LIFE IN SPACE On May 23 2017 Commander door of the Quest airlock Fellow Peggy Whitson opened the outer astronaut Jack Fischer accompanied her They left the International Space Station ISS They floated out into space Strong cables kept both astronauts tethered to the station This was Commander Whitson’s tenth space walk or extravehicular activity EVA Her task was to replace a broken computer For almost three hours the two astronauts worked outside the station They were circling the planet at 17,500 miles per hour 28,000 km h Whitson works on equipment outside the ISS
BECOMING AN ISS ASTRONAUT Astronaut candidates must have a college degree in engineering science or math They complete years of tough physical and mental preparation Training includes water survival and aircraft flight skills They must learn Russian Candidates learn how to put on bulky space suits Spacewalk practice takes place in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory It is the world’s largest indoor pool Candidates wear suits that keep them stable in the water The pool mimics conditions in microgravity Candidates practice moving around and doing repairs After being accepted astronauts learn specific mission skills They learn to repair equipment and conduct experiments 6 Despite this extreme speed they heard only their radios and the whirring of air circulating in their space suits The vivid blue and green Earth rotated below them The inky blackness of deep space loomed above Commander Whitson used bolts to secure the new computer On another part of the ISS Fischer installed two antennae The astronauts completed their jobs They returned to the airlock and re-entered the ISS
THE FIRST SPACE STATIONS In the 1970s both the Soviet Union and the United States built space stations The Soviet Union’s cylinder-shaped Salyut stations were the first The earliest Salyut station went into space in 1971 Solar panels collected the sun’s energy for power Cosmonauts traveled to Salyut on Soyuz spacecraft America’s Skylab station launched in 1973 Three crews visited it The first lived on Skylab for 28 days Salyut and Skylab were not permanent stations When objects orbit near Earth their orbits gradually get lower and lower They eventually dip into the atmosphere Without heat shielding they burn up Once their missions ended and astronauts left these early stations burned up in the atmosphere A PERMANENT SPACE STATION In 1986 the Soviet Union launched a space station called Mir It was designed to stay in space for many years Mir had separate sections called modules Astronauts from 7
