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CNN Saturday Morning News

Interview With Jeff Williams, Gregory Errol Chamitoff, Jonathan Dorey, John Daniel Olivas

Aired July 20, 2002 - 08:51   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, now for some in depth reporting, we mean in depth here. Astronauts, you know, just can't blast off into space every time they want to do some training, especially now that the shuttle fleet happens to be grounded.

But what they do is they do the next best thing, they train and they train like crazy. Where do they go for that? Well, one of the places they do it is underwater. Key Largo the place, 62 feet below the surface, where some of the conditions of outer space can actually be simulated.

Three astronauts right now, a trainer, are in the Aquarius underwater facility. That facility is operated by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA is just dropping in for a visit there right now. And let's take a live look.

This is pretty cool. Sixty-two feet below the surface we're talking to the crew of Aquarius. Good morning, all. How are you?

UNIDENTIFIED CREW MEMBERS: Good morning.

O'BRIEN: All right, to the left of your screen is astronaut Jeff Williams. We're going to begin with him because he is the one person in this crew that actually has been in space and can make the comparisons. Jeff has been a space walker back in the year 2000. He did that outside the international space station and now he's spent a week underwater practicing some techniques that might be used in space and learning a little bit about the close confines of Aquarius, which I had an opportunity to visit a few years ago.

Jeff, what's the biggest difference, what's the biggest similarity between space and where you are now?

LT. COL. JEFF WILLIAMS, NEEMO 2 CREW COMMANDER: Well, I guess the biggest similarity is that we're living in close, confined quarters, like you said, and we're working in a very challenging and an unforgiving environment, in this case outside on the bottom of the ocean, where we cannot come to the surface. Of course, in space it's in a vacuum.

It's different, of course, because we have the assistance of gravity here and we don't have that up in space. O'BRIEN: Gravity can help you and gravity can hurt you, though, can't it?

WILLIAMS: You bet. Sometimes it comes in handy and other times, like when you're moving large objects, it's nice not to have the effects of gravity.

O'BRIEN: All right, now I'm looking at the whole crew and it's pretty tight quarters in there. Is it pretty similar to the confines of the space shuttle in the number of crew members the they squeeze in there?

WILLIAMS: Actually, the habitat is about the same size as the laboratory module in the international space station. A little bit bigger than the space shuttle, but still a nice, cozy place for a crew of six to live for nine days.

O'BRIEN: Cozy. So we won't ask if you guys are getting along. We'll just leave it off to the side for now. I want to ask Greg Chamitoff, who is a NASA astronaut, who has -- you haven't been to space yet, have you, Greg? But this is a great opportunity to train.

I'm curious what you've taken away most over this past week.

(CROSSTALK)

WILLIAMS: He's asking you what did you take away most over this past week.

GREGORY ERROL CHAMITOFF, ASTRONAUT: Oh, yes, you're right, we have, I have not been in space yet. Hoping to within a couple of years. And but the one thing from this week is that it feels like it is a real mission, more than any of the training we've had so far, where a lot of things are simulated. This is a real mission and NASA is working with NOAA and making the time line as if it was a real space station flight.

And so everything about what we've been doing, to me, feels real and so that's, I think that's going to prepare me a lot for when the real space flight comes.

O'BRIEN: Well, give us a sense, we're looking at some pictures now which you can't see. It looks like you're putting together some PVC piping there. Give us a sense of what that was all about.

WILLIAMS: Go ahead, Jonathan.

JONATHAN DOREY (ph): Really what that was kind of trying to simulate there, it's an analogue to doing an assembly on the international space station where crews have to work outside in a neutral buoyancy environment very similar to what it's like working in a micro gravity environment, also working with com units, talking back and forth to one another, and having to put together at least the hardware according to some predefined schematics.

Really the idea there is with limited communications and with the neutral buoyant conditions, really trying to be able to put this thing together efficiently and work as a crew to do that, very similar to how astronauts would do in space.

O'BRIEN: All right, so now that was -- was that Jonathan Dorey? I'm sorry, was that John Olivas? Who was that there?

WILLIAMS: That was Jonathan Dorey.

O'BRIEN: All right.

How much is this going to help you in your efforts to train astronauts, do you think?

DOREY: Well, really I think that the biggest part of this is just learning how crews all work together managing a time line, managing space, managing all the types of things that we have to do down here that are very similar to what astronauts are going to be doing on orbit. So really this is a very, very close type of a mission and learning all these types of things down here and participating in them will help tremendously in the future to train astronauts.

O'BRIEN: Let's talk a little bit about life aboard as we, we're looking at a great shot where somebody swam right up to that big porthole there and you guys are waving there. It's, what is the biggest challenge? You know, we sort of glossed it over, but six people in closed confines for a week.

I remember when I was down there for all of an hour's time. It was confining, in a way. You almost wanted an opportunity to, perhaps, get away from it all.

Do you have that feeling or is it comfortable a week later?

WILLIAMS: I think it's comfortable for everybody a week into the mission. The biggest challenge that we have down here is keeping everything organized. It's all the little things, you know, how we can lose things around our home. It's very easy to do here. So it's important that we keep everything ship shape, as they say in the nautical world.

O'BRIEN: Now, in addition to this effort to learn a little bit more about outer space, the Aquarius project historically has spent a lot of time looking at the inner space, at the reefs in particular and the health of the reefs. There's been a lot of scientific study done on that.

What's your best sense of it just from being out there? Do you feel as if that wonderful reef there off the Keys is doing OK?

WILLIAMS: Well, Miles, I'm going to let Danny Olivas answer that question.

O'BRIEN: OK, go ahead.

JOHN DANIEL OLIVAS, CREW MISSION SPECIALIST: Well, Miles, we're spending a lot of our time down here taking a look at the health of the reef, as you know, and trying to assist some of the scientists back on land with their assessments on the general overall health of the reef out here off the Keys. And the analogy to what we're doing out here is very similar to space flight in that a lot of the times most of the experiments which are running on the space station or on the space shuttle were actually developed by principle investigators which happen to be on earth.

And so it's that coordination, being able to train the astronauts to actually conduct the experiments that they're going to do in space and then bring that data back.

And that's kind of what we're doing here. We received a lot of instruction top side but (AUDIO GAP) the community and present it to Americans.

O'BRIEN: All right. Hopefully we still have the audio, because I just want to ask one final comment here.

And, Jeff, I'm going to put you on the spot on this one, because space travel, after all, gets a lot of money. NASA gets, by comparison, a lot more money than NOAA does to study the underseas.

Do you think that more should be spent and more time should be focused on learning about our oceans and what goes on beneath them?

WILLIAMS: Boy, that's a tough question for me to answer, Miles, and frankly I'm thankful I'm not a policy maker and having to make those tough decisions.

I think where we spend money, both in space (AUDIO GAP) exploration as well as exploration of any kind is important and we need to keep the right balance in our (AUDIO GAP)...

O'BRIEN: Ouch.

All right, I guess we ran out of good luck there with the technological gremlins. But that was interesting. I hope you agree.

That was the group on board the Aquarius, operated by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some folks from NASA aboard there this past week and having a good old time in their own yellow submarine.

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