I met Olathe, at the fossil table right outside of the meeting room.
The fossil table is a demonstration area where you can teach kids to
locate fossils scattered in a sea of flat grey pieces of limestone. The
idea is that the kids learn to pick out the flat grey fossils from the
flat grey stones. The activity might lead anyone with an average to
high boredom susceptibility score to flip the entire table over in
frustration. I was transfixed, sorting the stones, and stacking and
balancing the discarded ones like a city of miniature Stonehenges.
I noticed Olathe’s laptop before I noticed her. It had two bright blue
stickers on it – one for NASA and one for the CSA (the Canadian
Space Agency).
“I know who you should interview for your book,” she said
even before introducing herself. I hear that a lot. I expected to hear
about a neighborhood thrill-seeking skateboarder or ice athlete.
“Oh?” I asked.
“An astronaut trainee,” she replied decidedly.
“Huh...” I thought. “Nice idea. But where in the world am
I going to find an astronaut trainee?” Olathe smiled broadly.
I’m fascinated with people who are drawn to environments
and careers that I would find absolutely intolerable. And as intoler-
able careers go space travel gets my vote. On TV and in the movies
space travel is a joyous experience. It’s smooth, sleek, and efficient.
Passengers zoom around in antiseptic spacecrafts that look like
class A office suites. It’s even nice enough to bring your family
and pets. For now, that’s the stuff of science fiction. Currently
accommodations for space travel are a little more clunky.
The early Apollo missions were jalopies compared to the
Millennium Falcon and were relatively short treks. The fastest of
these reached lunar orbit after only about two days. The Lunar
Module spent another three days getting back to Earth. That’s five
days (if you don’t count the time they spent on the surface of the
moon) in a ship that’s not much bigger than a Mini Cooper. Five
days of roaring engines, no bathing, and having to do precise
calculations.
Even in the more modern International Space Station (ISS),
things are only a little better. The ISS is silent compared to older
space vessels, but the background noise can be distracting, even
befuddling. Air circulation fans, transfer pumps, and fluid coolant
pumps produce a constantly shifting roll of noise, despite efforts to
keep it as noiseless as possible. Over time, this noise can affect your
hearing.^8 There’s a relentless hum of about 69 decibels, which is126 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge