B-roll video clip introduction

Lea Bentley and Chris Borne on screen

Lea: Good morning and welcome to Living in Extreme Environments. I'm Lea Bentley.

Chris: And I'm Chris Borne.

Lea: Let's see, for today, you know, we talk a lot about outer space but today we're going to talk about inner space. We're going to talk about and learn about an interesting, unique place called the Aquarius Habitat.

Chris: You'll get to see how the astronauts trained underwater for going in outer space.

Lea: Let's take a look at how NASA and Aquarius have worked together to experience this.

Showing video clip of Sea to Space Connection

Narrator: The Undersea habitat was completed in October of 2001. The primary objectives of this mission were to explore opportunities for using the Aquarius habitat as an analog for space flight and long duration space habitation and to identify areas for transfer of ideas and technologies between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Multiple directorates at the Johnson Space Center worked together with the National Undersea Research Center to accomplish this mission during the NASA extreme environment mission operations, or NEEMO project.

Many tasks and science objectives were evaluated and accomplished such as techniques for operating in extreme environments, crew and mission controller interaction and leadership and interpersonal skills training for the astronauts and aquanauts.

The Aquarius itself is the only undersea research laboratory in the world. It is owned by NOAA and managed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. It is located five miles off of Key Largo in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

It is deployed next to deep coral reefs 60 feet below the surface. It is similar in size to the International Space Station service module, measuring approximately 45 feet long and 12 feet in diameter.

Like its outer space counterpart, Aquarius aquanauts live, perform research and explore in an extreme and sometimes hostile environment. Aquarius aquanauts and scientists live in a saturated environment equivalent to a depth of a 50 feet. This gives them the ability to work on the reefs outside the habitat for extended periods of time; however, they must go through a 16 hour decompression profile in the habitat before returning to the surface.

The first mission by an all NASA team in Aquarius was completed in October 2001. It lasted seven days and six nights with the crew returning to the surface on October 27, 2001.

The crew for the mission included Mission Lead Bill Todd from the Mission Operations Directorate at the Johnson Space Center: Astronaut Mike Lopez-Alegria from the Flight Crew Operations Directorate, Astronaut Mike Gernhardt, also from the Flight Crew Operations Directorate, and Astronaut Dave Williams from the Live Sciences Directorate.

The topside support team was Marc Reagan from the Mission Operations Directorate and Monica Schultz from the Flight Crew Operations Directorate.

All of the training for the mission was conducted at the National Undersea Research Center over a period of six days. The entire team stayed directly adjacent to the NURC operations building at their crew quarters.

The training consisted of a very rigorous schedule of equipment briefings, swim tests, in-water diver training, including site and equipment familiarization, science briefings and habitat visits.

During the actual mission, four NASA aquanauts spent seven days living and working in a saturated environment and accomplished all of the mission objectives.

Some of the accomplishments were running from a mission timeline similar to that used on the International Space Station with all activities scheduled and completed per the timeline, linking audio and video communications with the Mission Control Center in Houston, performing credible space analog science tasks for NOAA research, performing a detailed test objective on an underwater communications system for aquanauts, performing environmental science inside the habitat on acoustics, lighting and human factors using a variety of scientific research instruments, hosting five educational outreach events reaching of millions of school kids on real time video and audio which highlighted the similarities between living in the extreme environments of inner and outer space, conducting a communication link up with the International Space Station crew on orbit and finally, documenting representative training and mission activities by video and still cameras.

At mission completion, the overwhelming opinion by all participants was that this was an excellent analog and is very applicable to the training and research that the Johnson Space Center performs.

The management and staff of the National Undersea Research Center were extremely professional and did everything possible to make the NASA mission a success. Their obvious commitment to safety was impressive.

They understand that our objectives are different than those of previous missions and went to tremendous lengths to facilitate our communication, science and technical needs.

The National Undersea Research Center and the Aquarius habitat have proven to be an ideal match for the objectives NASA brings to the project.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. It's now time for us to meet our Aquarius crew.

Chris: Aquarius, this is Houston. Are you ready for the event?

Aquarius crew in control center on screen

Scott: We are ready.

Lea: Hi guys. I hear you're having some bad weather over there.

Scott: Yeah, well unfortunately, there's a tropical storm just over the island of Jamaica and its forecast to head our way so as you can probably tell, we're not actually inside the habitat right now but we're in the control center where the habitat is operated from, similar to mission control for the space station.

And although we'd like to be bringing you this Web cast from the habitat, unfortunately there are safety rules and the safety rules of the NOAA and UNCW dictate that we cannot be in the habitat with this approaching storm.

But we would still like to participate with this Web cast and answer questions about what we're doing here, about our training, about our experiences at NASA.

So first I'd like to introduce my crew. First myself, my name's Scott Kelly. I'm a commander in the United States Navy and I've been in the Astronaut Office for about six years now and I flew in space as the pilot of Discovery in 1999 and I'm very excited to be here and excited to be a part of this NEEMO four crew. And I'll just let my fellow crewmembers introduce themselves. Jessica.

