You know there's a few things that we do as astronauts
that really make you feel like an astronaut...
and spacewalking is one of those things.
I really just enjoy those days. I enjoy everything about a spacewalk.
This is the small area that actually goes to the vacuum
and the hatch that Luca and I will egress out of is right here.
In space, it's Christmas Day over and over again
for the kid that's been waiting for Christmas for 364 days.
We astronauts crave that moment.
Here inside of the flight control room
at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, preparations are continuing
to prepare these two astronauts for their venture out of station airlocks
into the vacuum of space.
On this spacewalk, Chris Cassidy will be designated EV1
and then Luca Parmitano will be designated EV2.
Thanks.
Houston station, the hatch is closed.
Karen, we copy. You guys have a good time out there, okay?
Thanks a lot, Karen. Nice work. Thanks, Karen.
We're ready. Let's go do a spacewalk.
Three, two, one.
Shane, good morning to everybody in Houston. Great to be with you.
Good morning, Chris and Luca.
We are ready for you to head out over to the Z1 site
and we'll get you set up and ready to go.
Copy that, Shane.
It can be a little frightening,
the first hour or so when you're out there.
And every now and then, even when you're experienced,
you stop and take a look.
It's a beautiful sight.
When you see the Earth out on a spacewalk,
it's usually between your toes and you're seeing the Earth go by
at five miles a second, and you know how far it is between cities
and coasts, and you're seeing that distance happen within minutes.
It really blows your mind.
You have to actually tell yourself, "Hey, you're here to do a job
"and focus on it."
Getting our first views now from the helmet cams.
This one, Luca Parmitano, currently translating over.
It's a very dynamic environment.
Everything changes constantly, all the time.
You can think about stuff that will happen,
and then you'll have a procedure, and then you can follow steps
and make it better.
And then you have those things
that just by human nature we have never thought about.
All right. Nice work, Chris.
All right. That's completed, Shane.
Copy, Luca. Nice job.
And just for Chris and Luca,
big picture, you guys are about 15 minutes ahead of the timeline, looking great.
Thank you. Copy.
Um...
Yeah, Chris and Shane, FYI.
I feel a lot of water on the back of my head.
Look, Chris, look. Just look at me right now.
Oh, I see, yeah.
I see it now. Can you see? It’s over here, right?
Yeah, I think this is sweat.
No, it’s not sweat.
But where is it coming from then? It's too much.
I don't know. It's a lot.
Now it's in my eyes.
Shane you back with us?
All right, Chris and Luca. Just for you guys,
based on what we heard, what Luca is saying,
that water's in his eyes now and it seems to be increasing,
we think we're going to terminate. So, Luca,
-we'll have you head back to the airlock. Copy.
Hey, Chris. For you, if you can get that MLM ethernet cable
and put it in the bag, clean things up here
-and then join him here in a minute. Okay.
Do you wanna just head on back to the airlock?
Why don't you just make your own way back to the airlock
-and I'll clean up this. Alright.
Sun's about to set, Luca.
Okay.
Now, it's pitch dark and I remember seeing Luca,
his silhouette disappearing and I remember thinking to myself,
"This is a really crappy feeling."
Hey, Chris. I hear you, Luca. Go ahead.
Luca, I hear you.
The momentum of his motion starts making the water move around.
Copy.
It then sloshed over his eyes and covered his nose,
and because of the helmet, he can't wipe the water off of his face.
His sound was intermittent. A little bit, you could hear...
This is not good. There is more of that water.
Okay, we're back with you, Luca. Can you give us a status?
I can barely speak to you.
It's my visor...
Chris, can you help me?
I hear you weak, Luca.
I'm on my way.
I'm opening the airlock cover.
Get on in.
Coming home, Luca.
Chris, you will come in second and do the hatch ops.
Okay, Shane, the hatch is closed and locked
and I'm... with you.
Copy. Okay, here comes the equalization.
We cannot do anything for Luca.
The only thing that matters here is getting air pressure
back into the airlock where we can get his helmet off.
Removing Luca's helmet before that would be fatal.
Hey, Luca, from Houston, how are you doing? Give us the status.
Luca, do you hear that?
