Space Oddities by Joe Cuhaj

Author:Joe Cuhaj
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

8

GOOD MORNING TO OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD AND TO ALL THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE WHO CALL IT HOME

In the indescribable blackness of space as you race across the heavens at five miles per second, the sea of shimmering stars, planets, and galaxies that glimmer above you slowly fade from view as a dark, black crescent appears. The crescent is shrouded by a thin layer of blue that slowly becomes thicker, its color getting brighter. An orange disk, the sun, peeks out over the crescent that is Earth, so bright that the stars above seem to run and hide. A brief rainbow of color bursts across the horizon.

Grabbing a camera, astronaut Anne McLain clicks off a shot of the spectacular light show going on outside one of the windows of the International Space Station then greets the people of Earth. “Good morning to our beautiful world and to all the beautiful people who call it home.”

Soaring more than two hundred miles above Earth, every space farer will tell you that mornings in Earth orbit are spectacular. Of course, at five miles per second, an astronaut experiences sixteen sunrises in a single day, one every ninety minutes, but that doesn’t mean that they experience “morning” that often. So how do astronauts and cosmonauts know what time it is?

It’s simple enough when you’re the only country flying in space. For example, from Project Mercury during the 1960s to the final flight of the space shuttle in 2011, the crews were flying on American central time. Things became more complicated when the International Space Station (ISS) began operations and there were flight controllers on two separate continents half a world apart. Operating on American central time put Russian controllers in a bind. The station teams generally operate on a twelve-hour day from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. in what amounts to a typical workday for mission controllers. Being seven hours ahead of their American counterparts meant that when it was quitting time at 7:00 p.m. Houston time, Russian controllers were calling it a day at 2:00 a.m., a long day to say the least. Unconfirmed stories suggest that the Russian team demanded a change in what time standard would be used because their local transportation stopped running at a certain hour.1

An agreement was reached between the two space superpowers that the space station and ground crews would operate on Universal Coordinated Time (the old Greenwich Mean Time) to make the schedule equitable for all parties.

Viewing the sunrise from ISS is always spectacular, but when it comes to an astronaut’s morning routine, one fun tradition has been sadly missing from that routine—the morning wake-up call. For American astronauts, the wake-up call became a highlight of their morning routine when ground controllers began choosing songs with which to wake the crew. NASA’s acting assistant administrator for congressional relations, Lynn W. Heninger, wrote that the purpose of the wake-up call was “to promote a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps among the astronauts and ground support personnel.”2 Or

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