"The ink doesn't fall", they said. "Just try for a moment writing face down with a ballpoint pen and you will see I'm right", they said. During my first flight I took with me one of those very expensive ballpoint pens with a pressure ink cartridge, the same as the other Shuttle astronauts.
But the other day I was with my Soyuz instructor and I saw he was preparing the books for the flight, and he was attaching a ballpoint pen with a string for us to write once we were in orbit. Seeing my astonishment, he told me the Russians have always used ballpoint pens in space.
So I also took one of our ballpoint pens, courtesy of the European Space Agency (just in case Russian ballpoint pens are special), and here I am, it doesn't stop working and it doesn't 'spit' or anything.
Sometimes being too cautious keeps you from trying, and therefore things are built more complex than necessary.
But that was not the topic of this message. From a height of 215 km (it's 11:07 Moscow time right now) the clouds look gorgeous, with a three-dimensional quality that I couldn't see the previous time from 550 km.
Where it is warm (right now we are over the Philippines) the clouds are like fields full of mushrooms. Some seconds afterwards there's an area of high clouds, flat, looking more like a bride's veil.
Some more seconds of travel and we can see a storm, a high cloud penetrating the clouds and coming up until it seems it wants to touch us.
In the portions of sea we can see, the sun-glare appears now in an intense orange colour, while the atmosphere surrounds the curved horizon as a thick blue veil, strangely well defined. Its rim spreads a bit more, but it would almost look more like a liquid covered with a layer of its own vapour.
It will be the sunset in two minutes (it's 12:10 now). The Earth is already black below us and people sleep.
The sun, centred in the blue arc of the atmosphere, is surrounded by blackness. There's only 30 seconds left. The low side of the atmosphere gets orange, and the sun flattens. An orange brilliance remains, then a flattened ball of light, then only the orange and blue arc of the atmosphere, and then, and only then, the higher layers of the atmosphere become visible.
An arc two times wider but fainter appears on top of the previous one, ephemeral, and both disappear suddenly in the most perfect blackness.
The eyes get used to it and begin to distinguish the Earth from the sky. If we are lucky we will see lights from the cities or the Aurora Borealis; if not, it will be a good time to watch the stars. This is certainly a job with good views.
24 October 2003
You are mesmerised looking out the window of your spacecraft. As theres no work to do in the capsule in the next hours and you dont feel like sleeping, you observe the show of the Earth and the sky. The spacecraft turns and turns around its axis and displays to you one landscape after another.
Below your spacecraft the planet is black, almost like the sky. Like every night in orbit. Or maybe not? Far away, towards the horizon between the black of the sky and the black of the Earth, a yellow-green haze of irregular shape begins to show up. Too weird to be clouds.
As you get closer it turns into more and more brilliant gauze veils, which form curtains coming up from the ground. Another turn of the spacecraft and you see them again, you are almost above them. The curtains get more and more defined - they are striped and reach very high, even higher than the spacecraft. You go straight towards them, and you cant avoid feeling somewhat uneasy - will this be dangerous?
When you enter them, all the curtains next to you start to light up and change shape, as if you were walking among sunny window blinds.
The phenomenon lasts for one minute, then two, even three, and nothing unusual can be felt, the spacecraft goes on with its very soft trip along the rail of its orbit. When you leave behind this phantasmagoric image and face the blackness again you feel relief, but also a sense of loss.
Technical notes:
- The Soyuz spacecraft turns over its axis almost all the time, to keep the solar panels oriented towards the sun. Making the spacecraft turn over an axis perpendicular to the plane formed by the solar panels is the simplest and cheapest method to keep the position, and artificial satellites have used it since they were invented. Watching through a spacecraft window while this rotation takes place is like being in one of those revolving restaurants they put on top of towers.
- The described phenomenon is the Aurora Borealis (well, in our case it was Australis, which is the same but in the Southern hemisphere). The Earth's magnetic field protects the surface from electrically charged emissions coming from the sun or from other objects in the galaxy. These particles get trapped by the magnetic field and move inside it, approaching the Earth especially by the poles. The interaction of these particles with the upper atmosphere produces the Aurora. It is actually dangerous to go through areas of very high radiation, but a short while is safe enough.
25 October 2003
Try to imagine having to work in a 50-metre long laboratory with several lateral corridors. Everywhere in this lab theres equipment in which experiments are being performed.
The work is planned by people from another country, who keep phoning the experiments operator to learn details, to ask how things are going or, more often, to order the operator to conduct the experiments in this way or that.
There are several telephones in this lab, but none of them wireless, and the operator has to go to one of them to answer each call. Its true that being able to solve every doubt and to ask for advice sometimes makes the operators job easier, and that he or she doesnt feel alone when problems arise.
