NASA Astronauts Explain Nonverbal Communication In Space

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NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari describe how nonverbal communication in employed on the International Space Station.  Credit: NASA

Transcript

00:00People on Earth use nonverbal ways to communicate every day, like facial expressions, hand signals,

00:16body language, and American Sign Language. Astronauts in space have their own nonverbal

00:23way to communicate too.

00:25During the spacewalk and just generally during space operations all the time, communication

00:30is hugely important. So talking to the people who are outside, talking to the people on

00:33the ground, and obviously we have radios to do that, but a lot of times we wind up having

00:37to do that nonverbally.

00:39Hold on. Stop.

00:41The hold signal. So whether it may be sometimes your ears may not be clearing fast enough

00:45as the pressure is changing, maybe someone's helping rescue you, but you're still attached

00:50and you realize that, and so in any case, you give them a hold signal, and that should

00:54tell everyone to stop everything that's all the movement and kind of look around for

00:58something that seems abnormal.

01:00You okay? I'm okay.

01:04We really want to check on each other, check on our buddies, so the way we usually do that

01:07is we use the okay hand symbol, and so we'll use it as a question and as an answer. So

01:14if I'm pointing at Raja and then giving him the okay sign, I'm saying, are you okay? And

01:20if he is, he'll tell me, I am okay.

01:23I see what you're saying.

01:26There's a lot of nonverbal that just comes from knowing and working with people that

01:29makes a big difference when you're working day in and day out, especially on a high-stress

01:33thing like a spacewalk, where just the look at someone's face can tell you, like, either,

01:37yeah, I'm good with this plan or I've got reservations, maybe we should stop and talk

01:42about this, and you can do all that with just a glance, even through the glass of the space

01:47helmets.

01:48A handful of numbers.

01:51If you're flying formation, which we practice in the T-38, we also use hand signals just

01:56to keep up with those skills, and so one of the most common things is transmitting numbers

02:00with your hands, and so one, two, three, four, and five are pretty easy, and then the way

02:04we do six, seven, eight, nine, ten without taking our hand off the stick is to turn your

02:10hand horizontal, and so you can do the same thing with air pressure.

02:13So for example, if I had a problem with my suit and she was trying to tell me, you know,

02:18what is your oxygen pressure, and I couldn't talk because I had a communications problem,

02:22I could still tell Kayla, you know, I could tell her a one, and then this would tell her

02:26one and six, and then, you know, I could do a combination of those numbers to transmit

02:31to her non-verbally what the state of any of my values on my suit, whether it's suit

02:37pressure, water pressure, temperature, all the different numerical values, we can use

02:41hand signals for that.

02:43Maybe we could demonstrate a few for each other and see if we can tell what the other

02:47person's hand signals are.

02:50So I'll go first, Raja, and you can see if you know what I'm trying to tell you.

02:56What do you think Kayla is trying to communicate?

02:59Is she telling Raja she can't hear, that he needs to clean his helmet visor, or asking

03:06him what song he's listening to?

03:08All right, so what Kayla's telling me there is she's pointing to herself, which is indicating

03:14the person who has the problem, you could also point at someone else, but in her case

03:18she's pointing at herself, so she's telling me she has a problem, and then she waved across

03:22her ears, which is telling me she can't hear.

03:24Okay, so let's say we have that same scenario, so we've had some kind of loss of calm, and

03:29Kayla came to check on me while I was out on a spacewalk.

03:32When she got there, I might give her a signal like this.

03:36Can you figure out what Raja is trying to communicate?

03:40Is he telling her that they need to move to the other side of the space station?

03:44That they need to wrap up and finish what they're doing?

03:48Or is he asking her to do a flip in microgravity?

03:53So there, Raja would be trying to communicate to me that we need to speed things up.

03:57Maybe he has a problem that's accelerating or getting worse, so he's saying it's kind

04:01of an urgent situation here, let's get a move on, more or less.

04:06Next time you see astronauts on a spacewalk, look out for some of the hand signals you

04:10learned today.

04:12You can even try them out with your friends to talk in your own nonverbal code.

04:18For more fun with STEM, visit stem.nasa.gov.

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