The 250 Miles Up Club
One great thing about getting to meet the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour is that for the first time in my life I used the phrase “Commander, can I get your autograph?” while not wearing a Star Trek uniform. For someone who spent his formative summers in a blue jumpsuit at Space Camp, meeting an astronaut is like a normal person meeting whoever won the Heisman trophy this year.
STS 127 was the most recent NASA mission, wherein the space shuttle Endeavor docked with the International Space Station to deliver and install the final two components of the Japanese “Kibo” laboratory complex. While there, the crew also dropped off flight engineer Timothy Kopra, then gave Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata a lift back to the planet (space carpooling). It was Endeavour’s twenty-third flight, with only six more scheduled before NASA decommissions her along with the other two shuttles in 2010.
I asked a lot of questions (of the six astronauts attending the meet and greet, I was able to speak with five). Before I delve into my own queries, I will go ahead and address the singular issue overwhelmingly suggested by my friends. Paraphrasing, most people polled wanted to know if there is such a thing as “The 250 Miles Up Club.” (A few also posed followup questions regarding some interesting anti-gravity scenarios which are not family friendly.)
I hate to disappoint, but I never summoned the courage to ask the spacemen point-blank about orbital cronking. I suspect “no,” due to limited privacy, time constraints and astral professionalism, but for the benefit of my pervert friends I tried to fish around a little.
I asked several astronauts “So do you guys ever get to goof off, or is it pretty much a constant life or death situation?” NASA keeps everyone fairly busy, but I can relay to you that space is nonetheless rife with levity. On this particular mission, the combined crews of Endeavour and the International Space Station numbered thirteen people from America, Russia, Japan, Belgium and Quebec. Needless to say, the music selection aboard the ISS was diverse. Dr. Wolf told me that one morning they woke up to “The Twist,” by Chubby Checkers, so that for a few minutes a bunch of humans were zero-g dancing in their underwear 250 miles above the planet. I trust this mental image will at least partially satisfy my delinquent compatriots.
Incidentally, there has been a wedding on the International Space Station, but only the groom was able to attend. The bride remained in Houston with a camera and a proxy poster board cutout of her fiancee. Yuri Malenchenko, a cosmonaut aboard Mir and subsequently the ISS, fell in love with a Russian ex-pat named Ekaterina Dmietriev, but with with his training in Russia and living in space and whatnot, most of their relationship was long-distance. So they went ahead and got hitched while he was on the ISS in 2003.
Russian Orthodox priests improvise a "Blessing for Launching into Space" prior to the mission.
Yuri strapped a bow-tie over his blue space suit while his best man, astronaut Edward Lu, played the wedding march on the station’s keyboard. (Why was there a keyboard? I don’t know. Either Lu brought it with him, or NASA thinks of everything, including potential orbital weddings.) Of course when Yuri Malenchenko returned to earth he and the Mrs. had to re-do the wedding, as the Russian Orthodox Church is still somewhat suspicious of technological innovations like light bulbs or pews used in a liturgical setting, let alone wedding teleconferences from space.
For my own purposes I struck a balance between three different sorts of questions. Informed, substantive policy issues (“I know the current budget only provides funding for the International Space Station until 2016, but…”), barely contained nerdy science fiction hypotheticals (“How feasible is a space elevator?”), and random but vitally important information pertinent to my life goals (“Given that I don’t have an engineering degree or twenty-five million dollars, is space tourism ever going to be cheap enough for me to get up there? I’m twenty-five. Please frame your answer in reference to my life span.”)
One important fact gathered conclusively settles an argument I’ve been waging for years: You cannot see the Great Wall of China from space. I climbed the damn thing in 2006, and I’ve been saying ever since then that its width is no bigger than a road, so from an orbital perspective it can’t be any more visible than a highway. Yet I still have so-called “friends” who assert that “The Great Wall of China is the only human structure visible from space,” despite how often I argue with them.
I now have confirmation from Commander Mark Polanksy, who has personally been to space three times, that the Great Wall is not visible from orbit. So unless someone finds their own astronaut to pit against mine, the issue is settled. (Interestingly, the Great Pyramids are visible from space. Which no one ever brings up.)
Something random which piqued my curiosity was the perception of time in space. The International Space Station makes a full orbit around the earth sixteen times a day. That means if you’re living on it, you see the sun rise every forty-five minutes. How do you sleep? Do you pick a time zone and commit, or what?
According to mission specialist Chris Cassidy, space missions officially use a chronological counter from the time of blastoff instead of a twelve-hour or fourteen-hour clock (this is why all films involving astronauts have the epic “T minus fifteen seconds” to blastoff moment). But astronauts also refer to Greenwich Mean Time and whatever hour it is in Houston, so that they’re reasonably in step with those of us down here on earth.
As for sleep, there’s a simple solution. When the crew decides to sack out, they put blinds over the windows. Clever.
Dave Wolf, the lead space walker and a former flight surgeon, fielded that one. This guy is my hands-down favorite astronaut, and a badass of galactic proportions. If you consider that we’ve only had a space program for about fifty years, the man is basically a gritty astral pioneer.
In 1997 he cast a write-in ballot for a Houston election while orbiting the planet, making him the first human being in history to vote from space. He holds twenty patents and fifteen Space Act Awards, largely for work with three-dimensional tissue engineering technology which can only be grown synthetically in a zero-g environment. I spoke with Dr. Wolf more than anyone else, who enthusiastically fielded my questions and offered an ample amount of crazy stories.
He’s been on five shuttle flights and one extended stay on Mir, the Russian space station. Five months into his stint with the Russians he did a space walk, but when he tried to re-enter the station the hatch wouldn’t shut. Which meant everybody would have to remain in their space suits until they could fix it, and if they couldn’t, they would all starve or suffocate in the cold merciless void of space.