Ah! We are forgetting a little detail: the telephones have four lines, and the operator has to pay attention to the sound of the ring to push the right button when answering, because each of the four groups controlling the operator uses a different line. Oh, but its true, we havent said there are four groups, all of them very kind.
The operator doesnt even pay attention anymore to the fact that the calls can come in two languages, none of them in ones mother tongue. Nor to the fact that the operator spends the whole day meeting in the corridors the other four operators in the lab, all busy with a different task -- be it experiments or repairs of lab material. In such a lab one always has a feeling of rushing, of having to hurry everywhere. The day becomes tiring... and one feels like closing up, turning off the lights and going home.
Lets add another factor: its not possible to go home to sleep. As the lab is in a remote region, one has to sleep inside it and eat inside it -- pre-cooked food. There are even those who stay in the lab for up to a year. Every now and then one feels like going out, see something else, have a walk, open the window to get some fresh air, but that is not allowed either. In this lab the windows can never be opened, and the air gets recycled through filters.
This is somewhat the feeling of the International Space Station, as seen by a European performing experiments both in the US and the Russian segments, directed by people from the European Space Agency.
Lets introduce now an additional factor: the lack of gravity. In the Station one doesnt walk nor run; one floats from one side to the other. The sensation is of course very interesting, and the lack of gravity is also the reason to invest so much money in placing a lab here. Its true that its possible to cross the corridor very quickly if in a hurry, only by pushing at one side and braking at the other. However, experience shows that it is incredibly difficult to do this properly without touching the walls, and ah!, as soon as one touches a wall at high speed and without control the elves of physics take revenge, and one is sent rotating and kicking everything.
The people who have already spent six month in the Station are able cross the 50 metres in little more than say, fifteen seconds. My record after three days here (although I have experience from another flight) is 25 seconds and a bump on the head. Even if it seems a game sometimes you really have to fly from one side to the other, like when you have forgotten something at the other end (of course) and the time runs. When theres some free time its natural to train to move in a more controlled way, to avoid touching anything, especially the treacherous - and very very hard - half-opened hatches. I personally estimate I would need a couple of weeks to fully adapt myself, that is, to learn to move without having to think about every movement in advance.
Everyone knows that the very best part of this lab is the view. Alongside this is the pleasure of discovering that things get done despite the inconveniences.
26 October 2003
In a tidy house or office with a clean floor you can see immediately if someone has dropped something, a glasses case, for example. Lying on the floor, this object catches the eye, and everybody passing by will notice it. In the Space Station a number of factors make it very difficult to find something that is lost.
First of all, of course, zero gravity. The other day I had a ballpoint pen clipped to my trousers when I brushed past something and lost it. I noticed immediately, so I turned around quickly to pick it up. Nothing. My ballpoint pen was nowhere to be found, it had flown away, I didn't know in which direction, up, down; it could have been anywhere.
I began to accept the fact that I had lost it, but when I turned to proceed with my daily schedule I saw it in front of me, flying in the same direction I was moving. When it flew away it must have bounced on something, and kept going without waiting for me.
The Station is made of modules in which the working area is more or less rectangular, but ahead and behind; up and down; and even right and left there are multiple adaptors with hatches. As a consequence there are many corners in which things can hide.
Besides that, which wall is the floor? And which is the ceiling? In many places the four walls of the 'tube' that make a module are all the same, so everything is difficult to find.
For example, I do quite a lot of work in a module that is not in the main 'tube', but is attached to a side. You have to make a ninety-degree turn to enter that module from the others. Until then, everything is fine; when you enter, what is below you, you call 'the floor', and what is above, 'the ceiling'.
But sometimes you might come from the other direction on your trip along the tube, and make the turn. Now you find that the ceiling is the floor and vice-versa. Because of this, if I have left the computer switched on and attached to the wall, when I go back I always have to make a full turn to find it.
And, finally, there are so many things attached to all four walls. Describing it like this must make it sound untidy, with everything in the way, but it's a matter of necessity. The photo cameras can't be put away because we take a lot of pictures of the work we do with the experiments, and of the Earth as well. The cameras are all stuck in place with Velcro, together with a variety of lenses, flashes etc. Sometimes you need to turn three times to find the camera you are looking for.
Other items that are also in view are spare parts, food packages, bags full of clothes, etc. It is not that we use these things everyday, but there's no more room in the cupboards. The Station is not finished yet, and there won't be enough storage space to put everything away until all the planned modules have been connected.
One of the things that I use most frequently is a notebook where I take down information about the experiments. I carry it with me everywhere, I write down the precise hour at which I have changed the samples, the results, things to be aware of, etc.
This notebook has to come back to Earth with all this data; it will help the scientists to rebuild exactly how everything has happened. The first days this little notebook drove me crazy. I stuck on it, of course, a large piece of Velcro to help keep it from flying around. But at the end of the day, if it was not in the first place I searched then it took me a while to find it.
