Episode 4 - The Spacewalk Stargazing Live

'This is Mission Control, Houston.

'We are in a terminate case.'

A dramatic conclusion to Tim Peake's first-ever spacewalk.

It didn't go to plan. Four and a half hours in, the mission is terminated,

as Tim's partner has a malfunction in his spacesuit.

And it all takes place as the pair fly through space

at 17,000 miles an hour,

clinging to the outside of the space station.

We'll bring you every critical moment.

I'm Brian Cox, he's Dara O Briain,

and this is Stargazing Live: The Spacewalk.

APPLAUSE

Thank you very much. It's been an extremely dramatic day

and we've brought the best team on the planet together

to guide us through Tim Peake's first spacewalk -

astronaut and former space station commander, Chris Hadfield,

a key member of Tim's support team here in the UK

and a former Columbus flight director, Libby Jackson.

And an expert in space flight biology, Dr Kevin Fong,

and later, joining us from Chichester, Tim's dad and sister.

Well, what today's events showed

is that spacewalking is incredibly perilous.

And it doesn't matter, Libby, how much these things are planned out,

as they are meticulously planned out, they can occasionally go wrong.

Absolutely, that's why Mission Control train and train and train.

We run simulations with the crew

to make sure that we're prepared for any eventuality.

Chris, as an astronaut,

there are obviously many hazardous things you do,

there's launch, space flight, spacewalks, re-entry,

what is the order? What's the most hazardous?

The most dangerous nine minutes of your life is flying the rocket ship.

-That's the most dangerous part.

-So, we've done that.

Now that we've got that part over,

today was the next most dangerous thing that an astronaut does.

And that is to not be protected by the ship itself,

but to pull yourself out and do a spacewalk.

So, you don't do a spacewalk for the fun,

-it's not something you do lightly?

-No.

-This had to be done?

-Yeah. We only go outside the spaceship

when we've exhausted all the other options.

When something needs the dexterity of our fingertips,

or the real-time judgment of a crew,

like they needed to go out and replace that unit today.

And so, Kevin, how many things can damage you medically on a spacewalk?

Well, from a doctor's point of view this is a total nightmare,

there's threat from the moment you get into that airlock

and you start decompressing, and it doesn't stop

until you're back in and you've gone back to normal pressure again,

so I look at this thing the whole way through and think,

"What's going to kill him next? What's the danger? What's the danger?"

The whole way through? Now, we've been following Tim's adventures

since 2011 when he'd recently recruited as an astronaut.

And before Christmas, just before he blasted off,

he told us why he so cherished the idea of walking in space.

The prospect of doing an EVA, an actual spacewalk of course,

I think for any astronaut is the absolute icing on the cake.

It's a real dream come true.

You shouldn't really get your hopes up.

Even if there's an EVA scheduled, all sorts of things can change.

And until that hatch opens, you can't really be sure that you're going to get a get a spacewalk,

but, of course, it's something that I'm really hoping for.

Now, a spacewalk is not a fast thing,

it's six and a half hours we're scheduled for today,

so we've been here all day with Chris Hadfield

watching this spacewalk every step of the way.

We've been listening to the communication between Tim and Mission Control.

And when Tim started the spacewalk, everything was going to plan.

-'All right, gentlemen, it's...

-I've got the airlock.

'If you're ready, it's time for Tim Kopra to head outside.

'And you'll be going out with the crew-lock bag torque wrench bundle,

'keeping the large and small wrench on the bag.'

BEEPING

'Copy that.'

-So, Tim Kopra's heading outside now.

-Correct.

And they're going to be passing equipment out,

cos they need all of this equipment during the day, they are doing a lot of work.

And they're just pushing those out, getting them tethered.

Once all those are squared away, Tim'll head up and start getting to work.

And then Tim Peake'll come outside.

What I find wonderful is the juxtaposition between the mundane and the kind of extreme.

"Have you got the tool bag? Yeah, I've got the tool bag.

"The hammer's coming out now."

This is the last of the bags that Tim Peake is handing out.

Oh, here comes sunset. Look.

It happens so fast.

-Darkness.

-The whole station glows red,

or just the station is driving into the shade of the Earth.

So there's a little bit as the sun goes through the atmosphere.

-So that's a sunset? It's the red of the sun?

-This is a sunset, yeah.

It's just like watching the whole sky turn red and then go dark.

-Oh, hello. There's Tim Peake.

-There he is.

His favourite view is the night,

so his first view of the Earth is going to be the view that he loves,

which are the lights of the planet.

-'A beautiful sunset.

-I know.

'Gosh!'

So, we should see Tim emerge somewhere.

You can see the white of Tim Kopra's suit.

And when Tim Peake comes outside, we'll see...

He may come out feet first, he may come out headfirst,

I'm not sure the geometry's going to work for him.

-Hello.

-It might be a breech birth, we'll see how it comes out.

Well, there's some feet there.

-'OK, I'm coming out.

-OK.'

I think he must be on his way out.

-There we are.

-There he is. He's actually at the door now.

-Yeah.

'Tim, it's really cool seeing that Union Jack go outside.

'It's explored all over the world, now it's explored space.

'Thank you. It's great to be wearing it.'

So that's his helmet.

-So he's holding on.

-This is the moment where he's about to step into space.

He's about to pull himself out.

'All right, gents, once you're happy, we are ready for config checks.'

So Tim is now outside... in the universe.

-Tim is outside.

-We should have a round of applause.

APPLAUSE

We're going to have a look at a spacesuit like Tim's.

And if you have any questions you want to ask about spacesuits or spacewalks,

send them to the usual addresses. They're on the screen right now.

Chris, this is a model of a similar spacesuit to the one

that Tim was using today. Could you show us around?

Yeah. It's inherently just a little bag of the Earth's atmosphere

that you're carrying around with you to keep you alive -

a little pressurised, one-person spaceship,

and it's mostly just, you know, cloth,

and it's not all that thick.

It comes... If I could borrow that.

It's got multiple layers.

It's got this white stuff to protect

you against the sun and the outside

and then it's got some sort of protective tough layers here in case you get hit by a little meteorite.

And then one thick, tough layer here.

And then inside, it's a pressure bladder in order to hold the air inside.

And then all of that against your skin is a liquid-cooling garment,

pumping water around your body, all keeping you alive alone outside.

Because one of the things, obviously,

it's not just there to keep air around you,

it's also to protect against vast extremes of temperature.