Jessica: Hi. My name is Jessica Meir. I'm the Experiment Support Scientist at the Johnson Space Center and basically that means I help coordinate and implement the space life science experiments that come through to be performed on the International Space Station and the space shuttle.

So I'm here helping coordinate all of the space and life sciences projects that we'll be participating in, in our mission.

Rex: My name is Rex Walheim. I'm a classmate of Scott in the Astronaut Office and I crewed on the space shuttle Atlantis in April of this year, to the International Space Station and did a couple of space walks there.

Paul: I'm Paul Hill, and as a space shuttle and space station flight director, I'm usually in a room like this, while people like Scott and Rex are up in space conducting manned space flights, so this is kind of an opportunity for me to be in the center.

Scott: And like the video showed, we've been conducting some pretty extensive training for the last week and a half, both academic training on the surface, and practical training underwater, learning about our gear, learning a lot of safety measures, learning science procedures that we might conduct during the mission.

And we've also had time to visit the habitat and get acquainted with the habitat, but, hopefully, the weather situation will improve and we'll get started on our mission, probably Saturday at the earliest and Monday at the latest.

Lea: What kind of things have you been doing to prepare for the storm? Since you guys can't go down, have you had to pull some equipment up or do something about that?

Scott: Well, since we're going to be the ones living in the habitat kind of as guests of the owners and maintainers of the facility, our personal preparations have not been much.

Certainly, if the storm comes here, we may have to evacuate the Florida Keys. We're currently in Key Largo. However, the people that maintain the habitat have been doing some extensive preparations simply battening down the hatches, so to speak.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: We talked about going down and visiting Aquarius, but we have a question from Stephanie that's a seventh grader here in Texas that just asks exactly that. Do people go down to visit you in Aquarius? So, just like you went down to visit Aquarius and see the habitat, is that an opportunity that other people have while you're down there?

Chris: Well, one thing that's interesting. We've lost the signal temporarily, so I'll talk a little bit about some of the training that they've received at Aquarius compared to what we and how we train them at the NBL. Both, Scott and Rex, we've had at the NBL doing training for EVA or for space walking, and we do that in a very large pool.

The NBL is probably one of the largest indoor pools in the country, and it's completely dedicated to the training of astronauts for space walks.

And so, there's a lot of similarities in microgravity and zero gravity environments that you can achieve in water, similar to what the aquanauts will want to do. They have to get and stay fairly neutrally buoyant so that they can maintain their work site locations.

Screen shows an Aquarius aquanaut working in the lab habitat environment

You don't want to be able to fall into the reef as you're doing scientific experiments on it, so they have to achieve that same state of neutral buoyancy that we achieve at the lab there, that you see on the screen now.

You can see the different umbilicals going to the astronauts, and there they are training for a space walk. We have mockups that simulate in size all of the modules and equipment that is in orbit right now, and we start training the astronauts about one year before their actual launch.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: That's right, and Chris, you've been in the Aquarius habitat and diver. We've a question asking what kind of animals do you see while you're diving down there around the Aquarius habitat?

Chris: At the site that the Aquarius is located at Conch Reef, it's a pretty prolific reef system that has lots of marine life, ranging from the flora of sponges, different soft corals to various species of fish.

That's one of the reasons why the Aquarius is there is to study a lot of this marine life. We also studied while we were there, we did a lot of work looking at geological features of the reef, looking at things like the impact of humans that they've had on the Florida Keys reef system.

So, it looks like we've got Aquarius back.

Lea: Hi, Aquarius. Welcome back.

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Thank you. Sorry for those technical difficulties, and we missed your question before we got cut off.

Lea: Well, let me think about what that question was, but while I'm thinking about it, let's say hi to the Pearl Hall elementary students. Ms. Lucco's music class has joined us and is asking questions here this morning.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

And one of their questions is, what kind of music would you listen to while you're down there in Aquarius habitat?

Aquarius team on screen

Rex: Well, actually, we have quite a variety of musical tastes here on the crew that's been kind of fun getting to sample each other's music during training week, and we have a little bit of two options.

We have our little CD players, kind of like the Walkman that you just put on and can listen to your own music, but it's also kind of fun to listen to other people's music, too.

So we've brought down some speakers so that from time to time we can plug the CD in and let the whole crew listen to what we'd like to listen to and kind of sample different peoples' musical tastes.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Well, of course, that's that relationship building and having to get used to everyone and their different tastes, just like it is on the shuttle and the International Space Station when you guys go to space.

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Yeah, that's certainly very important, and that's one of the objectives of these type of missions is to look at the habitability aspects of living in enclosed stressful environment with people with different backgrounds, different cultures, and things that we as individuals need to learn how to adjust to.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Super. Well, [Reesha], a second grader from Pearl Hall Elementary again asks what kind of experiments will you do on your mission there at Aquarius?

Chris: Okay. Well, it looks like they lost the signal again. The question from Pearl Hall Elementary was what kind of experiments will they do.

Now, on this particular mission, what the NEEMO Project has been doing is helping the Aquarius project as far as water quality monitoring. That's something that's real important in the Florida Keys.

Whenever you have a population like you do in an area like that, you want to know what kind of effect human presence is having on the Florida Keys, and not only on the Keys but also back into the Florida Bay, so they're doing a lot of water quality monitoring.

