Lost in Space

Lost in Space

   Morning has broken, as they say, and today is another day.  It has taken 24 hours, far from the 92 minutes it takes to see the same thing aboard the International Space Station, a mammoth football field-sized object orbiting our planet, its path perched firmly in the middle of our ionosphere.  And on this Sunday morning when the airwaves flood the U.S. with one of sports' most lucrative franchises, the crypt of my aunt is now sealed, her ashes encased in a bronze urn, Hans Solo like, her husband's ashes just an inch away.

   During the service yesterday, I spoke of being able to relate only from my viewpoint, one as a nephew whose eyes saw her and remember her from that vantage point.  I wasn't her sister, as I pointed out to the audience, noting my mother (her remaining sister) sitting nearby; and neither was I her child.  I could say all the words I wanted to while standing at the podium, but there was no way I could imagine what the feelings of my mother or her sons were, feelings that likely came in several forms.  Asking my cousin (one of my aunt's sons) if his emotions about her came in waves, he simply nodded.  More like tidal surges?, I queried. He nodded.  A tsunami, pulling way out then returning with a vengence at an unexpected time?, I hinted.  He nodded.  It was all beyond my understanding, I realized, at least until it would happen to me.

   Thus I was fascinated by the recent article in The Atlantic about living on board the International Space Station, yet another something that we on earth cannot relate to.  Falling asleep and risking a carbon dioxide headache because the gas from their exhalations simply floats in front of them, astronauts also face blood flows changes and bones losing density.  And here's a feature NASA is still unable to resolve, especially as we consider longer and longer space flights:  “Five years ago,” says John Charles, of NASA’s Human Research Program, “we had an astronaut on station all of a sudden say, ‘Hey, my eyesight has changed. I’m three months into this flight, and I can’t read the checklists anymore.’ ”  It turns out, Charles says, that all that fluid shifting upward in zero‑G increases intracranial pressure.  “Fluid pushes on the eyeball from behind and flattens it,” says Charles.  “Many astronauts slowly get farsighted in orbit.”  Astronauts need precise, reliable vision, so its deterioration during spaceflight is hardly a minor problem.  And it’s a particularly humbling one.  NASA has known about the eyesight issue for decades.  “We saw this on Skylab”—the first U.S. space station, which intermittently housed astronauts for up to three months at a time from 1973 to 1974—“and on the shuttle,” Charles says.  The importance of it just wasn’t clear until astronauts were regularly spending months in orbit.  And at the moment, NASA doesn’t know how to fix it back on Earth.  Bone mass, muscle mass, blood volume, aerobic fitness all return to normal, for the most part.  But astronauts’ eyes do not completely recover.  Nor do doctors know exactly what would happen to eyesight over the course of a mission four or five times longer than those of today.  “We’re not watching anything else as significant as this right now,” Charles says.

   It's an enormous task with over 60% of the time spent on maintaining the craft, much like our ships at sea (as the article mentions, "the cost to run and sustain the Space Station is about the same as the cost to run a single U.S. Navy aircraft-carrier battle group").  But the bottom line was, we want to know.  What's out there?  Can we survive?  Is there more?  "Space makes us impatient," the author writes. "We’re impatient for things to go smoothly."

   Life is like that, isn't it?  We want things to go smoothly and are puzzled and surprised when it doesn't quite work out that way, even when we know the order of things.  When something life-altering occurs, we often wonder, why me?  Or why him and not me?  Or why does an orderly world or god tolerate this?  We want to know, what's out there, what happens...we're impatient.

   But, at least in my case, I found my aunt's service a bit calming.  Perhaps it was because I was an outsider of sorts, a nephew who lived an ocean away and had a bankload of memories but mostly altered ones since they were primarily from my childhood.  And perhaps is was simply because I was older now, a bit more able to not only reflect but also a bit more able to start accepting that this was how things worked;  in the big scheme of things, the umpire was now about ready to point at me and call me to home plate.  "You're up," would be the next words I would hear.  No more yawning and stretching and thinking that I had all the time in the world.  Soon I would face that inevitable pitch and start swinging.  It was anyone's call how I would do when my time came, hit a home run or strike out;  heck, I'd be tickled as all get out just to get a base hit.  It would be mostly up to me and I knew that...but I still had time.  My mother was still hanging in there, still staring down that pitcher.

   I can imagine the feeling of taking that first step out of the space station, where, "When you look at Earth between your boots, that first step is more than 1 million feet down...you are literally an independent astronomical body, a tiny moon of Earth, orbiting at 17,500 miles an hour."  I can imagine it but I can't relate to it.  Just as I couldn't relate to what my cousin or my mother was feeling during my aunt's service.

   We humans are beings filled with independent emotions and thoughts;  perhaps all life is like that.  But the world,, as Newton discovered, doesn't revolve around us.  And perhaps that microcosm called the ISS floating far above us represents just how far we have to go, not only to understand how to get along and maintain and repair, but just to understand.  We can imagine it, as we have over the centuries.  But perhaps it is now time to begin thinking how we can relate to it.  And it might just start with learning to not be so impatient.