Squeeze my hand if you're fine, Luc--
Shane, I don't think he can...
I'm trying to see him.
-Here, squeeze my hand. - Everything okay?
Karen, you're go to press. - Okay.
Hatch coming open.
Are you okay?
This is a Special Report from ABC News.
A close call at the International Space Station.
An astronaut, Italy's Luca Parmitano, risked drowning inside his own helmet.
They're all complete. We'll get these guys changed and finished up.
Great job, great team effort, getting those guys out of the suit
in a timely manner...
Any given mission can end in a catastrophic way.
And pushing the boundaries of knowledge,
pushing the boundaries of exploring is what humans do.
And we get to do that...
we get to do that in space.
If you can hear me clap one time. Very good!
We are so excited to have a special guest here straight from NASA.
You're gonna be really amazed by this presenter today.
This is Chris Cassidy. He's a NASA astronaut.
What?
Thank you. I love hearing your questions, so please fire away with your questions.
How many times have I been to space? Two times.
Once on a Space Shuttle and once on a Russian Soyuz rocket,
so I'll be going again in probably early next year,
a little bit about a year from right now, I'll be launching again. Yes, sir?
What do you do up there?
We spend most of our day doing science experiments.
Cool. - The space station is big.
The space station is like the size of a football field,
and that's where we're gonna live for six whole months.
How do you pee and poop in space?
- How do you pee and poop in space?
Our pee is collected, and a machine turns it into drinking water.
Ew! - As thanks, we took care of your school,
so your water system has the same thing,
and tomorrow you'll be drinking the coffee from today.
Luca and I are finally getting a chance to go back up to space.
I've been an astronaut for coming up on 16 years now.
Being an astronaut I've realized over the years is a true privilege
because I'm no one that's any different, no one special.
It's just that I'm doing a special job.
Hey, there.
At the beginning, you're in awe that you're now inside the club.
All right, Houston, we've had a problem.
Standby, they're saying we're looking at it.
Three, two, one, zero, ignition.
First, you walk in and you think,
"Man, it's just a nondescript government building."
But what makes them special is the history and the people
and the cool stories that have emanated from those buildings.
Okay, I'm out. It looks beautiful.
I feel like a million dollars.
Lift off, we have a lift off!
In this same office were original astronauts.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
It's just such a cool place to work and the history that's there.
-And now we're a part of it.
Welcome to the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory,
our training classroom for doing spacewalks,
and as you can see it's a giant pool...
and we try to mimic as best we can a real spacewalk,
down to every last detail, and this is where it all happens.
Luca and I have started the training for an entirely new mission.
It'll be my third trip to space and could well be my last.
Chris and I finished our last spacewalk in a way that cemented our friendship.
When they told me that I would be participating,
I thought, "This is perfect."
I would be the best assistant...
...I would be the best EV2 that Chris could ever ask for,
and we'll go out and we'll be this dream team going out again.
EV1, copy. Copy on one.
Crane operator, hoist the subjects into the water, just below the surface.
Crane hoisting subjects into the water.
ECS, EV2, if you could play "Don't Stop Believing" for Chris,
that'd be great.
Chris, I know how much you love that song.
Yeah.
You're welcome.
EV1 and EV2, how's the volume?
EV2, loud and clear.
And I copy you loud and clear. EV1, how do you copy?
Likewise, loud and clear.
A singer in a smokey room...
And TC are you on the line? - Copy.
That's our comms check. Y'all have a great run.
Thank you. EV1, how's your way out?
Great.
Copy that. You can go and take EV1 to worksite, good job divers.
Strangers, waitin' In the night...
As astronauts, Luca and I are sitting at the tip of the iceberg,
but there's a huge team of people that work day and night
to allow an expedition to happen, including scientists, engineers
and technicians, flight controllers and the spacewalk office.
My name is Brian Mader.
I train astronauts and I train them to do spacewalks, specifically.
And then during the spacewalks, I'm sitting in the Mission Control Center
helping them walk through all of that process.
I'm a space geek like everybody at NASA, right?
Mostly working in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, the big pool.
We've got mockups of the space station we can work with underwater.
We put astronauts in spacesuits and it's like floating in space.
