![]() But going to space, you are really out of reach. When you travel on Earth, you're almost never out of touch. But at the same time I found it all very relaxing. It was incredibly hard work, stressful in its own way, and scary-if you screwed up, you screwed up with people all over the world watching. Shuttle flights were always busy-experiments, daily maintenance, EVAs, robotic operations. New astronauts get so worried about fulfilling their duties that they sometimes get hours or days into a mission before stopping to watch the sun rise, even though it happens 16 times a day on orbit. The most amazing thing about my spaceflights was how relaxing they were. The position of the shuttle put Earth in those windows, so when I woke up the whole world was out there in front of me-in that moment, just for me alone. On the last two nights of my final flight, I slept on the flight deck, my sleeping bag strapped beneath the overhead windows. I would tuck my arms into the bag and wear four layers of clothes sometimes I'd warm up a package of food in the oven and throw it in my sleeping bag like a hot-water bottle. The downside? It was also the coldest part of the shuttle by about 20 degrees. Nobody worked in there when we weren't doing an EVA (extra-vehicular activity), so it was like my own private bedroom. On most of my flights, I slept in the airlock, in the middeck of the shuttle. Sometimes you wake up in the morning to see an arm floating in front of your face and think, “Whoa! What is that?” until you realize it's yours.Īstronaut Marsha Ivins on board the space shuttle Atlantis in 2001, her fifth mission. ![]() If you don't tuck your arms into the bag, they drift out in front of you. Then you strap your head to the pillow-a block of foam-with another Velcro strap, to allow your neck to relax. You tighten the Velcro straps around you to make you feel like you're tucked in. The bag has armholes, so you stick your arms through, reaching outside the bag to zip it up. On the shuttle, you strap your sleeping bag to the wall or the ceiling or the floor, wherever you want, and you get in. One of the strangest experiences in space is one of the simplest on Earth: sleeping. ![]()
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