You go (before you go)
There, all the knowledge you really need in order to be a successful astronaut. I had a ringside seat for the launch of STS-127 a few minutes ago, and my advisor, Chris Hadfield, took the time to answer the question. You know; THE question.
His tidbit of insider info wasn’t an existential comment, nor was it a philosohical apology for why our species has this special place for those who venture toward the stars. The people need to know. What do you do if you get the urge, to (you know), evacuate the internal plumbery? Julie Payette won’t have to “hold on”.
Turns out that the planners at NASA have installed a privy up at the 20 metre mark on the launch tower. Good. Now that we know more than we really needed to know, we can get back to admiring the work a team of seven highly trained specialists will undertake for the next sixteen days.
TV broadcasts make the whole thing look like fun, big time. You get to sleep in odd positions, and float balls of liquid around in free style splashtime. The view out the window is much neater than the one from your mundane commute in a Dash-8 (I’m a Canadian, etc.)
Still, spending years in military discipline and training for a few weeks “out of this world” might be more of a price than I’d want to pay. In passing, we’re about to mark 40 years since the first footsteps on the lunar surface. Seems like only “yesterday”, give or take a few other important memories.
What really seems like just the other day was the imaginary flights of my HB pencil, when I should have been work ing in my Fun With Phonics class workbook.