You watch a spacewalk on TV and it looks so graceful,
they're just floating around. It looks easy, right?
But the suit is very difficult to work in.
You don't have much dexterity because you're wearing big gloves.
So, every time you're squeezing your hand,
you're fighting that four pounds of pressure in the glove
which doesn't sound like much,
but, you know, if you were to take a tennis ball and sit there and squeeze it
for six or seven hours, you'd probably get a little bit tired.
Chris, what you got for me?
All right, I am doing my thing here. And Luca, you good?
Um... What do you need?
I'm gonna be a little slower, sorry about that.
No, it's no problem, man.
All right. It's gonna be something different in space,
but you know, you and I both know that.
Yeah, there's always something. There's always something.
On my next mission, Luca and I will be involved with the repair
of a very expensive, large experiment on the outside of the space station,
called AMS.
AMS stands for Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.
It's a two billion-dollar science experiment
built to determine the origins of the universe.
If you ask a scientist or a physicist or an engineer
how to go about repairing a spectrometer,
they would probably cringe a little bit because it's such a delicate machine.
It's easier to break than to fix.
To do that in space, it's so much more complex.
Brian, I think that's it, right? Like that would be the final thing?
You got it. And safety divers,
you're good to take your subjects back to the dawning stand.
So, thank you guys for all your work today,
both Chris and Luca.
Thank you to the dive team too, we really appreciate all your hard work.
Chris has always been a friend and a mentor to me,
but on this trip back, I will help mentor another friend and astronaut, Drew Morgan.
Looking good there, Drew.
Good to see you. You doing all right?
Good to see you.
Drew is a first time flyer
and he and I will launch together with Chris joining us at a later date.
I consider myself someone who was inspired early on by astronauts
growing up in the 1980s, seeing the Space Shuttle, watching it on TV,
so I always looked at astronauts as something to aspire to be
and I was drawn to the idea of space exploration.
Chris is an experienced astronaut.
He flew twice before, including once on the Shuttle
and Luca has flown before too.
It's pretty awesome to be learning from the best
as I train for my first spaceflight.
-I feel pretty fortunate.
This time I'm really excited about sharing my return to space
with my friends and family.
And most of my extended family is in the New England area.
Doesn't it feel good when you come home?
Yeah.
Maine, it was a great place to grow up.
Oh, I'm so proud of him, really.
Never in a million years thought that he would become an astronaut.
Yeah. I don't think he did either.
- You should do a documentary! We're live.
Yep.
Are you really? - You're on it.
First of all, he wanted to be a SEAL
and he's excelled in the SEAL teams
and he was the top of his class and that takes a lot.
He can fix anything, so he's a perfect fit for being up in the space station.
You know, if the toilet breaks, you need to be able to fix the toilet!
You worked at this place? I worked here.
He was a bouncer here. I was a bouncer...
He was like 16 years old. ...and a dish boy,
I did everything.
-My brother and I have always been close. - We never went anywhere,
Chris and I, without a football.
He played quarterback. Accurate passer, good arm.
I think playing quarterback gave him good practice as a leader.
Chris and I have been together about five years.
Even though I work at NASA, this will be a new experience for me.
It's gonna be tough when he goes for six months up in space
because that's my best friend.
He makes my coffee every morning, so that to me is going to be something
that'll be like, "Hey, where's that guy that makes my coffee every day?"
- Hey!
Aww.
Yours is more like a pear.
This is Shuttle launch control.
Space Shuttle Endeavour is poised
awaiting the beginning of the STS-127 mission.
Christopher Cassidy, who will become the 500th human in space
when Endeavour launches.
Two thumbs up today.
I have flown in space two previous times.
My first mission on the space shuttle was 2009.
Have an excellent mission and Godspeed.
Chris Cassidy is fired up, handshakes all the way around.
He is ready to fly.
For me, as a new guy, it gave me chills thinking about it like,
"Okay, it is game on."
And the clock kept ticking down and finally the shuttle
at T-minus six seconds, the main engines light.
Okay, now, the main engines start.
And then finally at T-zero, the solid rocket motors light.
It's going. It's leaving the pad.
And it's very bumpy and violent. I didn't know anything what to experience.
