What's It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who've Been There
Ariel Waldman
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 1452144761
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Everyone wonders what it's really like in space, but very few of us have ever had the chance to experience it firsthand. This captivating illustrated collection brings together stories from dozens of international astronauts—men and women who've actually been there—who have returned with accounts of the sometimes weird, often funny, and awe-inspiring sensations and realities of being in space. With playful artwork accompanying each, here are the real stories behind backwards dreams, "moon face," the tricks of sleeping in zero gravity and aiming your sneeze during a spacewalk, the importance of packing hot sauce, and dozens of other cosmic quirks and amazements that come with travel in and beyond low Earth orbit.
3:16: Carnage Amongst the Stars
A Companion to Astronomy and Astrophysics: Chronology and Glossary with Data Tables
Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey Into the Unknown
Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network
Apollo Expeditions to the Moon
Comets And Their Origin: The Tools To Decipher A Comet
floating away. Yet another good reason to always carry a towel in space. BULL IN A CHINA SHOP It’s not easy being the new astronaut on a space station. It takes time to learn how to swim gracefully through the air. One shuttle pilot admitted that he created a floating mess of laptops and other devices in a wake behind him by flying too vigorously the first time he tried to fly from one room to another. “When you first turn up,” he said, “you are like a bull in a china shop.” SPICE EXPLORATION
think about what it’s like in space while being there. In 1973, feeling overscheduled by mission control, one group of astronauts aboard Skylab 4 went on strike. They turned off their radios, shut off communication with Earth, and spent the day thinking about the universe while gazing out the window. “We had been overscheduled,” astronaut William Pogue wrote. “We were just hustling the whole day. The work could be tiresome and tedious, though the view was spectacular.” Following the strike, NASA
agreed to insert more down time into the astronauts’ schedules for contemplating the cosmos. INSECTS IN SPACE Spaceflight is all about learning how to “space float,” whether you’re a human or a housefly. Many winged insects have been sent into space, often with less-than-graceful results. Butterflies haphazardly bounce into barriers. Honeybees helplessly tumble inside enclosures. Houseflies find spaceflight troublesome enough to prefer walking on walls over flapping their wings. Moths, on the
opportunity to look around during one of his spacewalks: The contrast of your body and your mind inside . . . essentially a one-person spaceship, which is your spacesuit, where you’re holding on for dear life to the shuttle or the station with one hand, and you are inexplicably in between what is just a pouring glory of the world roaring by, silently next to you—just the kaleidoscope of it, it takes up your whole mind. It’s like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen just screaming at you on
astonishingly beautiful to see this big stream of ice particles going out, being illuminated by the Sun and reflecting the light. It’s just gorgeous.” OUR ORNAMENT One of the most significant sights ever to be witnessed by humans was when the crew of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission looked out the window to see the Earth rise over the Moon. “To see this very delicate, colorful orb which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape . . . That one view