If you're in the sun and then you're out of the sun,

it's a difference of 300 degrees.

It is. If the sun was right there on your chest,

it would be in the order of plus 150 Celsius,

but on your back it would be minus 140 Celsius or so,

so a huge temperature... And you can feel it on your legs.

You don't want to let the flesh of your legs touch the ice-cold pipes of the suit itself.

-You really feel where you are.

-As you say, it's a little spacecraft,

so up here there are displays monitoring the systems.

So this is a computer system?

It is, it has the essential stuff that you need just analogue, like a pressure gauge.

But then you can watch and if there's an emergency,

you'll hear a little tone and you can look down and read what's failed on your suit.

You can control temperature right here by controlling that fluid, the water flowing around your body.

And then you can turn the volumes up and down and the lights.

-So it's a primitive little ship.

-It all seems easy, but then you've got one of these on,

which actually in this configuration, it's not too bad,

-it's like a gardening glove.

-But in truth,

picture that you're wearing that gardening glove with all the structure of the suit inside,

but then also pressurised to about the same pressure as a volleyball.

So that resistance of the cloth itself,

every time you want to close your fist, it's like you're squeezing a tennis ball every time.

And there's no break, you're in the suit for six or seven hours that way.

So when we see Tim doing quite difficult, very precise tasks with cabling,

he's doing it with this glove but inflated to that pressure?

It's as if someone has strapped you to an exercise machine

for six and a half hours for everything you move.

So when you come in after being on a spacewalk in this suit,

I mean, you've skinned yourself essentially?

Oh, yeah. You're tired, your hands are used up,

your fingers throb for days afterwards.

You have to be really careful, trim your nails beforehand,

and try and conserve your energy, because the things you do in the last 15 minutes of the spacewalk

are just as important as the things you did at the start.

So you have to pace yourself and be ready for it.

And the controls, I notice, they're all printed backwards.

Yeah. If you're in this suit and you're trying to control the stuff in the front, you can't see it,

so you wear a wrist mirror on your left wrist.

And so if you want to adjust the temperature, you look at that,

you reach down, you dial it to where it needs to be.

Or the main control of the pressurisation of the suit are all here.

We used the word earlier,

-it's a nontrivial exercise doing a spacewalk.

-Yes.

-That's probably right.

-Yes.

Yes. There's a lot of engineering in spacesuits, but they can and do fail during a spacewalk.

In 2013, a potentially fatal water leak nearly drowned Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano.

He told his story to Liz Bonnin.

Luca, tell me about the moment when you realised something was wrong.

I had just completed the first task of the day or maybe the second task.

And I was just moving away from this corner that I had been working in,

and in doing the motion I leaned back inside the helmet with my head

and I felt cold water touching the back of my head.

Water that wasn't supposed to be there.

It was coming from the back of my head and it was flowing forward.

'I feel a lot of water on the back of my head, but I don't think it's leaked from my bag.'

And at that moment the water covered my eyes

and then it went inside my nose.

'My head is really wet and I have a feeling that it's increasing.'

And the sun went down at the same moment.

And so, all at once, I went from a situation where I thought I was comfortable

to being very uncomfortable.

'It feels like a lot of water.'

At that point, I didn't know how much time I had, because the water is still filling my helmet.

Is it going to reach my mouth? Am I going to be able to breathe?

And so I basically started navigating my way in the blind,

using the experience that I had to try to reach the airlock.

'Hatch is open, Shane. Luca's going in the lock.'

After all of this, are you still very keen to do spacewalks?

And if so, will you approach them differently?

I was ready to go outside the next day. I wanted to go outside and finish the job.

Libby, what happened there in that situation?

So, in order to keep the astronaut's body temperature regulated,

they wear, as Chris said, a liquid-cooling garment.

And that feeds back into the back of the spacesuit there.

And what we now know happened, we didn't know at the time,

was that some grit had got into that system

and it was causing the part where the water and air meet, and they should never mix,

the water was getting into the air system.

Now, the air's blown up over the top of the head into the helmet to keep the air circulating,

and with water in there it was getting into the helmet,

going over, and so it was getting into Luca's eyes.

In space you can't feel the effects of gravity,

so the overriding force is one of surface tension.

So the water's just going to stick to everything, it stuck to his eyes,

his ears, got in his nose, got in his mouth.

As Luca said there, he couldn't see, he couldn't hear,

the only way back was to feel his way back.

We've footage of the test they did on Luca's helmet afterwards

and you can see how the water gathered in front of him.

And it is possible, Kevin, to drown in this situation.

Yeah. And certainly when Luca's mission was on, this was the worry of the flight surgeon on the desk,

could he drown in his suit?

And, you know, it doesn't take very much water to drown.

A few hundred mils of water in your lungs is going to cause irreparable damage.

And you don't have to drown completely, a partial drowning will cause problems with your lungs

that you'd need the services of an intensive care unit.

There's no intensive care unit up there.

But this suit, or this section of the suit,

it was returned into use again.

Well, Nasa, of course, looked into it really seriously,

they looked at the design, but if it's something that only happens when you're weightless,

then it's really difficult to figure out exactly what caused the problem.

But they replaced a bunch of pieces

and they put the suit back into service.

And that suit was being worn again today.

There aren't many of these suits in existence, are there?

No, there's, like, a dozen of these suits that exist.

And there are three up on the space station right now.

It's not like there's a bunch of reserves you can go to,

they're complex and rare and expensive,

and so you want to use them for as long and as many times as you can.

So it was the suit Tim Kopra was wearing today?

-It's the same one that Luca was wearing.

-OK.

The first moments of Tim's spacewalk were in darkness,

but after just half an hour, he experienced his first sunrise.

'All right, gents, the sun is coming up. You're over Western Canada.

'We're looking great on the timeline,

'we can take it nice and easy and no hurry at all.'

Now I think we're going to see our first glimpses, hopefully, of Tim Peake in daylight

on his first spacewalk.

You really get a sense of the scale.

I haven't really had that sense before,

but looking at these pictures, it is a vast structure, isn't it?

It's nice if you get lost, though.

We have painted little arrows all over the station that say,

-"Airlock - that way."

-LAUGHTER

-That must be Tim Peake there.

-I think Tim Kopra already went out.

He did, yeah. So that's Tim Peake clinging onto the bottom of...

He's got a bag of tools.

-You can see his safety tether as well.