They probably will maybe go into some census taking of fish. In other words, counting fish, the different numbers and types of species, to get an idea if there's any concern about the fish population dropping off.

Screen shows location of Aquarius undersea

One thing to understand. Aquarius is located in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which is part of the 100-mile reef track.

There's several marine sanctuaries within the program of NOAA. Monterey Bay. There's one in Hawaii. You have the USS Monitor as part of that program.

The Florida Keys are probably the longest natural reef system in the United States, continental United States.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

So it's very important that we study and understand that resource. So, that's the kind of experiments that they'll be doing.

Lea: Now, Chris, can sea life damage the Aquarius habitat?

Chris: Not really. There's nothing located at that particular reef that could. You do get kind of a calcareous growth on the structure, just like you would on an oil rig or a shipwreck. And, of course, what that will do is that's more hazardous to the occupants. If they were out around the structure, they have to be extremely careful that they don't. It's just like coral reef.

You don't want to rub on it. It could cut you and that's not something you. Usually cause an infection or something, so that's not really to the Aquarius but the occupants have to be careful all the time.

Lea: All right. So, another question is, how does the change in pressure affect your daily routine, such as bathing and brushing your teeth and eating?

Chris: Well, really, there's very little change. The biggest change and noticeable change that you see, in my opinion, in my experience with Aquarius, is the sense of taste. For some reason, I had to put Tabasco on everything. I couldn't really taste food.

As far as brushing your teeth, there is a change in the density of the air on your vocal cords, so it kind of makes you sound a little bit like Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, but that's just because the density of the air is increased in that atmospheric environment.

But, other than that, it's pretty much business as usual. You bathe the same way. You go to the bathroom the same way. That's really about it. So, it's not much change.

Lea: Well, what are some of the suits you have to wear differently? Do you have to wear anything different inside the habitat?

Chris: No. The thing that you have to watch out in the habitat is that you're wearing clothing that's 100% cotton. You don't want any kind of synthetic material because you do have to concern yourself in an increased atmospheric environment.

So as far as out of the water, you're wearing wet suits. And the water right now is probably in the upper 80s, but when you're out in the water column, like the aquanauts will be for up to six, seven hours at a time, the body will start to cool off, so you want to protect it that way.

Screen shows aquanauts undersea

The habitat itself has a skin of insulation around the exterior, because it was originally designed to be in the waters off the West Coast, which are much cooler than they are in the edge of the Caribbean there in the Florida Keys.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Well, great. You say that they're training a lot the same in the NBL and with the Aquarius habitat and the swimming and things. How can there be similarities between some of the things they're doing, the communication that they're having underwater with some of the projects and research they're doing with Aquarius, as they do in their training at the NBL and EVAs?

Chris: Well, part of the, it looks like we have Aquarius back. Hello, Florida, are you there?

Screen shows Aquarius team

Scott: We're here.

Paul: We're here.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: Good to have you back.

Lea: Welcome back. All right. Well, let's go with a question from Dryden High School marine biology. They ask, how do you feel about participating in this project? What about marine life interests you?

Screen shows Aquarius team

Jessica: Well, we're going to be doing some marine experiments, specifically assessing the health of some of the coral down around the habitat. We're all excited to participate in that and help gather some real data for the sciences here at NOAA and UNCW.

I think it will also be a wonderful experience to be able to live in that marine environment full time, 24 hours a day for a number of days. Most scuba divers don't ever get to experience an environment like that for such a long period of time, so I think we're all looking forward to being part of that ecosystem.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. Now, Rex, and Scott have been on a mission. Are you excited about the comparison of living in this underwater habitat to the life in space?

Screen shows Aquarius team

Rex: Yes. It's going to be interesting, because, again, it's a confined space and we've been down there, and it is pretty much similar to the size of the Russian service module on the space station, and so we'll be living in confined quarters with six people, and it will be interesting to see the comparisons.

We know we're eating similar food. We're eating some space food when we're down there, and we're doing a number of excursions which are similar to EVAs, so it will be a very interesting experience to see how it compares with being on the space shuttle for ten days.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: That will be interesting, and we were just looking at some space food here and trying to figure out what it was, so that's going to be interesting for Paul Hill and Jessica to experience that as well. And Chris was talking about earlier that when he was in the Aquarius habitat, he had to put a lot of Tabasco sauce because the taste is different, so that will be interesting to see your comparison between the two environments.

What kind of work are you currently working on and what kind of equipment do you need for those jobs?

Screen shows Aquarius team

Paul: Specifically the jobs in the Aquarius module?

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Yes. What kinds of jobs have you been planning for and equipment down there, yes?

Screen shows Aquarius team

Paul: Well, you know they have a unique scuba rig they dive with here at NURC, so they have two tanks with a relatively complicated valve and isolation valves on both, all of which is supposed to give us more options in case we have problems with the equipment.

We have backup regulators. We have tether reels to take outside with us, so as we go down lines away from the habitat, we can tie off the tether reel and then leave the line that takes us back to the habitat and still make our way back, so it's like leaving bread crumbs out for Hansel and Gretel.

