Hey guys! I recently read (and loved) Scott Kelly's book about his year living in space. It was an amazing look at life aboard the ISS, and I kept a list of interesting factoids that I thought might be useful for writing sci-fi. It occurred to me that I should probably share this list - after all, it's not often you get the deets on living in space from someone who's actually done it. Of course, a lot of you probably already knew at least some of this, in which case, congratulations, you are very smart!
Heard any unexpected space facts from those who have been there? (Or not?) Share 'em here!
Heard any unexpected space facts from those who have been there? (Or not?) Share 'em here!
(PS this really is a private list I jotted on the fly, so if you encounter any typos or weird wording, that's why)
- Upon returning to Earth, Scott suffered from nausea, weakness, and horribly itchy skin. After sleeping, the places his skin was in contact with the bed would be covered in hives. This abated after about a month.
- Cosmonauts have a song that plays during meetings with the press. It's about a cosmonaut who misses "the grass, the green, green grass, the grass by my home." It's like Heinlein's "Green Hills of Earth," only real
- NASA and Roscosmos are very petty. NASA started testing air quality in the Soyuz capsules so Roscosmos started testing air in the American section of the station just because. The astronauts and the cosmonauts are apologetic to each other about it when it happens
- It takes days to arrange a rendezvous, as ships slowly draw closer together.
- Once a seal is made between ships, they wait for hours, slowly feeding air into the "vestibule" (the space between the airlocks) and checking the air pressure to see if it goes down. If it goes down, they know the seal is bad.
- CO2 over three millimeters of pressure causes headaches, impaired cognition
- The space station is two or three failed launches away from running out of food. There was a string of failures while Kelly was in space and if the final Soyuz had not successfully launched they would have been in real trouble.
- CO2 is filtered by a system the astronauts call "seepra". It's a literal reading of the acronym which I forgot. It is very finicky.
- Astronaut ice cream is a lie. It has never been eaten in space.
- It's really easy to lose things in zero g. Sometimes something will float into a nook and vanish for years
- Astronauts are each other's doctors, barbers, etc. If you need an injection or other simple medical procedure, you have one of your fellows do it for you or (preferably) learn to do it yourself, since all astronauts work almost non-stop, 7 days a week.
- Eating is a pain in Zero-G, nothing can easily be put down or it will float around and maybe get into one of the seals between modules, posing a threat
- Fire can blind and choke astronauts in seconds
- The bathroom on the ISS is walled with the "kabin", which are removable panels. This is because of a mistranslation from Russian to English that stuck. The kabin gets very gross despite regular cleaning.
- Cosmic rays flash in people's vision when they close their eyes
- When an object might hit the station, and the Air Force doesn't catch it until not long before, and don't know how close it will get exactly: "This is a red late-notice conjunction with a closest point of a sphere of uncertainty" "Closing velocity of fourteen kilometers per second."
- NASA made them do an interview about the Kentucky Derby while an object was incoming with the potential to collide, because public relations are very important to NASA. Astronauts were secretly panicking as the kids on Earth asked them to do somersaults.
- Object coming from the opposite direction as the station would hit at 35,000 hundred miles per hour
- The Americans seal up all of the hatches between the modules when an impact is pending, in case of a blow out. This can take about two hours for one person, there are 18 hatches on the American side. Russians say "fuck it" and don't bother, since a collision would probably kill them anyways. Astronauts grab important stuff: the defibrillator, the advanced life support medical kit, Kelly grabs his iPad with important procedures on it, a bag of personal items, a flash drive with "pictures and video" of his wife. Then the crew hides in the Soyuz lifeboat and get it ready to launch, even though that probably wouldn't save then either
- It takes six hours to move the station out of the way of debris, a process called PDAM, predetermined debris avoidance maneuvers
- Takes four to six weeks for nausea to fade and for new astronauts to feel normal. Many often need help for simple stuff like peeing, moving, eating
- If a person in zero g wants to look at the contents of a bag or box, they will start spinning slowly before opening it. this will push the items inside to the bottom of the container so that they don't float out when it's opened
- Barf bags are absorbent inside. They don't keep any on the ISS, only using what is shipped up with the astronauts on a Soyuz. Scott improvises one for a new astronaut with a ziploc bag and some maxi pads
- Food on the station includes a "can of white" which is Russian chicken with sauce, a "bag of brown" which is some kind of beef thing from NASA, and a Russian "Appetizing Appetizer" which is awful. Also chocolate and vanilla pudding, although the chocolate always vanishes quickly
- Astronauts are kept incredibly busy. "Voluntary" weekend work, which was conceived as something optional to allow less important science to be done, is not really optional. Cosmonauts, though, have a lot of downtime and sometimes come bug the astronauts like unemployed roomates
- The Sun damages the exterior of the space station over time, an airlock cover on the station is permanently warped by Sunlight from a round shape to a potato chip shape
- The exterior of the space station is also dented and cratered by micrometeoroids
- All spacesuits leak
- As airlocks pressurize, the astronaut's ears pop. The helmets have a pad that's called a Valsalva built-in, specially designed to plug the nostrils and allow astronauts to pop their ears by blowing. Blowing too hard can make blood vessels burst in eyes.
- Moving around in space is easy, taking only a light tap of the finger or toe
- New space travelers often float around like superman, experienced space travelers float between chambers vertically, as if they are walking
- When landing in a Soyuz craft on hard ground (and maybe on the water) astronauts have to keep their mouths open to avoid biting their tongues
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