-Yeah.

There's his hand on the hatch back.

That there is a Union Jack on his shoulder

on the outside of the space station for the first time.

-It's nice to see.

-It is, isn't it?

Does it make you feel...insignificant?

Does it make you feel proud to watch that unfurl beneath you?

I think what Tim's going to come back inside with is a true sense of perspective.

And the fact that you recognise that you're small

does not necessarily make you feel insignificant.

Because through our creativity and our invention,

we have figured out a way to get to where he is today.

You know, to get to see the whole world like this out the window,

to start exploring the rest of the universe in person,

that gives you a great sense of historical significance.

But you also recognise just how small you are,

how ancient world is, how the distances are beyond comprehension,

and you're just out there in the middle of it all.

You really get a sense of...of where we are in the universe.

You know, one of my favourite moments, a beautiful little moment,

when we saw that Tim Kopra had a picture of his family strapped to his arm.

And we believe that Tim Peake also did,

but we saw that image there, which I thought was very beautiful.

And there it is.

And it's attached to his checklist, to his emergency checklist.

Actually, you brought your emergency checklist along, didn't you?

-This is the one that's flown twice.

-Yeah. So, it's really nice,

cos Tim Kopra's wife was there in Mission Control watching today,

so she got to look at that quick image over his shoulder

and see on one of these blank pages in the very back

where he'd put something personal.

It's kind of like social media sort of -

you're out there doing an important thing,

but it gives us insight into what it is like to be a person, a family member.

-It reminds you to be careful, I would think.

-That's true too, yeah.

They were lucky, actually, cos both Tims had time to take photographs,

we have footage of them, and they even got Tim Peake to lift up his visor to get a better photograph.

David Hartley wants to know, do astronauts have any time

for sightseeing or contemplation during an EVA?

There's no... If you were to look at the timeline that Nasa built for the spacewalk,

-nowhere in there does it say, "Take time out for contemplation."

-LAUGHTER

But...but you try and work as efficiently as you can.

Inevitably, there's going to be a few moments in there

where you get ahead of the timeline.

And in this case, they got all the way out to the furthest end of the space station,

and they had in the order of 15 or 20 minutes

waiting for the sun to go down before they could start doing the actual work.

So it was a beautiful moment that Tim will remember.

I loved it as well. Visor up and a big smile.

-Yeah.

-You'd have to! LAUGHTER

Shaun Murphy aged seven asks, "How heavy is that suit?"

How heavy is the suit? It weighs more than I do,

-maybe as much as you do, Dara.

-LAUGHTER

So, not heavy at all.

No, no. It's weightless in fact.

-All right. Yeah.

-LAUGHTER

Spacewalks are integral to the functioning of the space station.

In fact, it simply wouldn't exist without them.

In March 1965, Russian cosmonaut, Alexey Leonov,

became the first person to walk in space.

Since then, 214 astronauts

have stepped outside their spaceship into the dark vacuum of space.

Tim Peake is number 215.

The ISS was built from scratch by spacewalking astronauts.

It's taken 191 EVAs to construct and maintain the station so far.

That's over 1,000 hours in space.

Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev

holds the record for the most spacewalks.

He left the safety of the Mir space station 16 times.

The longest ever spacewalk was done by Americans Susan Helms and Jim Voss in 2001,

and lasted eight hours and 56 minutes.

Spacewalking astronauts experience temperature swings of up to 277 degrees Celsius

as the ISS moves from day to night.

Only six untethered spacewalks have ever been performed.

In 1984, Bruce McCandless floated freely away from the space shuttle for over 300 feet,

the most remote anyone has been in space.

So, Libby, space stations built and repaired...

Excuse me, spacewalks built and repaired the International Space Station,

so what was broken that had to be repaired today?

Back in November, a box called the sequential shunt unit broke.

Now, there are eight solar arrays on the space station,

and each one of those provides power to the space station.

It's completely solar-array powered.

Now, the sequential shunt unit is effectively a voltage regulator for one of those solar arrays.

It makes sure that the power coming in is good to use.

So that broke. We need to go and fix it.

The space station's fine at the moment, but if another problem were to happen with the power system,

we'd be down a quarter of our power and that's not ideal.

So we've gone out... but it's fairly tricky.

The sequential shunt unit is a bit like the on/off switch for the solar array.

Now, if you were going into your house to do some electrical work,

you wouldn't touch anything until you'd switched

the power off at the mains and the system was completely dead.

Now, we can't go and switch the mains off, our power comes from the sun.

So the astronauts had to wait until we were in the darkness, until the sun had set,

for them to go and touch that box to be able to move it and replace it.

So, it makes it technically more difficult than it already is

that the work has to be done within a very specific time limit.

Yeah. As a spacewalker, you always feel the clock ticking behind you,

but for these two gentlemen today, they knew that they had, basically, a half hour.

And at the end of it, the electricity was going to be back on.

So they really got a sense of the time and the urgency and the pace with which they had to work.

And if they'd had a problem and the sunrise was approaching,

they'd have to step back, step away from it and wait till the sun sets?

Yeah. And the problem is while they back away and wait,

they're way out on the end of the station and they've got a bunch of gear deployed,

so it wouldn't make sense to go all the back to the centre of the station to do any other work.

They sort of would have been trapped out there for a whole orbit,

so it gave them even more motivation to try to get everything done

in that one dark pass behind in the shadow of the world.

So, knowing the limitations under which this had to be done,

let's go back to Tim's spacewalk as the astronauts start their repair,

which is not without its hazards.

So explain to us the risk that's involved here.

The risk is...electrocution,

because a lot of the suit is metal,

so you could actually conduct electricity through the suit,

or if it starts sparking and arcing and spitting little bits of molten metal out,

the molten metal could go into the cloth of the suit

and burn through it and cause your suit to start leaking,

especially if you're hit up on your visor.

So those are kind of the primary risks we're trying to avoid.

And that's why we really want to make sure

that you're in the dark side of the world.

'Right, Tim, it's time.'

'Perfect. We are ready to go. You can verify the socket is fully engaged.

'And we are going to have you do four and a half turns.'

So that's the wrench.

So he has the big power tool on top of the main central bolt that is holding the SSU on.

And you can see Tim is watching, highlighting the area that he's working.

-'Three.'

-It sounds like it's turning at a nice rate, which is good.

'Four...and a half.

'Push it my way a little bit more.