We have a lot of other things we're going to take out there with us to measure the corals that Jessica mentioned. Then just get some experiments she's going to conduct on the crew inside the habitat also, like checking for viruses in our blood, checking for viruses in our saliva.

Screen shows aquanauts undersea

Scott: Actually, just to add to that, the equipment we dive with is more complicated than the scuba gear you'd see a normal scuba diver using, because we are in saturation, we cannot return to the surface if we have a problem underneath the water.

In other words, if we run out of air, if we get lost, the surface is not an option for us. So, the equipment is more sophisticated to take that into consideration.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: I'm going to try to follow up on that Scott. I mean, the Aquarius trains more like you would train for cave diving. Again, in saturation, you have the sealing of that hatch, whereas for cave diving, you have a physical ceiling, so you really have to be self-dependent down there, so the training techniques that they use are closely similar to cave diving.

Lea: Oh, okay. That's why the suits are different, etc.

Chris: And the diving equipment that they use.

Lea: Great.

Chris: You know, Aquarius, with a storm looming out over there, do you all have an opportunity to practice any emergency evacuation procedures in the Aquarius?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Yeah. One of the first things we do on our first dive, actually between our first and our second dive, is to conduct an emergency procedures drill.

That's really not to simulate if we were evacuating the habitat because of an approaching storm, because with a storm we would leave several days prior, so it really wouldn't be an emergency situation because they conduct this operation very safely and that's the reason why we're not in saturation now.

But, one of the first things we do down there is an emergency drill in case there was some kind of leak in the habitat, a water leak, air contamination, fire, things of that nature that would teach us what we need to do to both be safe for ourselves and also, in some cases, how to save the habitat.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Talking about the weather out there, we have a question from Jacqueline from Philadelphia. First of all, she wants to say, we wish all the aquanauts good luck on their mission and she wants to know, when do you think you'll be in the habitat due to the storm off the coast?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Based on the preparations that they've made to the habitat, in case the storm does come in this direction, I think the earliest that we could be in saturation is on Saturday afternoon. So, hopefully, the storm will not come in this direction, and we'll be down, we'll begin working there by some time on Saturday.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. Where do aquanauts go when they're exposed to a bacterial infection or a virus? Do they have to leave the habitat or return to surface or is there trained medical personnel on board?

Aquarius team on screen

Jessica: Well, in a situation like that, it would certainly depend on what that bacteria or virus was. If there's any confusion regarding the experiment that we're doing, it's an experiment to assess the reactivation of latent viruses.

Pretty much everybody, all humans have a large number of these latent viruses that don't have any affect. They don't manifest any symptoms, any signs or symptoms of these viruses, so they don't actually have any affect on the body.

But potentially, in a stressful situation, these viruses may be able to replicate and that could cause potential problems for the immune system.

The reason that's being studied at Johnson Space Center is for applications of long duration space missions, so they aren't necessarily any viruses that are going to have any real signs or symptoms that would harm any of us.

Paul: We also have a dock medical officer that's out here that can come down and see us on any day, and if we had some problem, they could treat us in place in the Aquarius module. And if it was really bad, we could decompress and come up the surface and go to the facility here at Key Largo.

Lea: Well, that's what more fortunate about being in the Aquarius habitat in comparison to being in space. It's a little bit easier to get to medical attention, isn't it?

Rex: In some ways, it is, but in some ways, it isn't actually, because in the space shuttle, you can come down fairly quickly, you know, in a few hours, whereas this one, if it's a non-life threatening emergency, it's going to take them 17 hours to get us back to the surface through the decompression process.

So there are some analog. It is easier in some ways because you're closer to home, but time-wise, it might even be longer on an Aquarius than it would be on a space shuttle flight.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. Thanks, Rex.

Chris: We had a case back in 1988 where one of the subjects contracted dengue fever prior to going into saturation, during training. And actually went into saturation and started developing a very high fever.

And it was concerning, because the fever can go so high. It's like, probably I had it when I was down there, and it's probably like the worst case of flu you can imagine, so there are vehicles in place that we can, with trained medical personnel and some of the technicians are also diver medical technicians, so they can help out.

Lea: That's good to know, definitely. All right. Well, we have a question here from our Internet. It asks, when you go to the bathroom, what happens to the waste when you flush? Do you let it go into the water, or do you have a special system set up for it?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: There is a special system set up in the toilet, in the habitat, similar, if I understand it correctly, to what we fly on the space shuttle.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: All right. Well, on the shuttle, of course, we have bathrooms as well, and the waste is taken care of there. Of course, we don't just let it go out in space, is that right, guys?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: That's pretty close.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

!!!!!!!!!!!!Lea: Great. So there are a lot of similarities between the two environments. Now, Tommy of Mast Academy wants to know, what measures do you take in the event of an emergency. And you talked a little bit about that with Chris and the evacuation procedures in place.

How would you safely decompress? Does it still take the 17 hours? I mean, if you've got that much of an emergency? We talked about that earlier.

All right. Well, what's the most interesting thing that you've heard others see in the water, and what are you anxious to see once you get to dive and be underwater? What are some things you're looking forward to experiencing?

