How to Astronaut by Terry Virts

Author:Terry Virts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Phones, Email, and Other Horrors

Communicating with Earth (Slower than Dial-Up)

How do astronauts keep in touch with friends and family back on Earth? The answer is both simple and complicated. There are lots of ways to connect with loved ones (and not-so-loved ones), which forced me to ask an introspective question. Did I really want to connect? In many ways I looked at that half year off the planet as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to disconnect. No internet. No texting. Limited phone and email. For me, it was the imperative to disconnect that was a blessing.

There were several ways to communicate with our fellow earthlings stuck on our planet. The most common method was by email. Good old Microsoft Outlook. For the first fifteen-plus years of the ISS, email was synchronized thrice daily. So you’d write an email, wait a few hours for it to be sent, then wait a few more hours until the next sync period happened, and hope there was a reply. Or not, depending on the subject of the email! If there were no reply, you’d have to wait hours for the next sync. This process went on for years, rendering email a not-very-efficient method of communication. Luckily, a few years ago the station program transitioned to a new system of continuous email syncing, where as long as the station is in satellite coverage, email accounts constantly synchronize. This allows emails to be used as a poor man’s text. You still have to float back to your crew quarters’ laptop to check email, and you have to have appropriate satellite coverage (roughly 90 percent of the time), and your buddy on Earth has to be checking his email religiously. But if all of those conditions are met, voilà—space iMessage!

There is also the possibility of logging on to the internet while on board the ISS. It is very slow, with speeds reminiscent of the good old dial-up days. It is only available when the appropriate comm satellites are in view of the ISS. And it requires a relatively painful log-in process. Despite all of these limitations, some astronauts love using the internet because it allows them to log on to their social media accounts so they can tweet directly, without having to email photos and quotes to a middleman on Earth who would post them to the appropriate social media account. It also allows you to surf the web, looking up such obscure questions as “How tall are the sand dunes in Namibia?” and “Where is the south magnetic pole located?”—two questions I asked the Google while in space. However, I quickly concluded that whatever strange facts I could learn through the internet weren’t nearly worth the pain required to log on and then wait forever for a Google query to get processed. I looked at my flight as a blessed opportunity to mostly go without the internet for 200 days, and only rarely logged on when absolutely necessary. It was exactly the detox that most of us could use.

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