And I think, "Okay, everything's fine."
I just remember taking a mirror and looking up
and seeing the flames and the smoke.
Um, and I remember thinking, "Wow."
But NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011.
And with NASA's partners, SpaceX and Boeing,
behind schedule on their commercial rockets...
We have had a launch vehicle failure.
...the only way to get to the space station
is on a Russian Soyuz rocket.
The Soyuz launches four times a year from Kazakhstan
taking astronauts and cosmonauts to the International Space Station
for missions that usually last six months.
Each space agency has to buy a seat on the rocket
to send their astronauts to space.
The European Space Agency has confirmed
a seat for Luca to launch in July of 2019 and he'll fly
with our NASA rookie astronaut, Drew Morgan.
While NASA is still in negotiations for me to launch
and join them in October 2019
which will give us about a three-month window
to conduct the AMS spacewalks.
But first, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin
launch for their six-month expedition to the International Space Station.
Nick Hague and now Aleksey Ovchinin
making their way up to the elevator that will take them
to the top of the Soyuz to board.
Final goodbyes from the stairs of the launchpad.
Command for ignition. Oxygen.
Launch command has been issued.
Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
And there is liftoff of the Soyuz MS10 to the International Space Station
carrying Nick Hague and Aleksey Ovchinin.
Everything proceeding as intended for today's flight
now just a little over a minute into it.
Following procedure.
There has been an issue with the booster
and we're standing by for information.
I knew that the launch was about to happen,
then I looked round the corner
and looked at the TV and, sure enough, "Wow, they just aborted. Unbelievable."
Breaking news. An emergency for rookie American astronaut
and a veteran cosmonaut today.
They were on a Russian rocket that failed two minutes after launch.
There's no word about what caused the booster rocket to fail.
Russia has now grounded all manned rocket launches
while it looks into what went wrong here.
And then a couple of days later, starting to think about,
"Okay, what's the impact now?"
Okay, they're safe. They're home. Everything's fine.
But moving forward, how's it gonna impact all these other crews?
And therefore, what's the impact to me?
Your call has been forwarded to an automatic...
I've just got some bad news.
With the recent Soyuz abort, the launch schedule has been changed.
Because my seat was never confirmed,
it means I won't be up there in time to do the AMS.
It's just, um...
a lot of moving parts and...
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know what I want to say.
That's good.
It means that Drew, who is confirmed
to fly on the next rocket with Luca,
will be up there and the two of them will do the repairs.
I'll do everything in my control to not give up on it.
I want to be part of that team.
It... I don't know. I don't know how to go from here,
but do I want to be part of AMS Repairs? Yes.
The Flight Director is responsible for the planning, the training
and the actual execution of spaceflight missions.
If you've seen Apollo 13, the guy in the vest. That's our job.
Hey, let's make sure we don't blow the whole mission.
-Okay, Aquarius, you're looking good.
From then till the next one.
I was working with our crew office to determine
who do we think is gonna be on board at the right time
to execute the AMS EVAs.
We figured out that Luca and Drew are in space at the right time
and so it makes sense for them to repair it.
So we decided to focus on the two of them
and making sure that we had a couple of runs
with the two of them together.
Loader two. I remember where it goes.
And then I can get back here...
My path led me to attending West Point,
becoming an army officer and then a physician.
I think that might have been something that really stood out about me,
a physician who had taken care of specially trained soldiers.
Operating in combat, under austere conditions.
You can see that the parallels of then being part
of an expedition in space, very similar.
And maybe it didn't really set in until after I was selected as an astronaut.
We have just a really short period of time
to fill Drew and Luca's brains with everything AMS.
That's where all my attention is going.
Anything I can do to help them be successful is what I want to do.
Can you feel the taper? There's a taper in there.
Yeah. No, it's really obvious.
I was training with Chris to be his support.
I was really counting on his presence, I was counting on his leadership in orbit.
His knowledge of everything that he's been doing so far
to get ready for this.
But then I go in between or completely around?
I think the best way is to go down and around.
- That's what you're saying. - Yeah, we'll figure it out.
And then Drew jumped in and in very little time
he had to learn everything from scratch.
