Scott Kelly, the current commander of the International Space Station (ISS), conducted the world’s first Ask Me Anything (AMA) from space.
AMAs—which are a sort of online press conference with users on Reddit—have featured hordes of celebrities, thinkers, politicians, and the like, ranging from Psy to Bill Nye. Of course, none of them have been floating in zero gravity before.
Getting down to business in space
The AMA lasted for a little more than an hour before “real but nominal communication loss from the International Space Station” led Commander Kelly to sign off—but that was more than enough time for users to ask the record holder for total days in space and single longest mission some interesting questions.
For example, a five-year-old named Simon asked (via his father, Reddit user chancycat), “Could a rogue spaceship sneak up on the space station without you being aware, and dock?”
To which Commander Kelly replied, “Simon, Maybe an alien spaceship with a cloaking device. But not your normal spaceship, no. Unless it had a cloaking device, which doesn’t exist, the U.S. Air Force would see it coming.”
Of course, he fielded a lot of pretty scientific questions, too. In particular, Reddit users were curious about the health effects of living in space long-term (in Kelly’s case, over 300 days).
“Yeah, there are a lot of changes that happen. Some of them you can’t see, cause [sic] it’s your eyes!” the Commander wrote. In the case of the eyes, changes occur because body fluids—unencumbered by gravity—begin to flow more freely to the head, which affects the intraocular pressure of fluid inside the eyes.
Conversely, blood pressure is lower, because the heart doesn’t have to pump against gravity, Kelly added.
There are changes in other places you might not expect, too. “The calluses on your feet in space will eventually fall off,” Kelly wrote. “So, the bottoms of your feet become very soft like newborn baby feet. But the top of my feet develop rough alligator skin because I use the top of my feet to get around here on space station when using foot rails.”
Shut-eye in the sky
And of course, there’s a big difference in how you sleep in space. When discussing how he goes “to bag” (as astronauts on the ISS sleep in sleeping bags), Kelly described their sleep habits: They get up when it’s 6 am in Greenwich, England and go to sleep when it’s 10 at night there. (As in, they use Greenwich Mean Time to regulate their sleep cycles).
Not that consistency makes it any easier for Commander Kelly, who confessed that he isn’t a great sleeper even on Earth—and space just makes it more difficult.
“Sleeping here is harder here in space than on a bed because the sleep position here is the same position throughout the day. You don’t ever get that sense of gratifying relaxation here that you do on Earth after a long day at work.”
Kelly now also has dreams that “are sometimes space dreams and sometimes Earth dreams”—as in he now dreams in 0-gravity . “And they [the dreams] are crazy.”
Freefallin’
And all of this is thanks to living in what’s more or less zero gravity—which Reddit user emshedoesit asked Commander Kelly to describe.
“It feels like there is no pressure at all on your body,” he responded. “Sometimes it feels like you are just hanging but you are not hanging by anything, just hanging there. If I close my eyes, I can give myself the sensation that I am falling.
“Which I am, I am falling around the Earth.”
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Image credit: Scott Kelly/Twitter
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