Living in Space

9/11/05 – 9/17/05

By C. Zaitz

The radio alarm goes off- it’s 6am and time to get up. A faint glow from the sun is just beginning to tickle your eyelids. You try to roll over but you realize…you are floating. Within minutes the whole room is bathed in light. You still feel like rolling over, so you mimic the effect by moving the small pillow strapped to your head from the left to the right. Just five more minutes, hit the snooze…but the sunlight is relentless. Rather than wait forty five minutes for it to go down again, you unzip your sleeping bag, release the restraints, and begin to fly toward the vacuum canister you call the bathroom. Slow and steady, you move hand over hand, feet dangling behind, through the narrow passages. Your personal speed limit is proportional to how hard you want to hit your head on protruding objects. Thus begins your new day aboard the International Space Station.

Currently there are two men aboard Space Station Freedom, but they are coming home soon. John and Sergei have been in weightlessness since April and are coming back to earth in October on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They will leave William and Valery behind to run things on board the station. This exchange of astronauts every six months or so has been going on since October of 2000 with the arrival of Expedition 1. Coincidently, Sergei Krikalev, the Flight Engineer on this first expedition, is the same Sergei of Expedition 11, the crew which is now aboard the Space Station. He must like it up there.

Besides living in microgravity, the astronauts also experience very short days and nights; they circle the earth every ninety minutes. Thankfully they keep time with the Earth and get eight hours of sleep, regardless of the sun streaming through their window. During the day they can see the earth from above. The Station’s orbit sometimes brings it within our view, and that’s when we can see the Station from below.

If you’d like to see the International Space Station, here are your best bets. On Tuesday, September 13 at 9:10 pm, look toward the northwest, about thirty three degrees above the horizon. The station should be visible for about one minute. On Wednesday, September 14 at 9:36 pm, it will be seen in the northwest about forty two degrees above the horizon, visible for less than a minute. On Thursday, September 15 at 8:25 pm, from the northwest to the east, it will be visible for three minutes about thirty degrees above the horizon. The best day is Friday, September 16 at 8:52 pm. For about two minutes the space station will fly from the northwest to the southeast, reaching a height of seventy eight degrees above the horizon, almost overhead. It will look like a bright star or planet moving steadily across the sky. If you have binoculars and a steady hand, you can get a closer glimpse of the Station.

While out waiting for the Space Station, be sure to see the planets – Jupiter and Venus still in the west, and Mars now showing up in the eastern sky a while after sunset. On the evening of the 17th the full moon will rise at sunset. This moon has been called the Harvest Moon in folklore.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!