The Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or the pool, as I like to call it, it's a really remarkable place.

It's so massive.

200 feet long, 100 feet wide, and the water is crystal clear.

And if none of the safety divers have started to get in the water yet,

the top is as still as it can be. The water is so clear you can just see straight through and

see all the models down in the water. And so you get to see the magnitude of what you're going

to go down and work on here shortly.

It's an amazing experience. When I first came down here,

that was when I first put on the space suit and was lowered into the water

and started floating around in the water. It felt like this is astronaut training.

Hi, I'm Nick Hague. I'm an astronaut at NASA.

I explore space for a living.

This is NASA's curious universe.

Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

In this episode, we're exploring the underwater training ground where astronauts train for space.

There are humans in space right now.

In fact, humans have lived in space continuously for nearly 20 years, on board the International Space Station.

This international space station, it is gigantic.

Imagine this space station floating around with these gigantic solar arrays,

these wings of solar cells that are collecting the sun's energy and that's how we power the

station. It's the size of a football stadium. On the inside, it's got kind of the volume of a large jumbo jet, and so that's the area we live and work in.

...