Aquarius team on screen

Rex: Well, we've already seen a lot of interesting sea life out there. We've seen some of the groups. We've seen turtles. We've seen sting rays and some small sharks and angel fish and grouper and all sorts of fish out there.

And, fortunately, they're all harmless to us. They get along with us real well, and we get along with them real well.

We know that we're in their environment and visiting them, and it's just a pleasure to see them all.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: We have a question from the Net asking, what is the longest mission that's been run at Aquarius? And how is it staying in the Aquarius in that kind of confined space compared to the shuttle for those durations?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: I think. I'm not exactly sure what the longest mission is that's been done. NASA's been looking into the possibility of doing a mission that may be 30 days or longer.

As far as the size of the module, compared to the space shuttle, it's actually kind of roomy. If you do a shuttle mission, like I did, to the Hubble space telescope, all we really have is the internal volume of the orbiter, flight deck, and mid-deck. So, we will have much more room in the Aquarius habitat than I experienced on an eight-day shuttle mission.

Chris: What kind of distances are you allowed to dive away from the Aquarius when you're in there on saturation? Where are your work sites located relative to the habitat?

Paul: You know, on a normal mission, some of the work sites could be hundreds of yards away from the habitat. I talked a little bit before about the lines that we use to find our way back.

Screen shows aquanauts undersea working with the lines and reels

And they have lines that are attached to the ocean floor that we would use to follow out to various work sites and then we would tie these smaller lines that are reels to those lines, and we would swim off to one side or the other of the excursion line.

Now, some of those lines have been pulled up in preparation for this tropical storm, but there are others out there so we'll either stay probably within 50 yards or so of the Aquarius module, using these reels, or we'll use the excursion lines and can still go some hundreds of yards away from the habitat while we're outside on a dive.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Scott: Yeah. It could be a good 15 or 20 minute swim away from the habitat, just to give you a good kind of mental picture of how far away that is.

Lea: All right. Well, once you're in the habitat, what kind of communications will you have? Will you have connections to the Internet or outside world at all?

Aquarius team on screen

Jessica: Yeah. We do have connections to the Internet. We also have a cell phone down there if we do need to talk to somebody in any kind of situation.

Each of us will also have a private family conference, which is very similar to what Scott and Rex have experienced on the shuttle flights and for International Space Station, as well, where we'll actually have a block of time in our timeline and we'll have a polycom event set up sort of like this one, so that we can talk to our family members.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Okay, well, Kyle of the Maritime and Science Technology Senior High School. He says he would like to be the youngest aquanaut to ever live in a habitat. His question is, how old is the youngest participant in this project?

Aquarius team on screen

Rex: I'm not the youngest one, but we've had young people participate in the programs before. A couple of years ago, we had a Jason Project, which some of your listeners may be familiar with, where we had some young aquanauts going down to Aquarius while some other school children were at the Johnson Space Center, with me on the mockups of the International Space Station.

So the unique outreach event where young people from across the country had a chance to either experience life on the space station on a trainer at the Johnson Space Center in Texas or life in Aquarius, so young people have had a chance to dive down there before.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Well, great. Maybe he'll get the opportunity to do that. All right, what is the primary source of power for Aquarius?

Aquarius team on screen

Paul: They have a couple of diesel generators in a buoy that's floating above the module, and it's moored to the ocean floor, and each one of these generators is capable of sending electricity down a line into the module, and they have some batteries also on the ocean floor, so that if something happened to the generators, the batteries could feed power to the emergency systems and still keep us alive long enough to decompress, if necessary.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: That's great.

Chris: During your decompression in the habitat, we have a question about, must you remain immobile during the decompression process?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Yeah. The decompression process takes the good part of a day and during some of it, we're breathing 100% oxygen, and they do like us to stay fairly immobile during that time period, but that's only about an hour in three 20 minute increments where we have to breathe that oxygen.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: We have another question. They're asking if the habitat can be brought to the surface?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Yes, it can, and it was certainly built on the surface, and it's been surfaced to move it from the West Coast to the East Coast, and they've also serviced it occasionally to refurbish it.

Although they do, do some extensive maintenance on that habitat where it is currently located on the ocean floor.

Chris: We have a question about whether or not, do only trained astronauts participate in this program, or is there a separate application process?

Scott: Well, NASA's involvement in this program is just a small part of what the National Undersea Research Center and the University of North Carolina, Wilmington do with the habitat.

We are just a very, very small part of this, and as far as astronauts' participating and NASA's involvement, as you can see from our crew, only half of us are astronauts, so the answer to that would be no.

There's a whole lot of other people, both at NASA and in this country and around the world, I think, that have participated in these saturation diving missions here at Aquarius.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: All right. Thanks. Well, if you were able to build your own habitat, how would it be different than Aquarius?

Aquarius team on screen

Paul: Well, I personally don't know that I could make any suggestions to improve it. They've done such a good job. They have backup systems, just like we have on our spacecraft, so if they have failures, you can not only keep the crew inside the habitat and do the mission, but you could have several failures and still keep the crew alive and get them back to the surface.

