Space Man

I’ve just deserted my post at the Stationery Cabinet for an hour to attend at talk by a NASA astronaut. Now I know what I want to be when I grow up! What a shame it is I didn’t think of that before. Having said that, my chances of a having any sort of career in science were blown when I was five and my parents decided to move to Saudi Arabia and put me into a shit school. But hey, I can dream…Maybe there’ll be a revolution in my country and the shortage of workers will force the government to sponsor free training programs for everyone to start new careers. Wait, who am I kidding? They’d just import the workers from another country and hang the locals.

But I digress.

It was very exciting to hear an astronaut talk about his experiences, in person. First of all, he showed us a video of his latest mission. There was no sound, and he explained what was going on as we went. I didn’t understand most of it as he talked in a fast, American monotone and used a lot of jargon, like ‘G force’. Of course, I easily worked out that particular example from context, but there were plenty of phrases I didn’t, and he spoke so quickly that I couldn’t even tell you what they were. It didn’t matter to me, though, as I’ve long since abandoned any attempt to understand anything scientific, so I just went along for the ride.

It got really interesting in the second half, when he answered audience questions. I must say they asked some good ones. He spoke a lot about his feelings in various situations, emotional and physical, and personal impressions. He told us about the view of stars from space. Unfiltered by the Earth’s atmosphere, they don’t twinkle, but they appear in a spectrum of colours, rather than the mostly silver stars we see from Earth. He said the Milky Way appears as a huge, bright streak, and when your eyes adjust, you can then make out other galaxies quite clearly.

Apparently astronauts have flashbacks sometimes, when they’ve returned to Earth. He told us about a friend, who was sitting at home having a drink. He suddenly reverted to being in space, stuck out his arm and let go of the glass! He told us that one morning he woke up and looked out of the window, and his eyes went funny and couldn’t focus – his brain was still adjusting to being in zero gravity, and having a definite up/down point of reference. Apparently, when you’re in space, without the fixed directions normally provided by gravity, the brain processes what you see differently. It’s funny to think that what I always considered a necessary function of the eye and brain is actually only conditional on people being on Earth. We could learn to live in non-Earth environments, and our brains would quickly adapt to working differently.

Interestingly, he believed in the colonisation possibilities of Mars. That’s a bit of a worry – haven’t we messed up our planet enough without wanting to ruin other ones? I guess questions of morality and ethics are outside the sphere of scientists.