'I'm looking at the basin end of it and...it all looks clean.'

-So old one has been removed, it's been checked, it's been stowed.

-Yep.

So now the new one goes in.

And now the focus is taking the last strap off the bag of the new, pristine...

This sequential shunt unit just came up to them on the last spaceship.

And now they're going to start the meticulous process of positioning it

so that it brings this whole solar array back to life.

'First engagement is good.

'Excellent. Connectors are on.

'Bravo One, clockwise two.'

So, it's attached in place and now it's being secured.

Will they begin to get stressed now? Are they working against the clock?

You're always working...

The clock is your enemy in a spacewalk, always.

You're... The clock is always ticking

-and you always have...

-But there's a very real risk here

-when we move back into daylight?

-Right, but here they are definitely working against the next 15 minutes,

they have to get this solved

or it's going to have an effect on the rest of their spacewalk.

It looks like it's going well.

'OK, guys, just a second. Everything looks good.

'Just hang out for a second and we'll give you final word.

-'My CO2 stats are bad.

-OK, Tim, we copy. CO2 stats are bad.'

So Tim just had a problem with his suit.

'You did get about a quarter turn out of that PGT.'

-Just to be clear, that's Tim Kopra's CO2 sensor?

-I think I understood it as Tim Kopra,

his carbon dioxide sensor in his suit failed.

'We're going to page 26 of the cuff checklist.

'And step one is to periodically monitor from water in the EMU.'

Yeah, so they think it was caused by water.

If they thought there was a problem with the actual CO2 level,

they would pop this, this comes out turns 90,

and that opens up a little hole into the suit.

So oxygen, and in this case CO2 would start hissing out here,

and then the new oxygen supply coming from your backpack

would be flowing over your head.

And so it flows it across your mouth, so you get a nice, new, pure environment,

which I did for about a half hour during my first spacewalk,

when I was dealing with...with a suit contamination problem.

-Why did you have to...?

-In my case, there was contaminated water floating around inside,

and it picked up some contamination off the visor and put contaminated water into my left eye.

And really...like oil or shampoo or something in your eye, so you can't see, but your tears don't drain.

And the ball of tear got bigger and bigger on my eye,

until eventually it got so big, this floating ball of contaminated tear

went across the bridge of my nose and went into my other eye and blinded me.

So I did what Tim just did, called down to Houston and said, "Houston, I'm blind."

And they said, "Well, give us a minute to think about it."

And then they thought maybe it's contamination, so they had me open this valve.

So I was holding on to the outside of the station...blind,

listening to my oxygen hiss out into the cosmos for a while.

Until eventually, I'd cried enough and my tears evaporated,

so that it started to dilute the stuff in there and I could start to see again.

So then I told Houston I could see,

although I couldn't really see very well,

but I could see enough and I was tired of listening to my oxygen hiss out.

As soon as I could just start to make out shapes,

I...I closed this valve and then got back to work.

And we finished the whole spacewalk, about an eight-hour spacewalk.

-But I was blind for about a half hour.

-But they should now,

eight minutes till sunrise, they should be moving away?

OK, so...

They're good, they don't need to move away,

because they got it locked down and torqued and it's safe.

-So anything that goes wrong will go wrong internally?

-Correct.

They have all indications that the SSU they just secured is just as good as the SSUs

that they went by on their way out there.

They got everything done in this darkness period, so that's terrific.

Now, Kevin, we heard there something which sounded a small problem,

which is a CO2 sensor failure in the suit.

So as the doctor, the flight surgeon, sat there,

what do you feel if the CO2 sensor fails?

They're fairly temperamental sensors,

and it's not uncommon that they fail,

but it leaves you with a problem. As the flight surgeon,

you're monitoring the health of the astronaut indirectly through all of these devices,

and now you're blind to that. Now, you've no reason to suspect

that the thing that's removing his carbon dioxide,

those carbon dioxide scrubbing units inside the suit have failed,

but you will now have to monitor his carbon dioxide levels

through what he's feeling, to monitor for the symptoms.

And the astronaut will have to monitor for the symptoms

of high levels of carbon dioxide, so drowsiness, dizziness, confusion.

So, it will be unnerving for the flight surgeon.

And certainly this would not have been a comfortable spacewalk.

And slightly unnerving for the astronaut,

cos you're saying that you put the diagnosis pressure back onto the astronaut.

And say, "Do you feel as if your CO2 levels are rising?"

-Cos that's all you can do.

-Absolutely.

Now you're going to your second monitor, which is the astronaut themself.

And...it's really the sort of thing that...

You don't want to have to rely upon just your feel of the situation.

You know, everyone wants to be clear that everything is working.

And there's a saying in space operations,

which is as soon as things start to go wrong, they tend to continue to go wrong.

So that sort of sometimes heralds other problems.

Question from Jill Martin.

She asks, "They keep looking at their gloves, do they do that to check for damage?"

Occasionally, the space station gets hit by a tiny meteorite.

It's like a little bullet hole, and if it's in one of the handrails,

you might not even know it was there.

And you grab onto that handrail and inadvertently maybe put a little tear in your glove.

The glove's got some layers in it and a pretty tough almost like a chainmail armour layer underneath,

but it's a really good idea every half hour or so to stop,

hold your gloves up to the camera that's looking at them,

do a full inventory and watch how your gloves are surviving the whole spacewalk.

You don't want to have inadvertently poked a hole through your glove and not know that it's there.

Jamie on Twitter asks, "Is there a special diet before a spacewalk?"

Well, the night before, astronauts carb load.

They're going outside for about eight hours at a time,

and they can't eat while they're out there, so in order to make sure they've got enough energy,

they'll eat well the night before, they'll have protein bars or something in the morning.

-OK. As if they're running a marathon, essentially?

-Exactly.

The same amount of effort they're putting into it.

Christian Wood got it touch to ask,

"If Tim were to become detached when outside the space station, is there anything that could be done?"

Well, astronauts do have a jet pack to help them get back,

but its fuel only lasts minutes,

a scenario that Tim had practised for safely when on the ground.

Houston, EV2 is off-structure at the airlock and drifting.

It's September last year, three months before Tim's mission.

He's in Nasa's Virtual Reality Lab in Houston.

-It feels incredibly real.

-As he floats away from the space station,

he has one chance to save himself.

Safety handle deployed.

Powering on.

Waiting for motion to cease.

In the simulation, Tim has just fired up the jet pack on his back.

