00:00People on Earth use nonverbal ways to communicate every day, like facial expressions, hand signals, body language, and American Sign Language.
00:20Astronauts in space have their own nonverbal way to communicate, too.
00:25During the spacewalk and just generally during space operations all the time, communication is hugely important.
00:31So talking to the people who are outside, talking to the people on the ground.
00:34And obviously we have radios to do that, but a lot of times we wind up having to do that nonverbally.
00:38Hold on. Stop.
00:41The hold signal. So whether it may be sometimes your ears may not be clearing fast enough as the pressure is changing.
00:46Maybe someone's helping rescue you, but you're still attached and you realize that.
00:51And so in any case you give them a hold signal and that should tell everyone to stop everything that's all the movement
00:57and kind of look around for something that seems abnormal.
01:00You okay? I'm okay.
01:03We really want to check on each other, check on our buddies.
01:06So the way we usually do that is we use the okay hand symbol.
01:10And so we'll use it as a question and as an answer.
01:14So if I'm pointing at Raja and then giving him the okay sign, I'm saying, are you okay?
01:20And if he is, he'll tell me I am okay.
01:23I see what you're saying.
01:25There's a lot of nonverbal that just comes from knowing and working with people that makes a big difference when you're working day in and day out,
01:32especially on a high stress thing like a space walk 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.
01:40Maybe we should stop and talk about this.
01:42And you can do all that with just a glance even through the glass of the space helmets.
01:48A handful of numbers.
01:51If you're flying formation, which we practice in the T-38, we also use hand signals just to keep up with those skills.
01:57And so one of the most common things is transmitting numbers with your hands.
02:01And so one, two, three, four, and five are pretty easy.
02:04And then the way we do seven, eight, nine, six, seven, eight, nine, ten without taking our hand off the stick is to turn your hand horizontal.
02:11And so you can do the same thing with air pressure.
02:13So for example, if I had a problem with my suit and I was trying, she was trying to tell me, you know, what is your oxygen pressure?
02:19And 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 one and six.
02:28And then, you know, I could do a combination of those numbers to transmit to her non-verbally what the state of any of my values,
02:35my suit, whether it's suit pressure, water pressure, temperature, all the different numerical values, we can use hand signals for that.
02:43Maybe we could demonstrate a few for each other and see if we can tell what the other person's hand signals are.
02:48So I'll go first, Raja, and you can see if you know what I'm trying to tell you.
02:55What do you think Kayla is trying to communicate?
02:59Is she telling Raja she can't hear?
03:02That he needs to clean his helmet visor?
03:05Or asking him what song he's listening to?
03:09All right, so what Kayla's telling me there is she's pointing to herself, which is indicating the person who has the problem.
03:15You could also point at someone else, but in her case she's pointing at herself, so she's telling me she has a problem.
03:20And then she waved across her ears, which is telling me she can't hear.
03:24Okay, so let's say we have that same scenario.
03:27So we've had some kind of loss of calm, and Kayla 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.
03:34Can you figure out what Raja is trying to communicate?
03:39That they need to move to the other side of the space station?
03:43That they need to wrap up and finish what they're doing?
03:47Or 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.
04:00So he's saying, it's kind of 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 learned today.
04:12You can even try them out with your friends to talk in your own nonverbal code.
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