Armed with a video camera and sense
of humor, the commander of the International Space Station (ISS) is working
hard to show students on Earth the ins and outs of orbital life.
ISS
Expedition 12 commander Bill
McArthur has tackled everything from a space station tour to the
orbital lunch menu in a series of video vignettes aimed at sharing the human
spaceflight experience.
"If you think this is really fun,
you're absolutely correct," McArthur said this week while narrating a video
tour of the space station that he had recorded earlier. "The nice thing is, if
you decide it's easier to travel on the ceiling...well, have at it."
McArthur and NASA ISS astronauts
since Expedition
7 have documented their experiences via video or other means as part of the
agency's educational effort to reach students and the public, NASA education
officials said.
For Expedition 12, McArthur and
flight engineer Valery Tokarev have highlighted their holiday
meals and the differences between Russian and U.S. spacesuits.
They have also detailed how the station is controlled by laptop computers,
where its power comes from, as well as other facets of orbital living. The
programs have aired on NASA TV.
"He loves it," said McArthur's wife
Cindy, who also serves as an education specialist at NASA's Johnson Space
Center (JSC) in Houston, of her husband in a telephone interview. "He's a
talker anyway, he likes to talk."
Cindy McArthur said that the
Education Office at JSC works each ISS-bound NASA astronaut to plan out their
programs, and also oversees their radio or video downlinks with schoolchildren
back on Earth.
While some of the work is planned
into an ISS astronaut's daily schedule, many crewmembers choose to use their
free time - such as weekends - to record messages, NASA officials said.
ISS
Expedition 13 flight engineer Jeffrey Williams, who is set to launch
toward the space station next month with mission commander Pavel Vinogradov and
Marcos
Pontes - Brazil's first astronaut - has
said that he hopes to keep journals or log entries to relate his orbital
experience.
"This gives [the public] some
insight as to what's its really like," said Ed Pritchard, NASA's program
director for teaching from space, of McArthur's videos. "That, while things are
different up there...they do have the same rigors that they go through."
According to Bill McArthur - who is no
small fan of U.S. Army football - some of those rigors are as basic as
avoiding doors and using the restroom.
"I'm slowing down because if you
slam into one of these hatches...it hurts," McArthur said as he passed the
hatches between ISS modules only to reach a vital ISS room. "This is an
important an important area in the station and we get a lot of questions about
this area. Yes, it's the toilet."
Glib aside, McArthur's videos have
touched on almost every aspect of his six-month mission, NASA officials said.
"I think most astronauts are
life-long learners," Cindy McArthur said. "They want to share that journey they
took to get to the space station...they think about spaceflight and love the
connection to life on Earth."
He and Tokarev have lived aboard the
space station since
Oct. 3, 2005, and have performed two spacewalks,
a series of experiments and a Soyuz spacecraft relocation
during their mission. The astronauts will return to Earth aboard their Soyuz
TMA-7 spacecraft in early April.
"I have always been amazed that I am
able to fit into such small location," McArthur said of his Soyuz seat in the
video tour.
Even more amazing, the astronaut
said, is the view of Earth through the window ports built into the space
station's floor.
"You look down, and it's almost as
if you're in this great ship that's sailing above the Earth," McArthur said.
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