NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari describe how nonverbal communication in employed on the International Space Station.
Credit: NASA
Credit: NASA
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TechTranscript
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's 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?
03:40That 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.