Story Musgrave Interview (page: 6 / 8) Dean of American Astronauts	Print Interview

Tell us about sleeping in space. What is that experience like for you?

Story Musgrave: I've gotten a lot better at doing that. You have to leave your earthly self back here. It's not just night, you know. The sun's going up and down every hour and a half. Before going to sleep, I try to spend ten or 15 minutes thinking about how I'm going to have a creative sleep period.

Here's another opportunity. I'm in space. I have an opportunity to do something different than climbing in a one-G bed and lying there. I could simply get in a sleeping bag. That's the way it's always been human space flight You get in a sleeping bag and you strap yourself in it, strap your head down and here you are.

I always try to do things that are unique up there, because it's such a privileged opportunity. I spend ten or 15 minutes before I embark on sleep to think of something that I've never done before, to experiment.

You float, right?

Story Musgrave: At times. On my first flight, I started playing around with sleeping bags. I'd try them all different ways. But then...

On my second flight, one time we worked 24-hour day shifts, where you had one team work 12 and you'd work 12. They were banging around all night. And, with their banging around all night working, it was hard to sleep. I took a pill to help me to sleep and I forgot I took the pill. So I went off to sleep, nowhere, just out, floating around. You don't get the head nods in space. Your head doesn't fall, there's no gravity to make that happen. So I went off to sleep, and actually I went floating upstairs where my buddies were, and they said, "Oh, a monster!" They threw me back downstairs. They didn't tuck me in, they just played with me all night. I'm off sleeping with the pill, you know. I bounced around all night. And so from there I learned to float, just plain to simply float.
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It's just delicious to go off to sleep, in the twilight zone. You don't know where earth is, it could be in any direction. You also don't know where the shuttle is around you. You are not touching anything. It's just a fantastic separation from everything. You go into the twilight zone, and occasionally these cosmic rays go through, so you have these little light flashes going off in your eyes.

There's times, falling asleep, when you feel like you're outside of the space ship. You see the earth, and you see the space ship going around it. It's a huge meditation in which you can let go of everything and have no contact with anything. I'll turn a little switch in my mind and I can turn my mind off totally, in an instant. Nothing, no images, no thoughts. I can accomplish that instantly, but I'm aided by that kind of environment.

There's other ways to sleep too. On the Hubble repair mission, we had four space suits in a rather small closet called our air lock. Two of them were affixed to the wall, the other two were floating around. I'd swim up into their arms and get a bunch of them ahold of me. I might grab a leg over here, bend the knee, so I have several feet which are pushing on me and I'm wrapped up in several arms, and I go to sleep this way, being held in the arms of unoccupied space suits. That's another way of trying to have a great sleep experience.

Are these suits that you designed?

Story Musgrave: I helped design those in the 1970s. Although going off to sleep with them, I didn't think of them that way, I thought of them as people.

Doing that within this small closet, I didn't expect to move or go anywhere. There's one little window in the back. We get 45 minutes of light in there, and 45 minutes of night. Every time I woke up a little, I would find that I had rotated. It turn out that even with that many things holding me, I was rotating. Two of those suits and me were doing this dance all night.

A lot of times I'll go in the laundry. I'll take a bunch of laundry bags and curl up with them, and we'll get stuffed in some corner. It's like a water bed, but it's a laundry bag bed at zero G.

Sometimes, as opposed to that kind of softness and floating, I will choose a very hard environment. I'll jam myself in an aluminum corner, where there's no room to go anywhere and the steel has got me contorted into some position. It may not sound nice, but it's another opportunity, and I try to do it all.

What have been some of your most exquisite views from space?

Story Musgrave: If you close your eyes and you think about earth, you have this whole map or globe of the earth that's human-created, with the cities and the countries all different colors. But over the last 30-some years, because of TV pictures, and IMAX and photographs, humanity is being transformed in how they look upon earth, and they're getting to be very sophisticated geographers.

As an individual, the same thing happens. When you first go into space, you've studied geography, and you think of earth as a map. But then you look out and you get the real picture. The Hawaiian Islands, for instance. You get a real visual image of the whole chain of Hawaiian Islands and what they look like. You pass them again, and again, and again, but there's a hundred different images, they move. There isn't just one picture of Hawaii. What's the sun angle? Sunset, sunrise, sun over head, what are the ocean currents? What is the weather?

It's a huge, moving thing. So many images that it replaces the map in your head. And so, as you do this you eventually have an image of the earth in your head which is part map and part real. You get this montage of places that you've been over and experienced, and it's the real stuff. And you fill in the rest with a map

If you talk about South America, I have to work hard to picture a map of South America, because I have passed over South America. I know what a South America pass is. I know what passes are over almost the entire earth now. I can sit here and play this incredible video in my head of what it's like to make a pass over a given area. Right down to very small details. The more I do it, the richer this kind of experience is. I keep adding to it, and I get more and more defined in my details.

What's it like to see the South Pacific from space?

Story Musgrave: The South Pacific is probably the most beautiful place for me. I haven't been there yet, but I'm going there soon. Just because you haven't been there on the earth, doesn't mean you can't fall in love with a place from space. When you look at the earth, you have an experience just as powerful as being there.

The beauty, the aesthetics, the different shades of blue, the coral atolls where a volcano has come up! The coral lives at a certain depth below the surface, the volcano sinks back down and it just leaves this kind of lagoon in the middle. The shades of blue, the green, and the beaches on both sides of these atolls! The beauty is extraordinary and you don't see it so much your eyes or your head, as you perceive it in your abdomen.

This goes on all the way from the Philippines to New Guinea and northeastern Australia, and all the way to Hawaii, one coral atoll after another. Extraordinary beauty, these big patterns before you. It is just a wonderful place in the world, although each continent has its magic.

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