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Hitting the Books: The invisible threat that every ISS astronaut fears:
Despite starry-eyed promises by the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin, only a handful of humans will actually experience existence outside of Earth's atmosphere within our lifetime. The rest of us are stuck learning about life in space second hand but that's where How to Astronaut by former ISS commander Colonel Terry Virts comes in. Virts shares his myriad experiences training for and living aboard the ISS — everything from learning Russian and space-based emergency medicine to figuring out how to unpack an autonomously-delivered cargo shipment or even prep a deceased crew member for burial among the stars — through a series of downright entertaining essays.
And where many titles of this genre can become laden with acronyms and technical jargon, How to Astronaut remains accessible to aspiring astronauts of all ages. Just maybe don't read the story below about how the ISS crew thought they were all going to die from a toxic ammonia leak to your 6-year-old right before bed.
Excerpted from How to Astronaut: An Insider's Guide to Leaving Planet Earth by Terry Virts (Workman). © 2020.
For all the emergency training I went through as an astronaut, I never expected to be holed up in the Russian segment of the ISS, the hatch to the US segment sealed, with my crew waiting and wondering—would the space station be destroyed? Was this the end? As we floated there and pondered our predicament, I felt a bit like the guy in the Alanis Morissette song "Ironic," who was going down in an airplane crash, thinking to himself, "Now isn't this ironic?" This is how we ended up in that situation.
Read the rest of the fine article for a gripping tale of planning for failures -- simple and catastrophic -- and the human side of dealing with them.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Monday September 28 2020, @01:46AM (2 children)
One tenth the science for ten times the cost.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Zinnia Zirconium on Monday September 28 2020, @02:01AM (1 child)
Infection [fandom.com]
Optimism from the decade of grunge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 28 2020, @08:16AM
Runaway will be, of course, long gone, dead from his own stupidity ("μορὼν λαβια" or some other principle he fatally takes as valuable at one moment). But, come a red giant or the heat death of the Universe, I bet aristarchus will still be stuck in California, fighting the right-wing of the time.