It's the best hope for an astronaut drifting in the void.

So, basically, there are six jets on every corner,

the top two and the bottom two corners.

And those six thrusters allow the crew member to manoeuvre themselves

in space and bring themselves back to the space station.

Plus X. Ten seconds.

If floating free in the vastness isn't bad enough,

one thing could make Tim's job of saving himself even harder.

Because the space station passes from day to night twice every 90 minutes,

disaster could strike in the dark.

It's a lot more difficult to do it at night.

As soon as you come away from the station, then you're just left with a dark piece of station.

Pitching up.

M2 level 35%.

-What are you thinking?

-I'm thinking I'm drifting a little bit port

and I'm still high above the station not really adjusting as quickly as I'd like.

People might think you can use this to fly around the space station,

you don't have that much time, it's a limited amount of gas.

Pretty low on gas. I'm at 6%.

If he runs out of fuel, Tim has no other way to get himself back to the station.

A crew member has to get it right the first time.

Braking. Negative X.

OK, this would be our reach.

I've got the handrail.

All right, Tim, you made it back to the station. Good job.

-BOTH LAUGH

-Wow!

-That's pretty impressive.

On the back of that, James Bass asks,

"How do thrusters work on the suit when there's nothing to push against in space?"

It's very simple. Mr Newton told us in 1687,

if you throw something one way, you go the other way.

-It's the conservation of momentum, that's how a rocket works.

-Very good.

Let's rejoin Tim now as he's attaching 28 metres of communication cables -

it's work needed to pave the way for a new adapter

which will allow commercial spacecraft to dock with the ISS.

Previously, he was working alongside Tim Kopra,

and now he's on his own.

I've got to say that is a great shot.

-Isn't that a beautiful view?

-The scale of the space station,

then little Tim Peake making his way along.

This is Tim's point of view here as he moves,

as they call it, as he translates across the space station.

As you can see, he's on the lab.

So this is an area code.

This is the armour that's on the outside of the laboratory here.

So you can see he's on the underside of the lab, holding on to...

The only places you can touch normally are designated in advance handrails, some of this shielding.

Lot of places they don't even want you to brush with your hand,

because of a coating on it or a fragility to it.

Is this painstaking to move around?

Erm, yes, it is. I think it's the definition of painstaking,

you want to take great pains of how you move along, carefully, deliberately.

Cos if you just miss one grip, then you are going to tumble off into space

to the full length of your tether.

And then your entire life is counting on the fact that this tether,

when it pulls tight, is going to pull you back in again.

You never want to get yourself in that boat.

And you're always just one missed grip away from doing that.

And how important is Capcom for that? Cos we hear every now and again that you get the message,

"Tim, you're doing great," reminding him to do things.

So how important is that relationship?

Er, well, Capcom can definitely save the day.

Cos what the Capcom has in front of him is exactly what I'm holding right here,

step by step with reminders that are in yellow,

cautions, all of the things that you might get wrong,

the values for maybe torques or things like that.

And also making sure... you can just miss a step.

And so it's sort of like having, I don't know, your mom with you to say,

"Hey, don't do that. OK, you're doing great. Watch out for that."

Someone that gives you that voice of second look and comfort.

And it's not just an anonymous voice from Houston,

this is someone with who you have... It's another astronaut.

And not only another astronaut,

but it's an astronaut who's done multiple spacewalks, who's lived on the space station.

So a great depth of expertise, who's been in the pool to practise this,

-so they know exactly what's going on.

-And they will know you as well, have a relationship with you.

Yeah. They know both of these Tims, they trained in Russia together,

in Houston, in...Europe, in Canada, all over.

So...so there's a great collegial feel of professional trust

as well as just knowing each other as two people.

And it's a very nice voice to hear in your ears when you're so far from home.

He's doing very well at this point, isn't he? He's doing very well out there.

Yeah. You can listen to his tone of voice,

he's staying on the schedule, everything's working well.

He's really done an excellent job to this point.

And it's making him feel good, but also it's a great reflection

on everything that went into his training and his selection.

Quickly on the dangers from Clare Aldridge, "Could Tim be hit by space junk?"

Both man-made space junk orbiting the world,

but also just little tiny pieces of the universe,

little grains of sand, little bits.

The station gets hit by those all the time

and it's one of the concerns out on a spacewalk,

it's why it's got all those layers. And we practise just in case one of them were to cause a leak.

You told me once that you could hear them when you're asleep.

Yeah. If you sit and wait inside the station with your head somewhere near the metal hull,

if you wait long enough, you'll hear the station get hit, like a little ricochet sound.

You even today described some parts, "That is armour," you said.

Yeah. So you're thankful for the armour when you hear it getting hit.

But when we bring back a piece of the station,

like an old communication antenna,

we look at that and it has hundreds of little punctures, little dings all around the surface.

So we can actually figure just how often we do get hit.

That's just luck, because you look at these things and the fabric

and there's not a lot of protection in a spacesuit, is there?

-So you just...

-Yeah. Eventually,

something will go very wrong on a spacewalk.

But we take our chances, we do the math, we try and understand it,

we try and make the suit as robust as we can.

And for the 193 spacewalks we've done at the station, our design has worked well.

Mark Clifford asks, "What are the others,"

presumably on the ISS, "doing while Tim is on his spacewalk?"

Well, there's four people inside while Tim and Tim are outside.

Scott Kelly, the Commander of the space station, he helped them get

into their spacesuit and will help them get out of their spacesuits

when they come back into the space station later.

The three Russian crew members will be aware of what's going on,

they'll be following along,

but they'll also be carrying on with their science experiments

-and their exercise and their normal day-to-day life.

-OK.

-So the day is normal for most people.

-With awareness.

-OK.

Now let's rejoin Tim as he carrying...carries on, excuse me, installing those cables.

The task they've given Tim Peake is one of the ones

all astronauts dread.

It's a perpetual pressure and force on your fingertips,

so they're throbbing, and they'll throb for the next week.

Actually, his fingertips will hurt for a week.

If you aren't careful, you'll rip a fingernail off, the suits will rip your fingernail off.

And by now, he's probably skinned most of his knuckles.

-It doesn't...

-We've just had big news, sorry.

They're terminating the EVA, they're going back into the space station.

Ah. OK, it must be because of Tim Kopra's...

'Breathe my work state in a good...'

'For Tim Kopra. We want you to get...

