Gadgetory

we're about to speak with astronauts tim peake jeff williams and tim kopra aboard the international space station to find out what life is like in lower Earth orbit please stand by for a voice check from The Verge station this is the verge how do you hear me we hear you loud and clear first off I would love to have you describe your day-to-day routine on the station you know what are your hours like is it a typical nine-to-five gig and what do you spend most your time working on you know it's a great question you know and it's an interesting place to both work and live because some aspects of our job are sort of like at home we have a list of events we have to perform every day but when you wake up and you get out of your sleeping bag in your crew quarters you float out usually float out to the place where we have on our food stowed and get some coffee and some breakfast and then do some cleanup originally coffee came in a freeze-dried bag but recently astronauts were treated to a microgravity espresso machine which pours coffee into a special zero-g coffee cup and then the rest of the day is really filled with science experiments with maintenance so that we can maintain the quality of life that we have up here the microgravity environment of the space station offers up a lot of opportunity for research and the astronauts are responsible for making sure those experiments run smoothly that can involve growing human tissues and protein crystals starting fires or cultivating producing plants in the veggie plant growth area there are very specific skills that we all have to have even just be assigned be able to apply the robotic arm because we have vehicle to come here that we capture and then the ground dock sit on to the space station we have spacewalks and it's a very challenging task we have to be proficient in that of course space isn't always the easiest place to live and work what have been the biggest adjustments both physically and mentally to living in microgravity it took about 24 hours before I felt actually comfortable because for the first 24 hours there's a lot of dizziness and disorientation just as your vestibular system needs to really shut down and I think your brain tends to then rely just on information coming from the eyes that you don't feel nausea along with this space adaptation syndrome astronauts often experience a lot of other health changes while in orbit people lose bone and muscle mass because they don't have to work against gravity astronauts must exercise such as weight lifting or running on a treadmill for two and a half hours each day to counteract this problem and the space environment has some other frustrating side effects too you know living as your gravity is some of the best things about living and some of the most frustrating things about living because you know you can't just step put your things out on a table and and expect it to be there you have to be very meticulous about all the things that you have it has to be in a certain place and you have to remember where you put it because no longer is it just a flat surface in which something can be so it can be stowed on any surface either with tape or with velcro and so that becomes a little bit of a challenge until you get used to living in this very unusual environment once you get the hang of microgravity makes for a great place to show off your skills as for general human upkeep the astronauts are deprived of one key earth comfort obviously we don't have a shower and that's probably one of the things that most of us most miss while we're up here and look forward to when we get back in the ground but we're we still are able to keep very clean essentially taking sponge baths we have a toilet that you would you would recognize as a toilet it works very well wonder how that toilet works the answer is suction astronauts use leg restraints to position themselves over the toilet and then a fan draws out waste and liquid each astronaut has their own personal funnel for going number one but don't worry the space environment is kept super clean what's the air like up there is there a distinct difference between the environment on the space station and the air here on earth you know we we get to enjoy pretty good air up here it's recycled it's scrubbed from carbon dioxide and other harmful gases it's a fairly constant humidity and temperature the one thing that's very different from planet Earth is we we have about ten times the co2 level up here but other than that is that it's a pretty good atmosphere often people ask about the smell of space and the smell of the space station I remember it being almost like a clinical smell when I came on board and I know you know Jeff having just arrived couple of days ago said our that that's very familiar smell is quite hard to describe at the space station the workday starts to wind down around 7:00 or 7:30 p.m. after that the astronauts can enjoy some free time such as watching a movie reading a book or talking with loved ones back on earth we also have great communications onboard the space station with our families we can use voice over IP telephones and effectively we can call anywhere in upon the planet so we can keep in touch with friends and families in the evenings once these are finished our working day then it's time for bed the astronauts crawl back into their sleeping bags and get some shut-eye before they do it all again the next day and that's how life continues on the station well until the astronauts hurdle back to earth and a capsule at more than 500 miles per hour thank you your verge station we are now resuming operational audio communications oh my god I love this they're doing flips all right did we kill it