They've done the same thing on the diving equipment. We could take several different failures in all of our scuba gear and still safely stay on the bottom and make it back into the habitat. I don't know that there's a whole lot we could improve.

Lea: Well, that's a good thing to know and security is always very important. Now, does each of the aquanauts and astronauts have a specialty that they each represent for the research, or how are you guys chosen to do this?

Rex: Well, what we do is we do something similar to what we did before a shuttle flight. When you're assigned to a space shuttle flight, one of the first things you do is you get together as a crew and you start to divide responsibilities, and that's what we did a while back when we knew we were assigned to this mission.

For instance, Jessica, coming from Space and Life Sciences, she was the ideal candidate to monitor all the scientific investigations that are going to be going on both inside and outside of Aquarius, so she's basically our science officer, if you will.

And then we also need a photographic TV guy, and it seems like a simple job, but on a space shuttle mission, you have multiple types of TV cameras, video equipment, and someone's in charge of that, and that's one of my jobs.

And then Paul is going to be our computer guy. He's going to be making sure all of the computers are up and running and we're able to communicate in all the various ways we need to do.

So, different jobs like that have been divvied out amongst the crew and we've all got our specialties, so we can concentrate on those areas and free up some of the other people to concentrate on their areas.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: You know, Rex, in some of the saturation missions that I've been on in the past, they included the on-board crew, the technicians that work for UNCW and NURC as part of that crew, and they had a role to play in the research.

Is the same thing happening with your mission there now?

Aquarius team on screen

Rex: Yes. That's correct. Ryan and James, who will be our habitation technicians, will be down there and they will be participating in some of our experiments, and they are also, from day one, have been an integral part of our crew.

Whereas, we are taking care of each of the individual investigations in science and computers and equipment we're going to be running day to day, they're also obviously our experts on habitat systems. So they're our experts on the electrical, environmental, and mechanical systems on board the vehicle.

Lea: Great. And ready to work as a team, right?

Rex: That's correct.

Lea: All right. So, Jennifer from McCamey asks, are there any particular projects that you'll be training for to go to the ISS?

Jessica: There are a couple of our space life science experiments that do have applications for the International Space Station. We are testing out some hardware to assess any vulnerability to hearing loss, and this hardware will actually probably be used on the International Space Station so maybe Scott and Rex would have a chance to try it out in space, as well.

The viral shedding study, which we already mentioned as well, does have similar experiments performed on the shuttle and the space station.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: We have another question about gravity and what's its role down there underwater and does it affect your movement in the habitat?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Yeah, that can be a common question that people ask. Gravity's affect on us in the habitat is the same as it is on the surface. The main difference is the pressure, the air pressure that we're living under because of all the water that is pushing down above us. So the air pressure in this environment is about 2 1/2 times greater than what you see on the surface, but the gravity is exactly the same.

Lea: All right. Well, Mario from Mrs. Whipple's class wants to know how do you get into the habitat?

Scott: Well, there's a wet porch area. Essentially, it's a hole on the bottom of the habitat that allows you to swim up into the bottom of the habitat, and there's also something similar to an air lock in there that can seal that wet porch area off to the rest of the habitat, if you had to do that during an emergency, if you have water leaking or coming into there higher than you wanted to be, due to a storm, for instance. So, it's similar to a lock type of arrangement you might have in a space vehicle.

Chris: Well, we have a question from Mast Academy's fourth period marine biology class, and they want to know, what is the most interesting thing you have seen down there during your trip underwater?

Paul: Sharks. Sharks.

Scott: I think it was the habitat.

Jessica: It's also interesting to see the variety of life down there, all the different types of corals and fish and the sea creatures. It's amazing the number of different organisms that are down there.

Paul: I think the most interesting part of the experience for me was the first five days, I didn't see much of anything on the ocean floor. I mean, it was all there. All I was focusing on was doing what I was doing in different training exercises we were doing.

In our very last dive, it seemed like the entire ocean floor just came alive, because these guys have done such a good job training us and preparing us for what we're about to do that we've become very comfortable and now, instead of just trying to keep myself alive, I was paying attention to what was going on and seeing all this abundant wildlife that was swimming all around us.

Screen shows the Aquarius aquanauts team at work undersea

Chris: Does the life at Conch Reef, it's been about six years since I dove there, and we were concerned, of course, again by the human impact. How's the reef seem to be faring now that five, six years have gone by? Does it look fairly healthy, and do they notice any adverse impact on our visits there?

Jessica: I think the reef still looks to be in very good condition. One of the experiments that we are doing on the coral side, just to help ensure and just to measure the health of these corals.

There are a lot of factors that are contributing to a decline in coral reefs around the world, and not all of them necessarily are attributed to the human presences there, but I think the reef around Conch Reef does look to be in great shape.

Aquarius team on screen

Lea: Great. You've shared a little bit about the comparison between the conditions in the International Space Station or the shuttle and comparison to Aquarius, but can you expand on that a little bit? Jacqueline from Philadelphia was interested in knowing how the habitat mimics the conditions in space.

Rex: Well, one of the main ways it mimics it is the confined space. There's only a certain amount of space you have to go into, so you have to learn to get along and to live along with your crew mates, and it's a nice size space down there, but there's six people in there.

