On a sunny Wednesday in southern Oregon, I sit on the front porch, put my earbuds in my ears and join a Live feed hosted by StandfordMed featuring astronaut Kate Rubins who is currently aboard the ISS.
Astronaut Scott Kelly who wrote about his yearlong mission on the station in the book Endurance said this, “The ISS is a remarkable achievement of technology and international cooperation. It has been inhabited nonstop since November 2, 2000…. put another way, it has been more than 14 years since all humans were on Earth at once.” (Endurance, Kelly, p. 27)
And now, we can add even more years to that marker. On NASA’s website, right now as I check it, a counting marker lists the station’s time in orbit as: 8165:10:27:24 (days, hours, minutes, seconds). To go one step further than Kelly, I suppose we could count Yuri Gagarin’s launch into space and the first orbit of the earth by a human in 1961 as a starting marker for the time-of-humans-off-earth. But, from 1961 until 2000, no space travel was constant. I mean, rockets don’t get built overnight.
Four of the
astronauts—three from the United States and one from Japan have been on the ISS
for 134 days. The astronaut Kathleen (Kate) Rubins and the two Cosmonauts have
been aboard for 166 days.
Kate Rubins, astronaut, microbiologist, and Stanford alumna was the 60th woman to fly in space when she launched on her first mission in 2016. Since then, she has spent a total of 281 days in space. She has spent 26 hours and 46 minutes in four EVAs (extravehicular activity) aka space walks. She was also the first person to sequence DNA in space.
During the interview, Rubins’ holds a mic which she occasionally lets go of and which then floats in front of her. She takes it back in hand before it can get too far. Her blond ponytailed hair streams out behind her like seaweed in ocean water. As she floats in the micro-gravity, feet probably holding her in place with the use of some kind of handle (footle?), she answers questions about the difficulties of doing science in space, of what it’s like being in a confined laboratory area, and what it’s like living in a micro-gravity environment.
While I’m not directly interacting with her, it still feels like I’m touching space. I’m one degree removed from an out-of-this-world experience. I’m exhilarated.
When the interviewer asks her if she’s ready to come home she says, “Of course, I’m looking forward to being back on the planet,” but she’d take the opportunity to stay longer in space if NASA allowed that. She says that she’s requested a longer stay several times, but that she’s been told she’s coming home on the Soyuz MS-18 in April as planned.
Sitting with my tea near to hand, my hair held back in an unwaving messy bun, I think of how cool it would be to talk like that of being back on the planet. To be that kind of adventurer; one of a small pool of elite humans who have lifted far off the surface of the earth. Even so, sitting with the sun warming me, I’m also grateful to have my feet on the ground, for technology that enables these kinds of interactions, and for the chance I’ve gotten to feel the excitement of human capacity and the life of an explorer.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Rubins
The cool thing about our technological age is that we can send video images and sound bytes from space. From as close to us as the International Space Station (ISS) to the surface of Mars to the deep reaches of darkness and gaseous material near Jupiter and beyond.
As one of perhaps few benefits of our adaptation around the Covid virus and the limiting of in-person social experiences, the availability of being part of certain organizations or presentations has increased. Thus, I’ve been able to “join” groups that otherwise would have been limited to a geographical area or a field of study.
