Diary of an apprentice astronaut
I’m reading the book “Diary of an apprentice astronaut” by Samantha Christoforetti, and thoroughly recommend it. The title is a bit misleading because rather than being an apprentice astronaut, only the first half is about astronaut training, the second half in onboard the International Space Station. And rather than being an apprentice, she sets the record for the longest continuous space flight by a woman.
What a change from the early days of space flight! Later astronauts are far more competent than the early ones. Samantha begins as an Italian Air Force pilot. She’s only just qualified as a pilot when she wins a competition to become an ESA astronaut, beating thousands of other Italian applicants.
One astronaut training term is “slow orbit”, which refers to multiply circumnavigating the globe to attend courses in Japan, California, Houston, Europe, Star City in Russia, and back to Japan again. By the end of training, she knows how to operate every large and small tool, the location and operation of every switch onboard the ISS, how to operate three different types of space suits, how to handle all the different types of potential disaster, the four different ways to go to the toilet in space and why she doesn’t recommend two of them.
There is a lot of barely suppressed humour in this book. Within 24 hours, she handles all three of these embarrassing situations. Waking up for the first time on the ISS and being unable to find the light switch. The need to explain to mission control that “oh my God” means “I have a beautiful view” not “we have a critical systems malfunction”. The acting skill required to regularly report spacecraft room pressures while using the toilet.
Her role on the ISS is flight engineer. Operating the Canadarm, growing fruit flies, making and launching satellites, fixing space suits, as well as many health related and housekeeping related tasks.
One of the most important scientific results in the book is not a planned one. It’s a description of the effects of continuous high CO2 concentration on human performance. The International Space Station was running continuously at 3 to 4 mm Hg of CO2 partial pressure. On Earth, it’s 0.3 mm Hg. Negative effects, such as headaches, start to appear on passing 2 mm Hg.
On top of everything else, it’s beautifully written, recording emotional responses with equal facility to physical sensations.
She was the 216th person onboard the International Space Station.