One time where it does get a little bit more roomy is when people are outside, and that's also similar to a space flight because we go on EVAs or extra-vehicular activities and when you have two people outside on a space walk, then it gets a little more roomy inside and gives you a little more chance to move around, so that's one thing that similar.

One thing that's different, obviously, we talked about a little bit before was the presence of gravity down underwater. Now, it's a lot of fun to float around in space, but to tell you the truth, lack of gravity up there makes it harder to get things done, because things float around.

Screen shows astronauts floating inside space shuttle

You're trying to grab things and carry out your duties, it makes it a little bit more difficult.

Now, one similarity though is when we go outside and we go on scuba, it is very similar to a weightless environment.

Aquarius team on screen

There's still gravity out there, but if you use your air resources correctly and your equipment, you can float around as if you would in space. The only thing is, if you drop something, it will go down to the bottom, which, if you're close to the bottom, that can help you, but if you're not close to the bottom, that's not going to be much of a help either.

Scott: The other similarity is the view out the window of both the space shuttle and the space station and the Aquarius are spectacular, for different reasons, but they're both great views.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: Well, Rex, when you all go out on your simulated EVAs from the habitat, I know you've all been testing out some various communications equipment. How is that working out? Is it enabling you guys to talk to each other when you're outside the habitat?

Aquarius team on screen

Rex: Yes, it works quite well. We're able to talk to each other. We have had some technical difficulties, but that's the same as you have on space flights. Sometimes, the comm doesn't work right, but we've been able to work through it and there have been times when we tested it out and we've been able to hear all four people very well.

And that's a tremendous aid because when you're out there just doing hand signals for various activities, it makes it much more difficult to communicate, but the comm here has definitely increased our capabilities, especially when we're going to do more intricate tasks, like coral science where we're trying to talk about what piece of coral we're studying or what piece is bigger than another piece or communicate what help we need, it's going to be very helpful to have the communications gear.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. Bill from McCamey wants to know, do you grow plants inside the Aquarius habitat?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Not on purpose.

Lea: And what do you mean by that?

Scott: Well, actually, we don't have any experiments where we're growing anything inside the habitat, so I'm sure there are some scientific investigations where they're bringing sea life inside that habitat for whatever scientific experiment they're doing. So I'm sure there's been things growing in there intentionally in the past.

Chris: Can you all talk a little bit about how the potting process, how you get food and supplies to the habitat during the mission?

Scott: Yeah. That can be a challenge because you have to make sure the stuff stays dry as it's getting down to the habitat because it's at a 50-foot depth, the pressure is pretty high, so you couldn't put it in a very weak kind of airtight container. You've got to have it in a very robust container system, so the container doesn't leak.

So they have what's called pots, and essentially, they're high pressure pots that are about this large that commercial painters would use to put their paint in and pressurize it. But what they do is, they put all our gear in plastic bags into those pots and then they swim them down to the habitat.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. We talked about having some space food down there, but do you get to have regular food, too?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Yeah. About half of our food is space food and NASA provides that. The other half is camping food, freeze-dried type food that you can take on a camping trip or some other type of expedition.

And then we have some off-the-shelf kind of foods, you know, fresh fruits and vegetables, things like that, that we'll have for a couple of days during the mission. That's also similar to what we get in space.

Typically on a shuttle mission, you'll have some fresh food for the first few days, so it's fairly similar to what we eat in space.

Lea: Great. Will any of the specialists from Aquarius be mission specialists on the future shuttle missions?

Scott: Rex will.

Rex: And then there's Jessica or Paul. If Paul or Jessica decides to fly to the astronaut office and they get accepted, they could be eventually, too.

Paul: Feel free to put in a good word for us. [laughs]

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. Well, Joy from McCamey wants to know what is the official name of this mission?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: The official name of our mission is. We're the NEEMO 4 crew and NEEMO stands for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, and so that's our official name. We don't have an unofficial name yet, but as soon as we do, we'll let you know.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: Scott, we had a follow-up question. We were talking about how you actually get into the habitat through the wet porch. You can get in, but what keeps the water out?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: What keeps the water out is the fact that the habitat itself is pressurized, so you have a certain amount of air in there and there's not enough force of the water to displace the air.

Paul: It's the same thing as turning a glass upside down in a sink of water in the kitchen. When you push that glass down to the bottom of the sink, the air stays in the glass. The water doesn't come in. It's the same idea.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Well, Paul, I've read that you were a life guard at summer camp one summer. Are you experiencing some of those memories from camp, learning and taking these dives and using some of those skills you learned?

Aquarius team on screen

Paul: I would say some of the experience has been the same where, you know, I became a lifeguard. They made me do a lot of things I didn't want to do and practice drowning.

It's possible that last week we were going through the training here, we all felt like we were practicing drowning, but at the end of that week, we definitely felt much more confident with our skills at the bottom of the ocean. Certainly, much more confident that if something bad happened to our equipment, we'd be able to make it back to the habitat with no problem.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: To be selected for the NEEMO crew, do you have to go through the similar type of medical screening that you would in the astronaut office? I mean, are you going through physicals or anything like that that would potentially catch anything that would prevent you from joining the crew?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Well, the folks that run the organization down here, NURC and UNCW and NOAA, they have medical requirements somewhat similar to maybe a physical you would have to take before you started a scuba diving course.