Dr. Wolf, who had already been performing a space walk for four hours, spent an additional nine in his borrowed cosmonaut suit trying to close the hatch. Eventually, through tangled Russian and English, they decided to unhook their suits’ life support systems and enter a smaller capsule with a functional door. Throughout the fourteen hours they’d been in suits, attached hoses were piping in fresh air, like umbilical cords of oxygen. In order to get from the main capsule to the smaller one, they’d have to release the cords (thereby severing the oxygen supply), exit the faulty chamber, enter the smaller capsule, shut the door and flood it with air, and do all this in under four minutes before they died from asphyxiation. They made it.
The proximity of death is staggering when you begin to consider the unforgiving nature of life as an astronaut. Though it had never occurred to me before, Doc Badass explained that if you get too close to a hot surface (like an area of the shuttle painted black, which absorbs sunlight) the radiant heat will melt your visor and let the vacuum outside suck your face off. If a piece of debris the size of a marble happens to puncture your glove, you’ve got a matter of moments before finding out whether or not Yuri Gagarin was right about God.
These are just the fatal hazards. Apparently while first adjusting to anti-gravity, people have a tendency to overcompensate when they push off surfaces, and subsequently careen into walls or other astronauts. If you, say, make yourself a delicious bag of warm coffee in the morning, and lose your grip, an amorphous blob of steaming java will swarm up your nose and choke you.
Even after you’ve mastered the nuances of navigational floating, the Space Station is a terrific place to lose track of tiny objects. (Try absently setting down a pen and relocating it five minutes later. In space.) Apparently hand-held objects become virtually invisible once they’re in a state of constant free-fall. Our brains are designed to filter through needless visual stimulus and discern specific goals via constants. So if a pair of pliers is floating a foot from your face, pointed directly at you, you probably can’t see it. (Until it hits you in the forehead.)
These are just some interesting considerations. Obviously the Coolness Factor of living in space outweighs losing your pens. I am on earth right now, and have no idea where any of my pens are. I do not feel that space travel would seriously alter my lifestyle in regards to how many pens I control.
Here’s something interesting: the Japanese Space Agency, in conjunction with industrial engineers and origami masters, is currently working on a flotilla of super-durable paper airplanes which they intend to launch from the International Space Station and down to earth. Presumably this is to test air friction, or atmospheric re-entry physics, or something like that. But in reality it’s a high school science project with a multi-million dollar budget, which is awesome.
Even more interesting, in 2006 a Canadian golf equipment manufacturer funded a corporate experiment to let a cosmonaut on the International Space Station hit a golf ball equipped with a tracking device into the earth’s orbit.
What I want to know is: where did the ball wind up? If they put a tracking device on it, shouldn’t we know? I’ve been researching this pertinent issue and all I can find are scientific estimates that the ball probably zipped around the earth’s orbit for two or three days before plunking into the atmosphere.
I would like to ascertain the statistical likelihood that it didn’t burn up during re-entry and somehow landed in the eighteenth hole at St. Andrew’s. If that happened, mankind has a right to know, because it would pretty much give us free license to believe whatever the hell we want from now on. A hole-in-one from space would be too mind-blowing to ever bother dealing with reason or probability again.
Me: “I’m fairly certain that my neighbor is Thor, God of Thunder.”
Skeptic: “I doubt it. Nobody believes in Norse gods anymore, and if you read Richard Dawkins, he says–”
Me: “Really? Mikhail Tyurin whacked a golf ball from space, a shot spanning over a million miles, and he landed a hole-in-one at St. Andrew’s. THAT HAPPENED.”
Skeptic: “Seriously? Well, I obviously have no idea what’s going on with the universe. Can I meet Thor?”
The reader might wonder, what with the Japanese paper airplane flotilla and Canadian galactic golf apparel, what a cost/value analysis of shuttle and orbital stations might yield. I don’t have time to go into it now, but ask any nerd and he (or, possibly she) will explain how the collective benefits of the space program far exceed the direct funding we’ve put into it. Dorks across the world are more or less of one accord on this issue.
Dr. David Wolf, intergalactic badass, told me that he believes in retrospect we will view the International Space Station as the greatest feat in human history. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about my iPhone, which can identify songs I hum and check my e-mail. But I agree that the ISS is staggering when you consider the immensity of the accomplishment.
We, homo sapiens, have built a structure the size of a football field in space. It’s soaring above us right now, with human beings who can zip around inside of it as if endowed with super powers. Nations which nearly annihilated themselves in a nuclear holocaust less than half a century ago are actively collaborating on it, along with scientists from all over the world. Even if we ignore this monument of international goodwill and its hazy glimpse of a peaceful planet, it’s a staggering combination of physics, engineering and technology. Just here and now, it’s damned impressive.
I’ll sign off on a cliche note, but it’s worth noting anyway.
Based on my conversations with the astronauts, when you’re 250 miles up you don’t have the time or inclination to be American, Russian or Japanese. At that point you’re just a human.
And I am told, looking down from there back at us, there aren’t any lines or color-coordinated countries. It’s just one planet. A beautiful one.
I also infer, from the perspective of astronauts, that this one planet is inhabited by three billion fat people. Because in space you’re weightless, so I assume we’re all morbidly obese, from a quantitative standpoint, to anyone on the space station.
I don’t mind if astronauts think I’m fat. My self esteem can take it, and I only came up with the obesity thesis ten seconds ago anyway. My point is: I hope we don’t nuke our planet before I get a chance to see it from the outside.