Life aboard the space station: long days, sarcasm and swearing

The ISS crew, from left: Sergei Krikalyov, Yuri Gidzenko and Bill Shepherd

In this story: Horsing around in zero-G 'Guys, don't swear at me' RELATED STORIES, SITES

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- While astronauts on space shuttle Endeavour rested and joked on Wednesday, their colleagues on the International Space Station had another frustrating day filled with sweat and punctuated by swearing and sarcasm.

Endeavour has been docked at the orbiting construction site since Saturday, but the two crews -- five men on Endeavour, three on the station -- are living in very different worlds.

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In one, things work smoothly for the most part, and when something goes wrong, the ground support is excellent. In the other, struggle has become the norm and friction between the flight crew and ground controllers is often heated.

The hatches separating the two worlds will open on Friday, but only for a few hours, as the Endeavour astronauts deliver supplies. Then Endeavour will head home and the International Space Station (ISS) crew, known as Expedition One, will have another three months in space ahead of them.

For instance, when the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided that the limp wing of a new solar array on the station needed to be tightened, engineers worked on the problem around the clock. When a plan was devised, two astronauts on the ground suited up and hopped into a water tank used to simulate weightlessness.

When they were finished testing the plan, NASA ground controllers could even tell the shuttle astronauts which torque settings to use on their power tools and gauge the degree of difficulty for each task.

"Well, it sounds like you thought of everything," said Carlos Noriega, one of two spacewalkers who will attempt the repair on Thursday.

Later, in a series of television interviews, the crew felt loose enough to horse around a little when Noriega and shuttle commander Brent Jett took perpendicular positions to the others in the weightless cabin, as if they were standing on walls.

By contrast, the space station crew was dealing with an air conditioner that broke days ago when the system that removes carbon dioxide from the air also broke down. Since the systems are on the Russian module, the international crew of two Russians and one American dealt with Russian ground controllers, who scolded them after the astronauts decided to set up an alternate system for removing the potentially dangerous gas. "You could have damaged it," said a ground controller.

"We have to breathe with something," snapped Sergei Krikalyov, one of two Russians on the three-man team.

At one point the exchange between ground and space grew so heated that a ground controller said, "Guys, don't swear at me."

As Bill Shepherd, commander of the ISS team known as Expedition One said earlier, the biggest problem facing the crew is "how to fit 30 hours of work into an 18-hour day."

As he indicated, the ISS crew has not been getting the eight hours of sleep mandated or the two hours of exercise each crewman is supposed to have every day to slow the progression of bone loss and other health problems associated with weightlessness.

"We've been working 13 hours without any exercise or anything," Krikalyov complained on Wednesday. "We're going to have lunch."

Although the two crews cannot have direct contact until Friday, they have the unlimited ability to talk to one another by radio. For the most part, the ISS has been leaving the radio off. Jett, during an interview, described the relationship between the two crews as "fairly businesslike so far" and said the Expedition One attitude had been "more like neighbors than hosts."

The two commanders, Shepherd and Jett, conferred for about a minute Wednesday evening.

"We had a pretty wild day today," Shepherd told him.

As the first crew to live on the space station, the Expedition One crew had little opportunity to adapt to space life when they arrived five weeks ago. They entered a station that had just two days of breathable oxygen. Since then, they have struggled with both the hardware and ground support.

"They plan an activity to take one hour and we know it will take five hours," ISS crewman Yuri Gidzenko complained.

The $60 billion-plus station will be under construction until 2006. It is a joint project of the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan.

Copyright 2000 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

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HSF - International Space Station
NASA
Shuttle Orbiter Endeavour (OV-105)

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