'For Tim Kopra. We want you to get your crew-lock bag on your BRT

'and start heading back towards the airlock.'

OK, so that's Tim Kopra's suit probably?

Yeah. I haven't heard the reason yet,

but Tim Kopra has a sensor in his suit

that measures the level of carbon dioxide.

Here he is now. So, they've told him to get straight back.

It's not that the air supply...

We've just heard... Sorry, we've just heard there's water in his helmet as well.

Oh, OK. So he's got water in his helmet.

Water in the helmet is one of two things. You have a water bag that you can drink out of

and sometimes it leaks and then there's just water floating around.

If that happens, just drink the whole bag and get rid of the water source.

But you're wearing a liquid-cooling suit,

there's a lot of tubes in your undergarment.

If it starts leaking, then you could have a fairly high volume of water collecting in your helmet,

and then that can really lead to problems, cos you can breathe it or get it in your eye.

'For Tim Peake, as Tim Kopra comes by you, which he's going to do in just a minute,

'we want you to give a quick visual assessment of the water in the top of Tim Kopra's helmet.'

That's a good idea. So he's going to look into Tim's helmet and see...

Obviously, that's Tim Kopra, he's doing all right and he's heading back.

'Kopra, you're, er, rear 25 lock...'

He's heading towards the airlock.

But it can go bad fairly quickly, water in your helmet,

because if you start losing hearing or worse start losing vision,

and worst case you're starting to have to spit out water every time you breathe,

that can happen rapidly.

This is the time to be doubly methodical.

Nobody's dying right now,

let's think about we don't want to inadvertently

make a bad problem worse by feeling a sense of rushing.

-This is Tim Kopra's?

-This is Tim Kopra, through his helmet cam,

working his way back to the airlock, and you see he's on Node 3.

'Lift up your visor... looking into the sun.'

So now, they're looking at each other.

-'A film of water right now, see it?

-I see it, it's a film of water.'

-Tim Peake said that he could see a film of water.

-Yeah.

'OK, we're happy with that, guys.

'We want Tim Kopra to continue moving back,

'so grab your green hook on the way back for Tim Kopra.

'The, er, water from my helmet is cold.'

-BRIAN COX: What does that tell you? That it's cold?

-Well, if he's...

If it's the drinking bag water, then it's against his chest,

so it'll be warm, but he's got cold water,

which means it's coming from his liquid cooling system.

-We've actually got...

-Yeah.

-So this is a spacesuit.

-Right.

-And all the layers of the spacesuit.

-These are all the external layers,

but right against your body is an undergarment with these

tubes in it and these tubes collect the heat all around your body...

Then they go through an adaptor and then they hook up to the plumbing of

the spacesuit itself and then that runs through a chiller in the back.

'Check the water may be a little bit thicker,

'it's about four inches long.

'The neck cavity's about one inch wide

'and the pool is about four inches across two inches.'

So it sounds like it's pulling on his visor in front of his eyes.

He's looking at it here and describing.

And when Tim Peake says it's a film of water,

I think it's on his visor collecting in front of him.

So what they're doing now, they say, "As quickly as possible,

"back to the airlock," and now, they're...

'Hey, gents, we got, er, a big picture update for you.

'Tim Kopra, this is going to be mainly on you. We're thinking that

'we are going to have you ingress first and go on to EV2, SCU...'

-That's an umbilical.

-'..and have Tim Peake in EV1 position for ingress.'

That was actually a pretty big thing, because,

if we go with that plan, then Tim Peake is going to now be

responsible for, er, closing up and being the person that's going

to close the hatch, he's going to be basically taking over

in the EV1 role for the last part of the spacewalk, so it puts

a bunch of new responsibility on Tim at the end of this...

-So we see now Tim Kopra entering the airlock?

-Yeah.

-Headfirst?

-Yeah.

Tim's going to wait for him?

So Tim Kopra is basically inside the airlock

and now he's claiming forward to grab that umbilical off the wall.

This is being done in a very calm way, in a very methodical way,

but nonetheless, an hour and a half early, maybe two hours early?

-They...

-This is the response to an emergency.

-This is coming back fast?

Yeah. They've had a, er... an unexpected and serious emergency

with one of the suits, that, for whatever reason,

water is getting into the helmet

while it shouldn't be - outside during a spacewalk -

and it's water from this cooling system and so they have stopped

the EVA in the most safe and, er, and careful manner they can.

They've already got Tim back inside

and they were hooking him up to the ship's oxygen and water

and now it's up to Tim Peake to finish all the clean-up

and he'll be responsible for closing up

and closing the hatch.

So there was a sudden change in mood - an expected emergency.

Suddenly it was about a controlled urgency to get Tim Kopra

back inside the International Space Station.

Um, what was happening inside his suit?

Er, well, ever since Luca Parmitano had that problem,

where the water started enveloping his whole head,

we've come up with a different procedure.

We actually wear sort of a modified nappy on the back,

just in case that happens, so it won't get into your eyes,

and I think, listening to what happened to, er, to Tim Kopra today,

he had essentially the same problem Luca had,

but the absorbent material took a lot of the water,

but some of it has still been wicking around inside the suit,

is my best guess, so it's in the visor in front of his eyes

and everybody responded the right way -

they saw this as a serious problem, leaks never get worse...

Never get better! Leaks only get worse and so, they...they responded,

but they didn't, you know, make a panic of it, they made sure things

were carefully done, get Tim back, get him inside,

get him attached to the umbilical of the ship,

and then pass the responsibility over to Tim Peake

to do all the final clean-up and close the hatch.

But there was a difference in this case, wasn't there?

Because there is this absorbent - what's the word for it? -

what would they call it? There's an acronym, isn't there?

-Head absorbency garment.

-It's a nappy, isn't it?

-Yeah, yeah.

That the astronauts wear after Luca's emergency?

Indeed, so that was there, so it's a similar problem,

we don't know whether it was caused by the same thing,

or a different problem that caused the liquid cooling garment to leak,

but by having it there, it made the problem present itself later on.

We were able to get through all the main tasks we needed to do

and, by detecting it, we then got back to the airlock safely.

But as Kevin said, we saw that failure of the CO2 monitor,

which can be caused by moisture.

I think we mentioned it at the time, actually, and it looks like that was

perhaps a signal of something going wrong, as you said earlier?

Yeah, that detector can be tricked by lots of things.