There's a lot of risk in taking a guy like me, a rookie,
and putting me into this position
where Luca and I are getting ready to do these spacewalks together
and all the preparation that has gone into it.
So many times, where, like, we dig down into the procedure, and I'm like,
"I have no idea what we're doing right now."
I can't believe that I'm gonna get to do this
and that I'm getting all this dedicated training
for this special set of spacewalks.
It's pretty rigid. I mean, this is a flight light here. It does...
Yeah, once that's folded.
Oh, no, no, no, not that. This.
I'm Heather Bergman. I am a Project Manager for EVA Tools.
So, we design the tools that the astronauts use
on their spacewalks.
So, the astronauts have so many tools. This is a tool board for this set of EVAs.
So, one of the things that Drew will be doing is,
as Luca's working inside AMS,
Drew will pull this tool out and hand that over to Luca
and bring it back. And then swap this one for the next one.
Okay, I think I'm ready for the ratchet wrench.
Okay, here we go. Got it.
He's got a full-time job making sure he doesn't lose track
of what tool is where because if he can't find something,
- everything has to stop.
Okay.
So, to put your tape on, you've got to put it on there
and clamp it down.
Trying to manage all of these tools
is gonna be a big challenge for any astronaut.
Luca's going out and taking care of the debris shield,
while Drew is taking bags out to the worksite.
Most of the team didn't even know who I was.
I mean, I was like, "Hey, guys, looks like I'm gonna be the guy."
I never could have imagined that on my first flight
that I was gonna participate in an EVA series of this magnitude.
It's just beyond my wildest imagination.
I've been looking forward to this six hours
- underwater together. - Yeah, it will be fun.
And seven months in space. - And seven months in space!
-"Luca and Drew. On your final NBL run." - Awesome! Let's cut.
And this is it. We've done all the training we can.
We're off to Russia, then Kazakhstan, then launch to the ISS.
The next time that we see the team, or we talk to them, we'll be in space
before we go out the door for the actual EVA.
Thank you guys. - See you Friday.
Okay.
All right. You got it!
All right. Talk to you later. - All right, thanks. See ya. Bye-bye.
I'm Ken Bollweg, and I'm the Project Manager for NASA
on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project.
I say it's a project, it's become a career.
I've been working on it since 1994. So, it's been 25 years.
And I can remember the first time we met with Professor Ting back in 1994,
he got up there and explained the experiment that he wanted to fly
and every bit of it just went...
...over everyone's heads. It's like we're all looking
at each other going, "Where... What planet is this guy from?"
"What is he talking about? Um, no idea."
We're always looking for where we came from, okay.
We're always looking for the origins of the universe.
We can detect this many planets, this many galaxies, this many stars,
but from the math,
we're only seeing maybe three to ten percent of what we should see.
So, the rest of it we call dark matter because we don't understand it.
We can't detect it.
And that's the purpose of AMS, is to look for antimatter.
AMS has been up there for eight and a half years so far
and it's been rewriting the physics books almost since the beginning.
The AMS gets great results because of Professor Ting.
Without him, it wouldn't exist.
The Nobel Prize in physics,
the scientific discoveries. I mean, he's one of a kind. He really is.
For ten years, I've led experiment
to put a magnetic device on the space station.
Professor Ting ended up talking to various science advisors
and various members of Congress,
explained the story, what he was trying to do,
the international corroboration that he had formed
to do this incredible detector.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.
It is looked upon as a scientific experiment
that possibly several Nobel Prizes will come as a result.
But, Mr. President, we've got to get it up there!
They took his mission forward. And eventually, it was written into law.
NASA, you'll fly the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer,
and here's the money to do so.
We were just flabbergasted to think, "Oh, my gosh,
"this guy just got a Space Shuttle flight added for him."
And this was years after his original ride to the space station was cancelled.
Who does that?
Professor Ting is so intimidating.
When he desires something to happen, it's gonna happen.
It's his baby, and his team of people
that designed it, built it, and operate it.
NASA has only one shot to fix AMS.
So, he wants to meet with us today
to learn what the plans are for the spacewalks.
AMS being a very expensive, very high-profile experiment,
there's so many things that can go wrong with it. It's so complex.
