Speaker 3
I managed to step into a kind of freezing cold sludgy river where we're walking across a kind of a very very small kind of snow bridge you might call it I can see there was water then the the snow just went through and I got an extremely wet and cold foot and didn't think that much of it went to bed in the morning. My boot was completely frozen solid and I could not get my foot back in. And, you know, one of my colleagues came home and said, oh, is it all right? I brought a cup of tea, you know, from the camp server. Oh, it's been a while. Why is he coming over? And at that point, I didn't think, oh, you know, this is silly of me. I should have realised that, of course, it would freeze overnight. I should have, yeah, I should have maybe left it by the fire or but you know this is how we learn and it was a really nice moment of yeah the team supporting each other
Speaker 2
The winner of the Booker Prize 2024 is Samantha Harvey for Orbital. Hannah, this book Orbital, about the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station, six fictional astronauts on the ISS, has just won the Booker Prize. And that book talks a lot about some of the sort of the mundanity, the repetitive nature of a lot of the work on the space station, but also being so far removed and missing loved ones at home and so on. Did you talk to Rosemary about any of the challenges of being on the ISS long term, what that's like kind of emotionally?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, it does feel like a big part of the time is just maintaining the spacecraft. I asked about whether that would become mundane, and she said that it's challenging, but she wouldn't see it as mundane. It's part of the job. There's also just the health side of being in space. It's hard on your body. It felt really relaxing being in zero-G, but that's actually really bad in the long term for your bone health, your muscle tone. Astronauts have to spend about two and a half hours a day exercising just to keep in shape and kind of stay healthy. She said that people have all sorts of things they like to do as hobbies. She's particularly into board games. She's been planning which board games she can take that won't have loads of little pieces that kind of flying off in all directions I think you probably form such a strong bond with the other people that are on there and you do probably feel like you're in in your own world you're very focused on on what you're doing you're very busy I'm sure people do really miss their loved ones. But at the same time, you probably don't have loads and loads of time to think about that. You're probably kind of so focused on the task at hand, even kind of simple tasks take a lot of thought, planning, preparation, that perhaps lessens those feelings of missing what's going on on Earth.
Speaker 2
I think in my own reporting on astronauts in the International Space Station, there's one story that's always stayed with me probably more than any other. But I was talking to some astronauts about how they go to sleep on the space station, your classic sort of journalistic question. The astronauts, they tend to sort of hook a sleeping bag to the wall when they go to sleep. But at the time I was doing the interviewing, there was a cosmonaut who was renowned for just going to sleep where he finished his day. And so if you were up after most people had gone to bed, you might just see him drifting around, dozing but bouncing off the walls and he would essentially be carried just by the currents of the fans on the space station and so you could just be working suddenly have this sleeping figure gradually slowly drift past you and i found that absolutely extraordinary because this man and this space station these people are traveling at 17 and a half thousand miles an hour and they're falling to Earth, but they don't hit it because they're going so fast. And he's asleep, just drifting around. And I find the whole thing just such a bizarre juxtaposition of the reality and his mood and his state, that it's an extraordinary environment. Yeah,
Speaker 1
I mean, I guess you really are at close quarters and if you've got any sort of weird habits or kind of quirks, they're probably going to come out in that environment. And so I guess it makes you think who you'd want to take up there with you if you're going to be trapped for a few months with them, not just working together, but potentially seeing them floating past, sleeping. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Hannah, did Rosemary talk about what the future holds for her? What kind of missions could she be selected for?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so she knows that she will be assigned a six-month period on the International Space Station, but that could be any time between essentially now and 2030. And then, you know, beyond that, that's a bit of an unknown, really. I mean, we do know that there are going to be ESA astronauts participating in the Artemis missions, NASA's moon missions, which will, you know, see astronauts back on the moon. So that's a possibility in the future. And then, you know, further down the road still, there's this ambition to go to Mars and to land the first astronauts on Mars. And I asked her about that. And she said that was something she'd love to experience, you know, she'd definitely be up for it. But at the same time, she had quite a different perspective from someone like Elon Musk, who wants to kind of set up civilisations on Mars and, you know, talked about colonising Mars. And, you know, she didn't see it in that way.