The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Scott and I floated back through the tube to SpaceHab to activate several experiments that held the potential to improve medical treatments on a wide range of fronts. The BioDyn payload was a commercial bioreactor that contained work in several areas: protein research that could aid in ending transplant rejection; an investigation into cell aging, seeking tools to fight various geriatric diseases that cause immune-system breakdown; improved ways of making microscopic capsules to deliver drugs directly to the site of a disease; tissue engineering aimed at making synthetic bone to improve dental implants, hip replacements, and bone grafts; and heart patches to replace damaged heart muscles.

Then I moved on to ADSEP, part of a series of experiments in separating and purifying biological materials in microgravity with aims such as producing genetically engineered hemoglobin that may eventually replace human blood. Starting ADSEP meant moving its various modules from storage into active bays and setting switches and turning dials according to detailed instructions in our flight-data files. These experiments were only a fraction of the science we would do during our nine days on board.

By the time we returned to the mid-deck, I was hungry. It was then five and a half hours into the flight, longer than the total flight of Friendship 7. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and hadn’t had time to grab a snack from the pantry, a shallow drawer near the mid-deck ceiling that was loaded from the bottom, like a kitchen drawer at home but upside-down, with the contents secured with netting.

Eating involved first injecting hot or cold water into rehydratable packets, then waiting three to five minutes. As it absorbs the water, the food thickens and won’t float out of the packet. We all carried scissors for cutting the packets open as part of our regular equipment. The packets had small Velcro patches on their surfaces, so you could eat anywhere and stick your meal onto one of the orbiter’s hundreds of Velcro strips if you wanted to put it down.

I ate a full meal, starting with a shrimp cocktail and moving on through macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly in a tortilla, dried apricots, banana pudding, and apple cider. After eating, it was time to prepare for sleep. We had been up since six that morning, and working in space since mid afternoon. The schedule called for a two-hour presleep period that gave us time to wash up, send E-mails, review the next day’s work, or gaze back at Earth from one of the windows. A few of the crew put on headphones and listened to music. We all had the opportunity to bring a selection of compact discs along. My choices included music by Henry Mancini, Peter Nero, and Andy Williams. Peter and Andy are good friends, and Annie and I had been especially close to Hank and Ginny Mancini, visiting and vacationing with them on many occasions before Hank died in 1994. I also took along a disc of barbershop chorus harmonies by the champion Alexandria Harmonizers, a taste I inherited from my dad. After that, the entire crew slept. Space days and nights lasted the same forty-five minutes I had experienced in Friendship 7, and since the shuttle orbited through five of these days and nights during an eight-hour sleep period, its windows and portholes were shaded while we slept. Chiak and I bedded down in our sleeping bags in two of the sleep stations. Steve Robinson took another, and we reserved the fourth in the tier for storage. It was like being tucked into a long pine box with a sliding panel for a door.

The rest of the crew hooked their sleeping bags to the walls or ceilings wherever they pleased. Curt slept on the deck, Steve Lindsey in the mid-deck, and Scott and Pedro found space back in SpaceHab or the tunnel.

I used a block of foam for a pillow, even though my head and the rest of me, for that matter, needed no support in weightlessness. It was just a way of making sleep in space familiar, even though it meant bringing the pillow to my head instead of putting my head down on the pillow.

When we awoke, in the so-called postsleep period during which we washed with foamless soap and brushed our teeth with foamless toothpaste, I noticed that we all had fat faces. This resulted from the fluid shift that weightlessness causes. The body senses it no longer needs the same fluid volume it has in a gravity environment, and you eliminate the excess through urination. The fluid that’s left moves from the abdomen and legs into the upper body and face. We all looked comical, Steve Robinson even more so because his hair was standing up like Dagwood Bumstead’s. But the facial effect isn’t permanent; it would recede in another day or two. Steve’s hair, however, would keep floating.