‘What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been,’ the latest book from Ariel Waldman, a champion for citizen science, provides 60 short vignettes of stories from the brave men and women who have boxed with the heavens in our cosmic backyard. Illustrated by Brian Standeford, the book includes the bite-sized chronicles of astronauts Anousheh Ansari, Brian Duffy, Ron Garan, Richard Garriott, Greg H. Johnson, Michael López-Alegría, Ed Lu, Sandy Magnus, Pam Melroy, Jim Newman, and Bryan O’Connor. Below is an excerpt from the book.
What’s it like in space? It’s something many of us have wondered about, and something, of course, that astronauts are asked all the time. Much like space exploration itself, the question is boundless and hopeful. Asking “what’s it like in space?” represents our collective aspiration to dare how far humans can go and what we can achieve when we get there.
Despite several decades of human spaceflight, any answers to “what’s it like in space?” are provisional and will continue to change as the exploration widens, both in scope and accessibility. I enjoy reading through these stories and meditating on what someone four hundred years in the future might write about what it’s like in space. I can only hope that space exploration will slowly, but surely, become more accessible over the coming decades and centuries. Maybe someday this book will be as quaint as books describing what it’s like to fly in an airplane.
Falling Asleep
Sleeping in space can be difficult. With no bed to lie in due to the lack of our familiar gravity, astronauts have to adapt to sleeping in midair by relaxing their muscles enough to drift off. This can be tricky in a floating environment—many space newbies attest to being jolted awake by the feeling of falling, giving new meaning to the term falling asleep. One Russian cosmonaut became such a pro at sleeping in space that he was often seen outside of his sleeping cabin, drifting by in a deep sleep, his body occasionally bouncing off the walls.
The Smell Of Space
No one can agree what space smells like. While astronauts can’t smell space directly through spacesuits, they have tried to explain the smell that lingers in the airlock after conducting a spacewalk. Answers have ranged from “wet clothes after rolling around in snow,” a “burnt almond cookie,” “sweet-smelling welding fumes,” “ozone,” “burnt gunpowder,” “fried steak,” and a “mild version of the smell of an overheating car engine.” The source of all this smell debate lies within the dying stars that created our solar system and produced “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons” that cling to astronauts’ spacesuits during spacewalks.
Outside Of The Bubble
Seeing the stars from space can make you feel like you’ve spent your entire life inside a bubble. Two-time space shuttle astronaut Mike Massimino described what it was like to look at the stars during a spacewalk:
“It is kind of like looking at the Sun from the bottom of a swimming pool, versus looking at the Sun above the swimming pool. You are above that layer, so all of the stars, they don’t twinkle. They are perfect points of light.”
Ariel Waldman is the global instigator of Science Hack Day, a fellow at the Institute for the Future, a National Academy of Sciences committee member, a White House Champion of Change for Citizen Science, and the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. ‘What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There’ can be found here.
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