NASA
astronaut Jeff
Williams is glad to be back on Earth
with his family, friends and some long-sought peace and quiet after six months
aboard the International
Space Station (ISS).
"Six
months, as you know, is a long time to be on orbit and away from family and
friends," Williams said in an interview. "It's very good to be back on Earth."
As an ISS flight engineer, Williams worked, lived, ate and
slept high in Earth orbit before returning to constant pull of gravity on Sept.
28 with his Expedition 13
commander Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. space tourist Anousheh Ansari. Expedition 13,
which launched
on March 29, saw NASA's second
return to flight shuttle mission and first new
space station construction work since late
2002.
"It was an
honor to be onboard the space station during that time," Williams said.
"Obviously, there were a lot of key milestones met."
Among
those, Williams said, was the success of NASA's second post-Columbia accident
mission, STS-121 in July, which delivered
European Space Agency astronaut Thomas
Reiter to the ISS, bumping the station's population back up to a
three-person crew. Less than two months later, NASA's STS-115
crew aboard the Atlantis shuttle arrived
to add a pair of new
portside trusses and solar
arrays to the orbital laboratory.
"It's a
startlingly different configuration now with the additional solar arrays,"
Williams said as he recalled his last look at the ISS from his departing
Soyuz spacecraft. "I jokingly said it borders on ugly right now, so we have
to complete the assembly to get the other side to look the same."
Construction
of the space station stalled
after the 2003 Columbia
accident as NASA worked to recover from the loss of the shuttle and its astronaut crew. But after two test
flights and one successful ISS assembly mission, the $100 billion project is once
more underway as NASA prepares for the December
launch of its Discovery shuttle's STS-116
mission.
"Every step
is important," Williams said when Discovery rolled
out to NASA's Florida launch pad Thursday. "We want to get all the
laboratory modules up three and we want to increase [the station] to a crew of
six. We need the shuttle to do that."
A brief
emergency aboard the ISS in September, prompted by an overheating oxygen
generator and chemical
leak, proved the value of station crew training to Williams when he and his
Expedition 13 crewmates responded.
"I think
due to the training and the procedures, we went through the response not
without thinking about it, but in a very methodical and logical way that saved
the situation fairly early," he said.
Snapshots and silence
A colonel
in the U.S. Army, Williams served as NASA's ISS science officer during the
Expedition 13 mission and performed a host of experiments. One such project,
dubbed SPHERES,
tested the ability of two free-flying satellites to determine their position in
space.
But orbital photography,
it seems, was Williams' forte. The astronaut set an all-time record for the
most photographs taken during an ISS expedition. During Expedition 13, Williams
snapshots of Earth, space and the ISS pushed the station's total photograph
output past the 240,000 mark.
"I didn't
set out to try to capture any records," Williams told SPACE.com, adding that orbital photography was one-part hobby and
one-part travelogue to remember his mission. "I learned from my first flight
that really, when you come back, the most important thing that you have are the
pictures and video."
One photo
session in particular, in which Williams caught the
brief eruption of the Aleutian Islands' Cleveland volcano in May stands
out.
"There are
so many high points in six months," the astronaut said, adding that Cleveland's
eruption was one of those unique moments. "It was a very short eruption,
probably a bit longer than an hour, and was very exciting."
With
Expedition 13 complete, Williams has racked up 193 days of orbital living and
spent more than 19 hours working outside inside a spacesuit during three career
spacewalks. About 10 of his orbital days were spent during NASA's STS-101
shuttle flight aboard Atlantis.
But
returning home was a no-brainer, the veteran spaceflyer said. For one thing,
it's quiet.
"On the
space station, as you know, you have continuous fans and pumps running, and
some of these are louder than others," said Williams, adding that even the din
of recovery crews on landing day on the steppes of Kazakhstan amounted to a
whisper in his ears after Expedition 13. "For six months, not being able to get
away from that noise, I really missed that."
Williams
missed his family, wife Anne-Marie and two sons, more however, and is eagerly
settling back into life moored to his home planet.
"Right now,
we want to get our life back in order," Williams said. "I'll be working on
things in the house that need to be worked on."
After that,
he added, he'll think about what will follow his orbital trek.
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