In this video from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), astronaut Jeremy Hansen discusses how the crew will deal with any emergencies on the Artemis 2 mission.
Transcript
(Edited for clarity)
Jeremy Hansen – “If we happen to get a hole in our spacecraft on the journey—which is a real risk—then we have to get into our spacesuits to protect our lives from the depressurization.
When we go out to the rocket for launch day, it is fully fueled and ready to go. We go up the elevator; we get strapped in. But if there’s any sort of problem with the rocket before we actually leave the pad, we really only have two options.
- Option One: If we’re early in the count, we will open this hatch and emergency egress. We’ll go down baskets and slide wires to get away from the launch tower—hopefully before there was any sort of explosion—get into some somewhat armored vehicles, and drive away from the launch pad.
- Option Two: If we’re within five minutes of launch, we will have armed our abort system, which is like an ejection seat for this entire capsule. If we have a problem when the rocket starts to fire and begins the launch sequence, we can actually eject off the top of the rocket and then splash down just off the coast of Florida under parachutes in this capsule.
If we do land in an off-nominal location and we need to get out of the capsule by ourselves, how are we going to open this big heavy hatch that keeps us safe from the vacuum of space, but we need to get out of it in a hurry? We practice doing that. These orange bags are all of our survival equipment. If we don’t land in the right place, we may have to survive in the capsule for a period of time. We practice using all of the survival equipment both in this building and also in our big pool at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.
Of course, we train for other emergencies. One of the big ones is if we happen to hit a piece of space debris. We have to get into our spacesuits to protect our lives from the depressurization. Maybe there’s a chance that we’d be able to stop the leak, but then if we can’t, we just stay in our spacesuits until we can get back to Earth.
Of course, we plan for fires. Obviously, we’ve got things like a fire extinguisher. So just like you would manage fires on Earth, we can manage fires in space in a similar way. Those are the big emergencies that we need to plan for.”