All right, we'll get things rolling here.
We're really looking forward to seeing a successful mission
be completed here later this year. This is a great opportunity to really talk
to what operations has laid out as a plan.
If we have an issue or a failure on orbit, what is our next step?
So, for the EVA timelines, I've got those up here again.
This is the four EVAs.
Please bear with us. This is very much a document that is in work.
So, it is not a final, polished product so...
Can you please go back
to the debris shield removal?
Those are the possible problems?
That we've thought of so far.
Alright then. In your judgement, which one is most likely?
I'm not the right person to answer that question.
Ken Bollweg should be able to answer.
I can't tell you which one is the most likely. It's just that...
even on the ground, some of these are difficult
- to get to... - Ground?
With the situation we're putting the crew in here it's even more so.
Has all this been tried on the ground
or are these theoretical solutions?
Um, I mean, not everything in this document has been tried
on the ground. Yeah, some of it is theoretical.
Kind of tricky to try it in space.
I'm trying to think of which of these has not happened on the ground?
Like, we are trying to assume failures that we've never seen before
to make sure that we're as prepared as we can be when these EVAs show up.
So, some of them aren't that we can't go do it,
it's that we've never seen the failure on the ground to go try to fix it.
When you get far enough down the crib sheet,
it's worth taking a shot at it versus say, because the other option,
if it doesn't work, is just to say, "Well, I'm out of ideas."
You might as well give it a shot and see if it's what fixes the solution that day.
Well, when this happens, you better get my permission.
Because I'm responsible for the experiment which I want to make very clear.
You do not do things
that we have not tried on the ground.
Are you certain that you would not want us
to try something that we haven't tried on the ground?
No, no, no. I have to give permission.
Do you understand that the reason why we can't try everything on the ground is
- because we can't simulate every problem? Of course, of course. No.
And stopping to have lengthy discussions in the moment can delay the EVAs
to the point that we cannot be successful.
Before you try something new that you have not tried on the ground
we need to discuss and I have to tell you "go" or "no go"
because it's my experiment.
Okay, I need you to understand that that...
No, I understand. -...could delay completion to the point
that we cannot complete the series.
This is non-negotiable because you could easily ruin the experiment.
I hope not.
I want to talk to everyone first.
AMS is the only detector of its kind.
If something goes wrong then it will not be good.
It's a life and death issue.
Thank you.
When dealing with Professor Ting, there are three paths you can take.
You can stand on the side and watch that train go by.
You can get on the train.
Or you can be run over by the train. Those are your options.
You know, five years of preparation, training, engineering,
all comes down to this moment when Drew and I will do our job.
We give our contribution to something that's going to matter.
Drew, Sasha, Luca, you guys look great.
We're looking forward to having you up in orbit
and accomplishing a great mission.
Have some fun and we'll see you back here for a soft landing
in the not-too-distant future. All the best.
Thank you, Mr. Shireman. Thank you, sir.
I'm ready to go.
You've worked hard for this, you're gonna do great.
I'm very proud of you.
There are so many people right now celebrating this mission.
Godspeed baby, I love you.
- I love you, too. We're ready. The suit suits you.
Thanks.
The thing that I'm gonna miss most on Earth is absolutely my family.
This is gonna be a long one, that is gonna be the biggest challenge.
I'm up there just as a window for hundreds,
thousands of people on the ground
who have helped me become the person that I am.
And I want to be able to share that.
I'm launching for the first time. First time I'm going to space.
Seeing the rocket.
We get out of a bus and just walk right up to it.
You just walk up to a pretty rickety-looking staircase...
and climb into a jam-packed elevator.
You see that this rocket is a living, breathing beast.
The fumes and the groans.
The thing is alive and it wants to go.
That, right there...
sets the stage.
T-minus 30 seconds.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Kentucky woman She shines with her own kind of light
She'd look at you once and a day That's all wrong looks all right
And I love her
God knows, I love her
Kentucky woman
If she get to know you
She goin' to own you
Kentucky woman
She ain't the kind makes heads turn At the drop of her name
But something inside that she's got Turn you on just the same
And she loves me
God knows, she loves me
Kentucky woman