- Hi, this is former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and I'm here with Ars Technica, and we are going to go on a tour of the ISS. So we're on the outside of the Space Station floating around in space. And we're gonna go inside. We're gonna start in the Russian segment in the Russian service module, which is right there. So now we're inside the Russian service module in the Russian segment. We are looking towards the back of the International Space Station. And looking in this direction you can see some pictures up here. This is Sergei Korolev, who was basically the father of the Russian space program. He invented and designed the rocket that flew this guy, Yuri Gagarin, into space for the very first time; first person in space. To the right, we can see the Russian space toilet called the ASU, right there. And it's a little room with a sliding door that's kinda like a curtain. This is the table in the Russian segment of the Space Station. You can see a bunch of condiments up here. That looks like sriracha. In the Russian segment, the cosmonauts generally eat most of their meals here. The U.S. astronauts generally eat most of their meals in the U.S. segment but sometimes we get together for dinner on a Friday night and we all crowd around this table on Friday evenings and share food and share the experience, the comradery of being is space. You know, those are really, really special moments. At least they were for me. And if we can fly just a little bit forward towards the front of the Space Station. And you can see here on the floor there are some windows looking down at the earth. On the right side of the Russian segment the cosmonauts keep a lot of the cameras, very long lens cameras, to look down at the earth and take close up pictures of things. Who knows what they're talking pictures of. We're gonna float through into the FGB. The FGB stands for functional cargo block. We keep a lot of cargo on the floor. The other thing that's interesting about the FGB is, although it's considered a Russian module, it was actually paid for by the United States. So, even though they operate the thing, we, sort of, like, legally own it. These cans here are for either urine or water. And they're stowed on the floor of the Space Station. Obviously you keep the urine ones separate from the water ones. But when we urinate, the urine will go into these cans that are later either disposed of in a Russian Progress, or in the case of the Russian urine, we send it down to the U.S. segment where it's processed into water. These right here are Russian food containers. I can tell it's a Russian one because it has a red label on it. The U.S. ones have blue labels. These orange things over here, those are emergency respirators. And we would put those on if we had an ammonia leak into the Space Station. The Space Station uses very concentrated ammonia to cool the electronics on the outside and there's always risk that some of that ammonia can get inside the space station. If that was the case you would rush down here to the Russian segment, close the hatch on the U.S. side, cause the ammonia would enter on the U.S. side of the Space Station, and then put these respirators on. Let's keep goin further, forward, we would consider it forward on the Space Station. We'll stop right here. This area here is where the cosmonauts do their hygiene. So in the morning they'll close this hatch if they're getting changed, or if they're showering, or after exercise if they're showering, they'll, kind of, partially close this hatch to give them a little privacy. It used to have a little bit of a smell to it in this area - maybe a little bit of microbial growth on the walls, which I think we've actually solved that problem. So now we're translating into the U.S. segment of the Space Station. You notice it's a little bigger. It's a little brighter. The lighting's a little bit different and this is what's called Node 1 so this was the first U.S. module on the Space Station. It's a module of docking ports, basically, so you could build the Space Station out like a Lego model from here. These are all the stickers of the mission patches of crews that have flown. And what you do is you stick em in here and then you sign your name. So we actually graffiti up. Below those stickers is a laptop. You might watch movies on the laptop. Now we have a projector screen and another screen that is permanently attached right above the table. That allows us to, you know, watch movies and t.v. on a bigger screen than just this laptop. There's also some bags on the floor here. This is probably U.S. food. Generally, under the table we put what's called 'bonus food' which is stuff that's not part of the standard menu but is flown up specifically for specific crew members with stuff that they, alone, would prefer to eat or like. If we continue to look to the right, we'll get to this module over here, which is the U.S. Airlock. And this is where we do space walks from on the U.S. side of the Space Station. You can see two space suits in here called