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Our space agencies won’t be able to push out farther into space, to a destination like Mars, until we can learn more about how to strengthen the weakest links in the chain that makes spaceflight possible: the human body and mind.
If you were doing something safe, something you already knew could be done, you were wasting time.
WHEN I BECAME an astronaut and started getting to know my astronaut classmates, many of us shared the same memory of coming downstairs in our pajamas as little kids to watch the moon landing.
“Begin at the beginning,”
Baikonur Cosmodrome on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan.
The launch site was actually built in a village called Tyuratam, named for a descendant of Genghis Khan, but was referred to as Baikonur, the name of another town several hundred miles away, as subterfuge.
There is a fine line between ritual and superstition, and in a life-threatening business such as spaceflight, superstition can be comforting even to the nonbeliever.
Gennady
Mikhail Kornienko (“Misha”),
(The prime crew and backup crew always travel separately, for the same reason the president and vice president do.)
quarantine facility. This road
Gagarinsky Start (Gagarin’s Launchpad), is imbued with the successes of the past, and they have no plans to replace it.
The Sokol suit serves the same purpose as the orange NASA-designed pressure suit I used to wear to fly on the space shuttle. NASA
Soyuz means “union,” as in “Soviet Union,”
It took more than one hundred launches to get the components into orbit and more than one hundred spacewalks to assemble them.
It has been inhabited nonstop since November 2, 2000; put another way, it has been more than fourteen years since all humans were on the Earth at once. It is by far the longest-inhabited structure in space and has been visited by more than two hundred people from sixteen nations.
When Yuri Gagarin was on his way to the launchpad for his historic first spaceflight, he asked to pull over—right about here—and peed on the right rear tire of the bus.
The physical feeling of hunger is horrible, but much worse is the bottomlessness of not knowing when it will end.
Sometimes I think if my father hadn’t been a police officer, he would have been a criminal.
As bad as your parents may be at their worst, they are the only parents you’ll ever have.
I’ve heard it said that the children of conflict seekers are raised to have the emotional control their parents lack and then some—that fighters raise peacemakers.
