Most of you have probably seen the old videos of astronauts in the centrifuge and other weird bouncing chairs and such (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6F9Ar_FK4o), but some of the other training astronauts have to endure that is less known to the public is survival training.

Astronauts have to undergo desert, jungle, open sea, and arctic survival training.

In the early days of space flight, much like everything else, training was less planned out and more “let’s drops these guys in the middle of the jungle with no supplies and see what happens. It was quite literally that.

Here is Neil Armstrong and other Mercury astronauts building some survival contraptions



Sometimes you’re just dropped in the desert. Sometimes you’re given supplies. Supplies in that most likely if your capsule crashed in the desert and you survived, most likely the parachute for the capsule would be with you, so you can make protective clothing and shelter from it.




Water training was critical, as the desert, jungle, and arctic training was to prepare for a mission failure of some kind in which the capsule is off course on take-off or landing and crashes outside the designated landing area. Before the shuttle program, all NASA space craft came back to earth via water landing. So extensive training was done in water.

This training ranged from “throw them into the ocean to see how long they can tread water before putting themselves in a harness to be air lifted out”

to putting them in an actual test space craft to be able to perform exiting the craft while floating in the ocean.



(Why are they in full bio-suits in that last one? Never having been to the moon and back, NASA wasn’t sure if the astronauts would be contaminated, so they practiced water exists in full bio-suits as well, which the Apollo 11 crew actually wore upon return to the earth after their trip to the moon)

Training eventually became more structured and much of the training started to be done in more controllable environments such as specially built pool where different water conditions could be created.




Today’s astronaut has a different kind of training. 6+ hour space walks are common for ISS astronauts, so learning how to live in a pressurized space suit for that long is key to both surviving and performing their duties in space. Here is Purdue Astronaut Scott Tingle describing the rigorous underwater spacewalk training astronauts have to complete. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sbMi0rqX8o