Day 77
So… I am going to talk about awesome things in this blog. Aka, space.
But first I want to talk about time change.
Dr. Dave was right. We are feeling the time change. We didn’t really understand what was happening. We were all getting up a lot earlier than we used to. Like, a lot earlier. We have turned our clocks back by 1 hr 4 times already, tonight will be the fifth. We all couldn’t figure out why we were suddenly rising so much earlier until it hit us. The time changes. It's weird to be experiencing them so gradually and still feel the affects of it. Also, all y'all over there just fell back one hour due to day light savings. But we don't observe day light saves out here in the middle of the ocean where we are in our own time zone that no one else uses.
Freaky.
This means that I have absolutely no idea what time it is back home right now. My phone says that we are two hours ahead. I feel like that is wrong. After tonight we will be on Buenos Aires time. If someone wants to be awesome, can you let me know what the time difference is? Please and thank you.
Now, on to talking about awesome things.
We have two astronauts on the ship with us. One of them is our executive Dean, Kathy Thornton, and the other is a professor, George "Pinky" Nelson. Everyone calls him Pinky. They both have wikipedia pages, go ahead, you know you want to look them up.
They both went to space during the space shuttle program. Pinky went three times, his second flight landed 10 days before the Challenger explosion, and he was on the flight that went right after the incident. The longest he spent in space was 8 days. The longest Kathy spent in space was 16. They both were able to do space walks outside of the space station, Pinky even did an untethered walk using a manned maneuvering unit to get to a satellite.
One of Kathy's missions was the first one that went to the Hubble Telescope after it was put into orbit. She helped repair the primary mirror, which was sent to space with a major flaw that basically made all the pictures blurry.
They told us about what it was like to be in space, and what it was like to launch into space.
They load into the shuttle about three hours before the scheduled launch. They get strapped in and then basically have to wait. They can't do much besides talk to each other so they tell jokes and sing songs. The ground crew could hear them but can't talk back so they would make comments with the intention of irritated people they knew were listening, just for their own entertainment. They would be listening for a radio call that would cause them to not launch, like incoming weather. They have holds that they wait through and once they get to the 9 minute hold that means business. They stop all jokes and get ready because they are almost pretty sure they are going to go. At two minutes they put their visors down. Sometime after 31 seconds is when the solid rocket boosters light. They can abort the mission for many reasons up until the boosters light. You cant' stop them, they go until they burn out. When they light it causes the while thing to tip about 3 feet to one side and once it rights itself – that is T-0. The rocket goes from 0 to 17,500 miles per hour in 8 minutes.
She described the first few minutes like being strapped to a metal chair, with a bowling ball on your chest, and going over really rough train tracks. It's really bumpy and first and then smooths out. And once you hit space it goes from 3Gs to 0Gs suddenly.
It isn't very hard to move in space, it is actually hard to stay in place. They use foot straps built into the floor to keep themselves in place. Space isn't actually 0 gravity. It is micro gravity. There has to be gravity or else they would keep going in a straight line. But they don't, they stay attached to earth. Basically they are in a constant free fall with the earth turning beneath them. It is easy to move objects, like 600 lbs satellite parts, but you have to be careful because while you can just push something lightly to move it, you also have to be able to stop it, which can be more difficult.
To sleep they sometimes use sleeping bags but Pinky just liked to duck tape one of his feet to a wall. They just float there and sleep. Pinky told us that if we wanted to feel what it was like to sleep in space then we should go into a pool, go underwater, and relax our entire body. The human body has a natural position that it relaxes into and it will also do it under water.
They don't take showers in space, just sponge baths sometimes. They orbit the earth once every hour and a half, which means the sun rises every hour and a half. So they have to sleep with their eyes covered and they get 16 sun rises and sun sets in every 24 hour period.
They would do experiments, a lot of them on themselves to study the affects of being in space on the human body. They would light liquid fuel and watch it burn, since liquid balls up, it would burn up the fuel and then extinguish itself. They would manipulate liquid using sound. They would record their food intake and output, they would draw blood and do muscle biopsies. You lose 1% of your bone mass in orbit. It's basically an accelerated form of osteoporosis, which they are working to combat. And that could potentially help those with osteoporosis on earth.
Most astronauts feel sick for the first 24 hours. All of the fluid in the lower half of your body readjusts up, so you are really bloated. But your body disposes of the extra liquid so you go back to normal after 24 hours. Also, you grow in space, but it stretches the ligaments in your neck and back so they have back aches.
Re-entry isn't as intense as it looks in movies. It is actually really smooth and lasts about 40 minutes. They hit 1.5Gs because they are defending at a rate of 11,000 ft per minute. Comepare that to the 500 ft per minute you decend in an airplane. If you pumped out of the space shuttle at 20,000 feet, it would beat you to the ground.
Neither Kathy nor Pinky planned on being an astronaut. Pinky always loved the sky and wanted to be an astronomer and he had learned how to fly airplanes. One day he saw a flier on a bulletin board saying they were looking for astronauts. He met the requirements so he applied. He was 27 when he was accepted and retired at 38.
Kathy had her PhD and was working for the army. She was having a bad day and also saw a flier. She applied, went into for an interview, which consisted mostly of medical tests and psych tests, and was selected.
Training for a specific mission can last anywhere from 1 to 2 1/2 years. That comes after general training.
They both said that the were scared, especially at launches. But that they were mostly focused on the task at hand and so didn’t think about it. And they were so well trained that if something was wrong that they could control then they would handle it, if they couldn’t control it then they didn’t worry about it.
They believe that space exploration is headed farther out. We have spent the last 40 years just orbiting the earth and it is time for us to head towards planets or asteroids. There are 40 billion earth-like planets out there. Things that are big enough, orbit a sun, and are in that sweet spot distance where liquid water can exist. It seems like we are exploring space at such a slow rate. But just compare it to how long it took for us to discover various parts of our own planet. Hundreds of years. We are in the infancy of this 200 or 300 year age of exploration.
Both Pinky and Kathy said that if NASA called them up right now with a mission that they would go.
Can I go too?
