Enlightened Astronaut, Part 2: No Gravity

In “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth”, Chris Hadfield says that unlike earlier times, when space trips were short, now they often last several months:

“As the stints in space have gotten longer and longer, your temperament matters. Are you easy to get along with?”

And you don’t get to pick your team-mates. So yes:

“Sometime integration is not so easy, because we don’t get to pick our fellow travellers. It’s like a shotgun wedding.”

When that happens, focus on building the wall with the bricks you have:

“At some point, you just have to accept the people in your crew, stop wishing you were flying with Neil Armstrong, and start figuring out how your crewmates’ strengths and weaknesses mesh with your own.”

 

Why those months long space trips? To conduct experiments, fix and install things, and “help make space exploration safer”. So yes, a lot of work:

“A lot of time the work isn’t glamarous, but that’s okay. The workplace itself is , after all, in a pretty great location.”

A great location with a view to kill for:

“The world was rolling by underneath, every placed I’d ever read about or dreamed of visiting streaming past. There was the Sahara, there was Lake Victoria and the Nile, snaking all the way up to the Mediterranean. Explorers gave their lives trying to find the source of the Nile, but I could detect it with a casual glance, no effort at all.”

Gravity. Not feeling it leads to new, weird and fun experiences:

“Eating, jumping, drinking from a cup – things you’ve know how to do since you were a toddler suddenly become magical or tricky or endlessly entertaining, and sometimes all three at once.”

It also creates unexpected problems:

“Getting exercise isn’t all that easy in an environment where movement is so easy.”

Astronauts have to get exercise so their body doesn’t atrophy because someday they have to fall back to earth (just not Icarus style). So they strap themselves with velcro to treadmills. Damn it, there’s no escaping exercise, even in space! But if you’re an exercise freak, then, without gravity, you realize you can do things you could never have done on earth:

“In 2007, (astronaut) Suni(ta) Williams ran the Boston Marathon in space, which took her only 4 hours and 24 minutes.”

All that exercise creates a new problem – sweat:

“We also have to be careful about perspiration. When there’s no force pulling sweat downward, it just accumalates on your body like a slowly expanding liquid shield.”

Which is probably why Hadfield writes:

“I can’t say that running is my favorite thing to do in space: after you get used to floating everywhere, it feels odd and a little unfair to move your legs to go nowhere.”