CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- She says space smells like a
"burned almond cookie.'' She praises the wonders of Velcro, and describes
the hazards of trying to wash her hair in zero gravity.
Space tourist Anousheh Ansari's blog offers uncommon
insight into everyday life on the international space
station through the eyes of an American businesswoman.
Her 10-day adventure ends tonight when she touches down in a
Soyuz vehicle on the steppes of Kazakhstan along with Russian cosmonaut Pavel
Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeff
Williams.
"It is hard for me to write tonight,'' she wrote
Thursday in her last posting from space. "My emotions are high and there
are millions of thoughts going through my head.''
The 40-year-old Iranian-born Dallas suburbanite, who sometime
signed her entries "Space Cadet,'' paid $20 million for her adventure. She
was a last-minute substitute for a Japanese businessman who failed a medical
test for space flight.
Although she has a master's degree in engineering and made
a fortune in the telecommunications industry, Ansari's blog entries have been
free of tech-heavy jargon, exhibiting an enthusiastic, chatty style. She
tackled topics that vintage, tough-guy astronauts such as Alan Shepard surely
would have shirked from: motion sickness, the clumsiness of weightlessness and
personal hygiene.
"Well my friends, I must admit keeping good hygiene in
space is not easy!'' she wrote in the opening of one entry as if a columnist
for Cosmopolitan.
She then described washing her hair by opening a water bag
to make a huge bubble over her head, rubbing in dry shampoo and then being
careful not to make sudden movements that would burst the bubble into small
pieces of water floating everywhere.
Zero gravity has made it impossible to keep objects from
drifting away, she wrote.
"So God invented Velcro for this very purpose. Shhhh!
Don't tell anyone up here but I've lost a few little things already, like my
lip-gloss.''
One night, she discovered her toes were bruised from
gripping bars along the walls of the space station. She informed readers that
she uses her big toe to hold herself in one place.
And she wrote about the smell of space -- at least the space
inside the orbiting lab: "It was strange ... kind of like burned almond
cookie.''
At least eight astronauts have kept online diaries recording
their stay at the space station, but they weren't traditional blogs since
readers couldn't post responses, as they have on Ansari's blog. Astronaut Ed
Liu even described the nitty-gritty details of going to the bathroom at the
space station.
But few achieve the entertaining, intimate tone of Ansari's
entries.
Her status as a private citizen gives her more liberty to
describe the details of everyday life than active astronauts or cosmonauts,
said Eligar Sadeh, professor of space studies at the University of North
Dakota.
"Given the constraints the astronauts operate under,
not being able to necessarily speak freely or share the real insights or
thoughts, given concerns of them being government employees,'' Sadeh said.
"Clearly (the blog) is an inspiration as well for many individuals.''
Hundreds of those individuals from around the globe have
left comments on Ansari's blog.
"I've been involved with the theme of manned
spaceflight as a hobby (passion?) for more than 25 years, read a lot of books
... spoken to numerous astronauts and cosmonauts,'' wrote Luc van den Abeelen
of the Netherlands in Ansari's blog. "But only reading your blog entries
do I really get a taste of what it is like to be in space.''
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