Now I've got used to leaving it in one of three different places, but at first it was a nuisance because I didn't know if I had dropped it somewhere else or if it had loosened itself from the Velcro and was floating around, in which case it could be just about anywhere.
Once I made the famous turn carrying the notebook in my hand, together with some books and other items. When I reached the workplace I didn't have the notebook anymore. I knew I must have lost it when I slightly hit the corner, so I went back immediately. It was nowhere to be found. After some frantic minutes fearing that I would bitterly pay in delays by the end of the day - I found it in a little hidden corner. Thank heavens.
I forgot to mention an important factor in loosing things: the air stream. As everything floats, and because the air gets renewed and cleaned with fans and filters, anything that flies away tends to follow the direction of the air stream. The air stream actually helps more than hinders, contrary to what you may expect. If you have lost something small you only have to wait a couple of hours and you know where it will go: to the filter where the air enters the circulation system. We are already used to checking there every now and again: all kind of interesting things can be found.
27 October 2003
All you know is that you've just woken up. Nothing, really nothing, squeezes you or pushes you, nor do you have to make any effort to raise your arm and rub your eyes. In fact, strangely enough, your hand seems to want to get closer to your eye all of its own accord. You feel you have slept very deeply, and the world around you calmly comes into focus. A noise engines? No, it's the fans - a light breeze.
You open your eyes to a weird light and laptop computers switched on all around you. Why are they up on the ceiling? Of course, you are waking up in a space station, after a night inside your sleeping bag, with your arms floating in front of your face - as usual - and legs in that semi-curled position in which the push and pull between the different muscles is evenly balanced. It's amazing how well you can sleep in here, thanks to how much they make you work and the softness of the mattress.
You check the time and it's a quarter to five. Soon, you think, the alarm clock will ring. You could sleep a few more minutes - it would do you good. The mist clears and the daily plan comes to your head. Let's see, biology, medicine, physical experiments... and TV interviews. Then you suddenly remember the first interview is at 06:00 and that can't wait.
If you start an experiment 15 minutes late you may be delayed for the rest of the day, but the orbits are a relentless clock and the Station will pass over the antennas picking up the television signal at 06:00, not a second more, not a second less. Will you have time for breakfast after the connection?
Forget about sleeping a bit longer, quickly get out of the sleeping bag and look for the precise plan of the day, even if you have little hope: most likely you have to be ready for work very soon. Oops, too quickly! The sleeping bag and the daily plan, which was hanging on the wall, quickly move away.
Without your reflexes fully awake you don't manage to find a handle and you end up in the laptops, which are luckily attached to the wall and for the nth-time they cushion you. It doesn't matter, the laptops have an electronic version of the daily plan - in fact, after the television interview it's straight into the experiment activities, and you have to hurry.
You take the clean clothes, the soft-soled shoes and the paper with the details of the interview. Flying towards the 'bathroom' you meet no-one, everything is quite dark and you are the first up. The bathroom is just a point in the corridor with a large mirror and everything stuck to the wall with Velcro - combs, water bags, soap bags, no-rinse camping shampoo, etcetera. You find your towels and wet one of them with the soap. You get cleaned, more or less - this is not the day to be meticulous. Comb your hair, get dressed... now for breakfast.
Luckily your commander is already up and, even if he hasn't had time to get dressed, he is already switching on the Station's television system and setting up the camera. What does the note about the interview say? With the Spanish flag in the background, this television, this commentator, these are the possible questions.
Stretch the flag, which of course in zero gravity stubbornly persists in becoming all tangled up. This is not the first time, all is under control and the background is ready in two minutes. Its 05:30.
You take some tea bags, a canned omelet and a bag containing pieces of white bread. You begin filling the bags with lyophilized products and in the rush you burn your hand - nothing serious, the temperature is such that it avoids people getting badly burnt.
With the can-opener you uncover the omelet, which at first sight could be pt or cheese. Fortunately the spoon has not flown away during the night, this time you won't have to recover it from a filter; you are not making beginner's mistakes anymore.
Its 05:48 and the lights have to be turned on. Your commander shouts to you "balans bieloie!!" and you immediately grab a piece of paper, put it in front of the camera to help define the white for the camera - that's what your commander was asking you to do in Russian. The focusing process makes you leave your breakfast for a while.
It's 05:58, you leave somewhere, half-eaten, the last bits of omelet, most likely they will stain something. You squash the can to save room in the garbage, and they are already calling through the radio in Moscow. Yes, we are ready (not true, you are still cleaning your face). Ok, you can start the interview.
When the interview ends, you share a burst of laughter with your mates because of the near miss. This relieves tension - there's still a full day of work ahead. Thank heavens it ends back in your sleeping bag - a pure feather mattress.
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