real good guy mike if you're listening, how are you?

Hope you're doing well Miss you.

Alright.

Does Nasa put any time in the schedule to give first time spacewalkers a minute to take it in.

Yes and no.

The first few minutes of your spacewalk are considered to be translation adaptation of your very first time space walking.

It's the first time you're out there you're in the big suit.

Just like you were in your training but we typically train underwater.

So when you're underwater and you're moving around you move differently than when you're in air or also when you're in space we call space walking.

But really what you're doing is using your hands to move around.

So as you move around with your hands, you want to go very, very lightly and very slowly.

If you put too much into it, that's not a good thing.

You'll go flying now in the water, you kind of need that actually because the water viscosity slows you down and makes you more stable, requires a little more force to move around.

You get to space, there's nothing, there's not even any air to slow you down, there's no resistance at all.

So the same type of motion That you would use in the pool will send you flying somewhere you don't Wanna go in space.

So the 1st 15 minutes or so are usually dedicated to you just to get used to moving around.

It's not really look around, taking in have fun, it's get used to that environment so you can do your job at free The Stones asks space travel question, it's about fuel.

Once you get your spaceship pointed in the right direction and get going, do you need to keep your engine's going.

In other words, do you only need to say fuel to either change speed direction or to slow down if you're in an orbit around around Earth, let's let's take that as the example here, there still is a little bit of drag.

Now, if you're familiar with the drag equation, Its velocity squared if you have a large amount of velocity like 17,500 mph, you square that, that's a really big number.

So even just a little bit of resistance can give you enough drag that eventually the orbit will decay from atmospheric drag even though it's just little traces of it, there's still a little bit, you'll get lower and lower and eventually re enter the planet, which is what happens.

Sometimes some spacecraft will slow down enough and they'll come back into Earth.

Usually they'll burn up in the atmosphere on reentry or if anything makes it through the land in the ocean or someplace where people aren't around.

So typically isn't a problem, but that will happen.

The only way to prevent that is to increase your altitude and go back up and give it a boost over.

For example, when I visited the Hubble space telescope, we gave it a boost and it raised its orbit and it kept it up.

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

If you're on your way to another another place, you know, going to going to the moon or to mars or something like that.

It's gonna be a little bit different.

You would just need to coordinate your speed, use your fuel to maybe slow down to enter the orbit correctly, but you're not necessarily worried about the orbital decay that you would experience on Earth when you're not in orbit.

If you're traveling somewhere else, then you do have to uh manage the fuel usage with not only with your straight trajectory, but when you encounter whatever the target is, you're going to, you need some fuel to slow down and enter into the orbit correctly.

At Cristo CS asks do space suits fit well.

Are they even remotely comfortable as best as you can get them?

You know, you're not going to, you're not going to a tailor but they do their job.

I think they're adequate or they even remotely comfortable?

Yeah, they're all right.

You know, you wouldn't want to wear one around town necessarily, but for what they, what their function is and what they need to do to protect you.

Yeah, I would say they are comfortable at kaio pigeon cook.

Hashtag ask Nasa as an astronaut, how many languages do you have to learn to be able to communicate with the crews from other countries?

It's not just english, right?

That's true.

It's not just english anymore for going to the international space station.

You're gonna operate and work there as a, as a Nasa astronaut or as an astronaut from the european space agency or Canada or Japanese space agency or the Russian space agency.

You need to be able to speak to two languages because it's Russian, the Russian segment of US segment on US segment we speak english as the primary language on the Russian segment.

It's Russian on the US side, you needed to be able to get along pretty well in Russian and the same for the Russians in english.

So yes, two languages required on the space station at Christine 12272 asks my wife just turned to me and asked baby, do you think space smells?

I have no idea how to answer this question.

So if you're inside the cabin, you're in a pressurized environment and space will smell like things smell here on earth.

If you're smelling food or each other, use your imagination.

It'll smell the same.

The question might be more of what the space smell like.

This requires a longer answer, but we're not doing a longer answer.

We're gonna do a short answer.

It has what they're gonna go with the long answer.

When I was a new astronaut, Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut had just come, he had been on mirror a few times on space station, MIr had just come back from a shuttle flight and he said there was a very distinct odor you come inside the airlock, you closed the door to space and you opened the door to the spacecraft inside when you enter that airlock is what Sergei told me it was the same smell on mir as it was on the space shuttle.

It doesn't last for long because that air starts to mix with the air in the cabin and the smell goes away.

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

So sure enough after the first spacewalk I was not outside.

I was inside for the first spacewalk helping the guys outside as soon as the spacewalk was over I opened up the hatch.

I went in there started I've got a good nose for smelling and it was this very metallic smell almost like a burnt metal smell and it's very distinct and I'd like to think that's what space smells like at Almira A.

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Asks Mike Massimino was in Big Bang Theory.

Yes, I was on The Big Bang Theory.

Ah Froot loops wanna hit your fan switch.