EMU's. These are the extravehicular, meaning outside, mobility unit. And what you do is you get suited up them you float into what's called the crew lock, the hatch would be closed, you would pump all the air out, eventually open the hatch that's on the floor, it'll go up like this, and then you go outside. You're either head first or feel first and the earth is 250 miles below. It's a pretty surreal experience when you're looking down at the planet earth and you're going 17,500 miles and hour and you have to crawl outside. Let's go back into Node 1 and then we'll turn around and we'll look at Node 3. As we fly into Node 3 one thing you can see is this wall here. To the left is the toilet with some insulating blankets on it. Those are acoustic blankets to insulate the crew that might be in the toilet or even on the other side of that Node 3 module from the treadmill which is right here. And interesting, the treadmill is on the wall as we fly into this module. So, when someone's exercising it looks like they're running on the wall. That right there, is the U.S. toilet. This is a can, right? And we have a name for it that I'm not going to say what it is but you could imagine there's a word that goes in front of can. That's part of the toilet system and there's the little toilet seat. You push that little button, that silver button right there, the lid pops open, you do you're business, you close the lid, as the can fills up it becomes less convenient, let me just say. There's a hose right here, and that's the urine hose. If we look up we can see the little funnel on the top. That little yellow funnel. I guess they made it yellow for a reason. So we're gonna go to the Cupola now. It's in the floor of Node 3. If you turn upside down, I would often put my feet on the windows, and it would seem like a glass bottom boat. It was built so we could see the outside of the Space Station for robotics operations, for flying the robot arm. This here is the Canada Arm 2. And here's how we would operate. This is one of the hand controllers for the robot arm. So you'd be in there and you could move the arm around and not only monitor what you're doing on the monitors, but also you could see what you're doing by looking outside. So let's fly back into Node 1 and then we're gonna move forward into the U.S. laboratory module. This is the U.S. lab and as you can see it's very, very busy. There's a lot of experiments all over the place. Computers, cables, cameras. I mean, it's just covered in stuff. To the right here is another place where we could fly the robot arm. Here's the monitors I was talking about. There's another set in the Cupola. This is the glove box. Microgravity science glove box, the MSG, on this side. It allows us to do experiments in a very controlled, concealed way. This is where we would work with the mice and dissect the mice in here and you'd spend all day with your hands in this glove box with a headset on talking to the guys on the ground. We're gonna continue through the lab module and go into what's called Node 2. And Node 2 is where there are four crew quarters that we sleep in. So this one on the left is the one I slept in during my year in space. And other astronauts slept in this one. There's one on the floor which at least I refer to as the coffin because when there's somebody in there and you're floating through the module it looks like someone's lying in a hole in the ground, like maybe a coffin. Behind me is where the space shuttle used to dock and eventually we're gonna have the commercial crew vehicles dock either right here or perhaps on the ceiling as a backup. Here is the Columbus module. That's the European module. It is the only module on the Space Station that doesn't have any windows which is kind of a bummer. And you can see that at this time, there was probably a French guy onboard. So this is kind of our science module for a lot of the human research studies we do in the Columbus module. If we turn completely around and we look in the exact opposite direction from where we are and fly back through Node 2 where we came from, we'll go into the Japanese Experimentation module. This is the largest module on the Space Station. It's a little bit longer than the U.S. lab and it's filled with science experiments from Japan but also U.S. science is conducted in here as well. To the right we have a freezer that gets really, really cold, minus 98 degrees. Right behind me, those round things, we put a lot of our blood samples and other science samples in there. If we go further to my left, we'll go by all these experiments, and that big white thing is the Japanese airlock. And it's not an airlock for people, it's and airlock for experiments. Up in the ceiling, right there, there's also a closet. We call it a closet, or it's the JLP, the Japanese Logistics Platform, but really what it is is some space for cargo and it's generally filled with a lot of stuff. I think that's the quick and dirty tour of the International Space Station. I hope you all enjoy it. Maybe we can do this again sometime.