It can be tricked by water, water vapour, that's what we see

in our life-support machines in hospitals and anaesthetics

and intensive care - that's what's happened here.

And it just underlines for you that this is truly the smallest

spacecraft that you will ever travel in and doesn't have

the same levels of redundancy as the space station or the shuttle,

so you're pretty vulnerable, and that's why they got him in quickly.

And now there's a new level of responsibility

-on Tim Peake's shoulders?

-Because the job...

He was supposed to go in first and Tim Kopra, who's already done

two spacewalks, was, er, was going to use his experience

to make sure that everything got closed up and put away quickly.

Now, suddenly, sort of with almost no warning,

Tim Peake not only has to take care of everything outside,

try and get it inside, with a real feeling of urgency,

cos his crewmate is in some sort of risk,

and then get himself in, which is quite a complex physical manoeuvre,

to be the last guy in and get everything out of the way,

and then up to Tim Peake to be the one to close the hatch and

make them safe again, so he wasn't expecting that to happen today.

Let's rejoin the spacewalk with Tim Peake,

on his first spacewalk, now in charge.

BRIAN COX: So that's Tim Peake entering the airlock now.

-TIM PEAKE: 'Bolt's good.

-OK, great, we have Scott ready

'and Sergey to help and we've got towels ready.'

-CHRIS HADFIELD:

-Did you hear they have towels ready?

They just announced, so they've now Scott and Sergey inside,

are ready with towels so, as soon as they get it re-pressurised,

pop open the hatch, get his helmet off, so that water...

-That's Tim now re-entering.

-Yeah.

-He's going into the airlock.

'And for Tim Peake,

'don't forget about the thermal cover as you come in there.'

-Ah, so Tim is now inside and now it's...

-Here's that checklist.

Yeah, that's the re-pressurisation checklist, and it's got...

It's got a slow version and a fast version, of course.

Tim Peake now, it's quite complex to climb in

and get yourself turned around, like doing a little somersault

-with all those clothes on...

-I believe this is his camera.

..to now head out the way he is,

and now he's going to be reaching around, grabbing that...

'..there's a little piece of Velcro right there by your right hand...'

..fabric thermal cover. Here he comes, he's pulling it closed now.

'There's something blocking my head.

'I don't know if I'm going to be able to get the hatch on here.'

Am I reading too much? They sound slightly out of breath, as if...

-this was a greater exertion now to return?

-'OK, guys, nice work...'

Er...it's mostly just

-a sense of urgency.

-Yeah.

-You don't have time to take a break.

-Will Tim have trained for that?

-Yeah, they've both trained for this.

Tim Peake is familiar with the mechanism. It wasn't his job today.

But it's one of the things he'll have practised.

But he didn't think he was doing it today.

-No.

-So it puts a little more responsibility on his shoulders.

We've lost a couple of layers of what would normally be

protection here. Tim Kopra's pretty vulnerable right now.

That's the umbilical.

Tim Peake is now getting his umbilical attached to his suit,

so that he knows for sure he's on the ship's system.

-'Just make sure it's clear before you go all the way in.

-Yeah.

'It's good.

'And latching.'

OK, so this is Tim Peake's helmet as he's pulling the internal hatch

into place and now he's starting to drive the locking mechanism.

'Tim, are you just talking about the little tab right at the base

-'of the hatch handle there?

-Yeah, just the little tab,

'little tab at the base of the handle is still in the unlocked position.

'OK, you can flip that over, that's great.

'Cool. Handle is latched. It is locked.

'The hatch is latched and locked.'

"The hatch is latched and locked." Tim Peake brings it in,

closes up the hatch, brings them back into the care

of the International Space Station.

A genuine sense of relief, I'd imagine, for everyone there?

Absolutely, it was an unexpected problem.

We wanted to get Tim and Tim back in safely.

We knew what we were doing, we knew we had time,

the crew were never in danger, but we still

breathe a sigh of relief when we know that hatch is closed.

I think we saw, um, a sense of the urgency, because Yuri,

who flew that manual docking that we showed just before Christmas,

we saw a picture of him and he was just showing

a little bit of fiddling with his hands.

You noticed it as well and said, "Even Yuri..."

All four members of the crew gathered at the door at this point?

They should be off doing their own tasks -

they wouldn't normally be there to welcome people in?

It's human nature. You've got someone who's out there

who's got water in his helmet - we know how serious that can be -

and you want everybody there, to make sure that we can get

Tim Kopra out of his suit, out of his helmet as quickly as possible,

to get him back, to be able to breathe,

to dry him up, and everyone just wants to make sure he's OK.

This is Tim Kopra when he finally arrived in, actually.

Sorry, Tim Kopra we've already seen. Apologies. This is Tim Peake,

I think, as he arrived in and his helmet being removed.

So, we should say that that was...

It was a successful spacewalk, by any measure,

in the sense that the main job was done and, of course,

the astronauts returned safely, so that's tick, tick.

You don't expect everything to go right all the time,

but that's the main thing?

We essentially have an unlimited list of things we could do while

we're outside, most of them just aren't worth doing a spacewalk for.

Today, the one that we really went outside to do was to fix

the electrical system and they did that immaculately.

They got that done right away and then Tim Kopra got

the pressure valve installed - that's good -

Tim Peake got a lot of the cable laid and then

we ran into a problem and we did the right thing and came inside.

But it was a rollicking success overall, of things getting done,

and we dealt with a serious problem, which will teach us about the suits.

We breathed a huge sigh of relief when we knew Tim was back safely.

If WE were relieved, however,

how must it have felt for Tim's family? Let's ask them!

His father Nigel and his sister Fiona join us from Chichester.

How was that to watch this afternoon?

Er, pretty interesting. I wondered at some stage if I was going to need

-a maximum absorption garment...

-LAUGHTER IN THE STUDIO

..but, um, I think, in Chris Hadfield's words,

it was "a rollicking success".

I think it was your wife who said, on the day of the launch,

that it was, "A good day at the office" -

does this count as an even better day in some ways?

Er, pretty good. I mean, it's taken us 25 years

to actually see what he does, you know, to catch him at work,

so it was wonderful to sit there with a cup of tea and see him, um,

tethering himself and carrying out his tasks properly

and professionally, um... You know, it's a pretty proud moment.

And did you breathe a big sigh of relief,

proud as you were to see him out there working, when that hatch

was closed and he emerged back into the space station again?

Yes, I think so, I think it was, um...

