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What Makes a Mission Name?
One of my several identities: Part of the Soyuz TMA-03M "Antares" crew. What space station crews call our “mission” is a bit more complicated than what you might think. Under normal operations, there...
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The Beast
Weightlifting in weightlessness is now my favorite oxymoron. (It has surpassed my previous favorite: reality TV.) Living in weightlessness causes our bodies to slowly degenerate, and for long-duration...
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Last Day on Earth
Cloud City. This is the downtown section. The day before launch maybe gone for a year perhaps half right Your last day on Earth what would you do? Robbing the piggybank of time to...
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From Us to You
A couple of pictures of the present we left in Dragon just before we closed the hatch last month. Click on the images to see them larger.
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Beating Stray Light
Stray light—those nasty reflections off our Space Station windows—can ruin the aesthetics of nighttime imagery and viewing. Reflected light from our numerous control panels and computer screens is...
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Warm Regards
If Matisse and Van Gogh worked together to make a portrait of the Expedition 31 crew, this is what it might look like: Left to right in the first image are Joe Acaba, Gennady Padalka, Oleg Kononenko,...
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A Slice of Time Pie
If my day on Space Station were a pie, it would be sliced into many wedge-shaped slivers. It begins with a small slice for waking up, hygiene, and a bag of coffee (even in space, it is comforting to...
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Carrying the Load
Humans make rather poor beasts of burden. Fortunately, nowadays heavy loads are pretty much relegated to machines, saving our spines for recreational activities like donning backpacks and heading into...
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An Astronaut’s Guide to Space Etiquette
Chapter 6: Having company for dinner. It does not matter that you’ve seen the same faces every day for months on end; you’d still like to invite everyone over to “your module” for dinner. With...
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Going Home
When a frontier feels like home, it is no longer a frontier; it has become “civilization.” Those determined to wander must now pack their bags and move further into the cosmos. Space Station is very...
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