For instance, with, I think, some added requirements. It's not as extensive as what Rex and I experienced as applicants to the astronaut program, but it's enough of a requirement to make us safe to live and work in this type of environment for an extended period of time.

Chris: Has any of you spent any time scuba diving in other parts of the world that you could compare it to the experience you've been going through the last week?

Jessica: I recently went on a diving vacation to Bonaire in the Caribbean, just off of Venezuela, and that also has some beautiful, beautiful sea life there, the tropical waters. There are a lot of similarities with the coral reefs here as well, since we are in the same tropical water environment.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Well, I know that, of course, two of your are astronauts and Paul and Jessica are not, and there are a lot of people here at Johnson Space Center that would love this opportunity, of course, but people are wondering, especially Chris, how do you get chosen for this project?

Aquarius team on screen

Paul: You know, I wish I could say how I got chosen. I got lucky and had Bill Todd and Mark Reagan come ask me if I was willing to participate, that they wanted a flight director to come down here and go into the Aquarius just to give them a different perspective than we have from the control center, and I'm still scratching my head, wondering how I got lucky enough to get asked to do this.

Scott: From the astronaut office point of view, for Rex and I, I think the people that we send down here to participate in these missions are people that our office potentially could be looking at to do a future long duration space mission.

Jessica: From the Space and Life Sciences Division, we actually had an application process. It was announced and it was set out for people that wanted to apply for this, so I did apply, and I was lucky enough to get accepted.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: It’s like team building. Is NASA looking at things like crew compatibility? You know, it is a confined space and it can sometimes probably get tough to get along if you didn't have a good day. Are you looking at things like that while you're down there?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: I think our office always looks at those issues and we have different types of training environments, simulators in Houston. We do other expedition type training events that put people in stressful situations to see how they can react.

And I think when it comes time for the chief of the office to assign a crew, those compatibility issues are things he considers along with some of the other issues, like mixes of certain skills, certain experience levels to pick the right crew for the current or whatever mission they're currently assigning.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: All right. Well, Sarah, Ann and Whitney from Andover, Maine, fourth grade asks, when you are down there in the Aquarius habitat, does it feel like you're in space?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: Well, we haven't lived there yet. We've been in it for a short period of time, and other people that have been in space and lived in space have also lived in the Aquarius.

And I think, like we discussed earlier, there area lot of similarities. You're living in an extreme environment. Outside the habitat, it's very hostile. Outside of the space station, it's a very hostile environment. So, there are similarities, but there are also differences. But differences aside, it's still a very good environment to train people for missions on the ISS or the space station, for that matter.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: Well, while you're all waiting to see what the weather's doing with this tropical storm out there, are you going to be going out and doing any kind of diving from the vessels there to help you better prepare maybe for your stay before you go into the habitat?

Aquarius team on screen

Rex: We had a chance to do that on Monday. We did some more training dives and basically tried to do some of the activities that are similar to what we would have been doing if we were in saturation. We had some more familiarity dives where we learned how the excursion lines are strung out and the local environment around there. Since then, however, the activities to prepare Aquarius for the approaching storm have taken priority over our diving, so we haven't had a chance to dive much since then.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Great. Well, just for the divers who have done time on the space shuttle and the International Space Station, what's it like being away from your family for that long period of time?

Aquarius team on screen

Rex: Well, the missions that Scott and I went on were ten to eleven days long, and so we haven't been on a long duration mission, but that is certainly a challenge. When I went up to the International Space Station, we went up and met Carl, Dan, and Yuri, who had been up there already for 4 1/2 months, and so they had done the long duration, and it was a challenge.

They have to work real hard at it, but they have a phone on the space station where you actually can call your family, and they had a chance to talk to their family just about every day, and they get e-mails from their family and friends and have a chance to correspond from there, so I think that's one of the ways they cope with that.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Chris: Okay, if you had to sum up your experience so far, without having had the opportunity to actually get in the habitat, how do you compare the two programs? Are they similar in the kind of training and operation that they do, just in different environments?

Aquarius team on screen

Scott: I think they're very similar and I think mostly because of the group of people that we have working and running both programs. I think NASA does a great job in flying people in space safely, and I think the folks down here that run the habitat do an equally good job operating the habitat safely.

And, in both cases, it's our top priority, and I was very impressed to find a great group of professionals down here, so I'm very comfortable with what we're getting ready to go do, and I'm sure my fellow crew members are as well.

Back to Lea and Chris on screen

Lea: Well, thanks so much for spending your time today and your preparations. I know you're excited about your dive, and we hope that the weather holds out and you can go to another direction so that you can get down there in the Aquarius habitat.

From Houston, we would like to thank everyone who participated and sent in their questions. Thank you for doing that. Thank you to Quest, the Distance Learning Outpost. And, of course, the Aquarius. Thank you very much.

Chris: Thanks, guys.

Aquarius team: Thank you.

Scott: We enjoyed it.

[end of Webcast]