![]() ![]() ![]() The International Space Station is a vast outpost-as long as a football field, as big inside as a six-bedroom house. In them, one can begin to make out a greater purpose for the station’s 82,000 manned orbits-even if it’s not the one NASA seems to be pursuing. Scientific research on the station hasn’t yielded any noteworthy breakthroughs, and daily life there, thankfully, lacks the drama of a movie script.īut all of that does the station and its astronauts a disservice: The details and challenges of life in space are weird and arresting, revealing and valuable. The Space Station is an engineering marvel, but all it seems to do is soar in circles-a fresh sunrise every 92 minutes. We just know the fictional characters better than the real ones. Without any fanfare, we have slipped into the era of Captain Kirk and Mr. But we seem indifferent to what is happening in reality all the time now. ![]() The 2013 movie Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, brought in $716 million at the box office and won seven Academy Awards. It’s a stunning achievement, and it’s completely ignored.Īs a culture, we remain fascinated by the possibilities, discoveries, of space travel. We’ve got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. But chances are, most ninth-graders don’t know the name of a single active astronaut-many don’t even know that Americans are up there. ![]() It’s a little strange when you think about it: Just about every American ninth-grader has never lived a moment without astronauts soaring overhead, living in space. Mission Control in Houston literally never sleeps now, and in one corner of a huge video screen there, a counter ticks the days and hours the Space Station has been continuously staffed. All day, every day, half a dozen men and women, including two Americans, are living and working in orbit, and have been since November 2000. In the past decade, America has become a truly, permanently spacefaring nation. Spaceflight has faded from American consciousness even as our performance in space has reached a new level of accomplishment. “I wish I dreamed every night of floating,” he says. Hopkins says he didn’t have unusual dreams in space, although now, back on Earth, he does occasionally dream of floating through the station. If you leave your arms out, they float free in zero gravity, often drifting out from your body, giving a sleeping astronaut the look of a wacky ballet dancer. The main question is whether you want your arms inside or outside the sleeping bag. Sleep position presents its own challenges. You never have that feeling of taking weight off your feet-or that emotional relief.” Some astronauts miss it enough that they bungee-cord themselves to the wall, to provide a sense of lying down. There’s an immediate sense of relaxation. On Earth, when I’ve had a long day, when I’m mentally and physically tired-when you first lie down on your bed, there’s a sense of relief. “The biggest thing with falling asleep in space,” says Mike Hopkins, who returned from a six-month tour on the Space Station last March, “is kind of a mental thing. When an astronaut is ready to sleep, he climbs into the sleeping bag. Each cabin is upholstered in white quilted material and equipped with a sleeping bag tethered to an inside wall. That’s where the NASA astronauts sleep, in a space where they can close a folding door and have a few hours of privacy and quiet, a few hours away from the radio, the video cameras, the instructions from Mission Control. side-four private cubicles about the size of airplane lavatories. In 2009, with the expansive International Space Station nearing completion after more than a decade of orbital construction, astronauts finally installed some staterooms on the U.S. Consider something as elemental as sleep. And so, living in space, the oddness never quite goes away. Wh en humans move to space, we are the aliens, the extraterrestrials. ![]()
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