Obviously, we started to get a little bit tense,

although they were very reassuring and everybody was very calm,

but it was the sensible thing to do to get them back in,

and, I must admit, I was quite relieved when, um,

when you knew that that was it and they were almost back to safety

and just waiting to get the pressurisation levels back again.

It's quite incredible, you know, that a member of your family is one

of the only 215 people who have ever done a spacewalk, and the only one

-from Chichester, as well!

-LAUGHTER

So, er, the hits keep coming! You must be terribly proud of this?

-Yeah, quite.

-Yeah.

-I mean, we keep using this word "surreal",

which it really is - you pinch yourself all the time.

I've watched the ISS go over this morning, at 7.28 it passed over us,

a beautifully clear sky, and to think that your son is up there, um,

conducting these experiments and getting ready for a spacewalk

is just completely... It's still unbelievable.

Do you keep track of where he is at all times?

Do you have a website open with where the ISS is?

Usually, we try to, but, um, you sort of...

The other night, when he called us, you know, one minute, he's over

the Alps and, the next minute, he's heading towards Moscow or somewhere.

It's pretty difficult to sort of

get used to this five miles a second, um, idea.

When do you expect to speak to him about the spacewalk?

Um, I don't know, really.

Maybe hopefully this weekend, um, if he gets the chance.

It'd be great to chat with him and see how he felt it all went,

because he was certainly very relaxed when we spoke to him.

Well, I spoke to him last Sunday,

Dad and Mum spoke to him on Tuesday, I think,

and he was certainly feeling really relaxed about it then.

How does that work? Does the phone just ring

and you pick it up and it's Tim?

-Or is it prearranged somehow?

-Yeah, I know!

It just rings and, if he gets the right number, he, um,

you hear a voice saying, "Is that Planet Earth?"

LAUGHTER

And, if not, you get a voice...voice message. We've both had messages.

Yes, if you're out, you get a voice message,

which we did, but, um, it just comes up, it's not a special number,

it doesn't say, "ISS,"

or "space" or whatever, it just comes up as a phone number

and you hope that it's not somebody trying to sell you PPI insurance.

LAUGHTER

Well, good for you for not screening out your son's calls from space!

Er, well done to all of you,

hopefully not too many nervous moments today.

Thank you very much to Tim's dad and sister, pleasure to talk to you.

The, er... Ooh! Where do we go from here?

I'll lead this on through a question.

Peter Young asked, "What's going to happen to the spacesuit?

"Will it be brought to Earth to be looked into?"

All the teams at Nasa, and around the world, will already be having

discussions about what possibly happened, what does it mean?

Was it the same as Luca's failure or another one?

They'll look at all the data. They've already had the crew

taking lots of photographs, collecting the amount of water.

They may bring it back, they may not, these are dec...

discussions and decisions that will happen in the coming days.

Can we reflect, though, on what a terrific achievement this is

and the International Space Station?

We saw it today, the pictures took me by surprise, actually -

the size and scale of what we've done, what you've actually done.

I think you pointed to an antenna at one point and said,

"I put that on," which was quite impressive.

But it is a remarkable engineering achievement, isn't it?

I think it's remarkable for a couple of different reasons, Brian.

One is we've run almost 2,000 different

experiments on the station since it was put up there.

We're running about 200 at a time right now.

And today's spacewalk was really just to keep everything healthy

and to run all those experiments. It's also letting us

see the world in a way that we've never really seen it before.

Not just personal, like Tim saw it through his eyes today, but just as

a species and actual understanding of our own perspective.

But it's also our first permanent step away.

You know, for 15 years, we've been living on the space station.

Some of us have been off the planet for the last 15 years.

It's kind of a historic moment in the life of our species

on this planet, and the space station,

when Tim's dad went out this morning and watched it go over,

that's what the space station really symbolises.

I thought it was a really powerful moment when you said,

-for the first part of the spacewalk, we had three schools in.

-Yeah.

And you said, you looked at those children, and you said,

"You've never been alive when there were no humans beyond Earth."

For their whole life, humans have been off the planet

and hopefully will be forever now.

The space station is such an incredible issue.

At the start, before they started building it,

they had the wall, which was all the spacewalks

they would have to do to build the station

and, from a medical perspective, that was just terrifying,

cos we knew this is the most dangerous thing they do on orbit

and you're going to have to do dozens, hundreds actually,

of walks to get it together.

The fact that it's up there and built, the fact that

we are running operations like today - incredible achievements.

The, er... It's been spectacular.

We have a piece of, well, some would say mundane media that he's...

He's been on Twitter! He's been on Twitter since he did this.

-Tim's been on Twitter?! Nice!

-Tim has already tweeted to say...

-LIBBY:

-With the selfie!

-Hashtag spacewalk, hashtag, er...

-LAUGHTER

..er, walk it through... hashtag I'm the daddy!

LAUGHTER

But, Libby, for you to summarise, it's been a terrific day,

but the whole project, the International Space Station, goes on.

It's a wonderful thing.

Yes, it is, and it will continue to go on doing fantastic science,

inspiring the next generation of children to get involved

in science and technology, engineering, maths.

Today was a job well done.

We went out, we fixed the Sequential Shunt Unit,

everybody's done their jobs perfectly, perhaps the spacesuit

didn't function quite as we hoped, but we sorted it out.

You know what it says to me as well? We're sat here at Jodrell Bank.

It's the 70th birthday of Jodrell Bank, as we've said on Stargazing,

so we've got a telescope out there

that tracked the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, across the sky

and then we're sat in front of the telescope, it's still working,

and we're watching people living and working in space.

I think it tells you about how powerful and wonderful...

-What wonderful things humans can do.

-And a great story of progress.

That, I'm afraid, is all we have time for.

It has been an extraordinary day at the end of an incredible week.

I'd like to thank very much Commander Chris Hadfield,

Libby Jackson and Kevin Fong for bringing your insight and expertise.

Now, Tim's only been in space for a month,

and so much has happened, as I'm sure you've seen.

He's still got five months to go, so you can certainly follow

his mission all the way through, follow his re-entry down to Earth.

-There's about half a year of it still to go.

-Absolutely.

Thank you for joining us for the last four nights,

for finding pulsars with us and following Tim Peake's spacewalk.

It's been a pleasure to have you here. We'll see you

-for the next Stargazing Live.

-See you next time.

-Goodnight.

APPLAUSE