Taking a cellphone call during a meeting is rude at the best of times, but when that meeting is a public discussion in front of an audience of several hundred, putting a ringing phone to your ear is surely the height of bad manners.
So when US astronaut Catherine “Cady” Coleman answered her phone on the stage during a discussion with former space explorers at the 62nd International Astronautical Congress at the Cape Town International Convention Centre last week, lots of eyebrows were raised.
But, in fact, Coleman’s call was a carefully arranged publicity stunt, because the person on the other end of the line was none other than her Nasa colleague, Michael Fossum, speaking from aboard the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting more than 350km above the Earth.
Fossum is commander of Expedition 29 to the ISS and although the line was not perfect, his voice came through loud and clear at times. He explained that he and his fellow crew, Sergey Volkov of Russia and Satoshi Furukawa of Japan, were really busy with a number of different science experiments.
“At times it feels as much as though we’re jugglers than astronauts and cosmonauts, there’s so much going on,” he quipped.
Fossum was also asked for his opinion on a question from the audience addressed to all the panellists – Coleman, veteran Russian cosmonaut Valery Ryumin, Chiaki Mukai of Japan, and Germany’s Thomas Reiter – about whether the national flag that all astronauts wear on their spacesuits should be replaced with a unified symbol along the lines of “one flag in space”.
Fossum was diplomatic in his response, calling it “a really interesting question” and suggesting: “There is something to be said for a common symbol, but maybe each country will want the freedom and privilege of having their own symbols too.”
Coleman, who flew twice in the Nasa space shuttle Columbia in 1995 and 1999 and who only returned from her last mission in March – this time to the ISS – said the motivation for the space programme had changed.
She had been only four months old when Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in April 1961 and so had no memory of this historic event. “The reaction in the US to Gagarin’s flight was extreme. I think the US couldn’t believe this had happened. It galvanised them, it created a great excitement and the spirit of competition – I think that’s what drove the early Apollo flights. It was our way of having a shooting war with our (Russian) colleagues that we now fly with.”
While the early astronauts had been driven to go “higher and faster”, backed by a strong nationalistic motivation, this had now changed, Coleman suggested. Although she was still proud of US achievements, she was personally motivated by the belief that people generally should be in space.
This was also reflected in the global space programme, and was probably motivated by scientific discoveries in recent decades. “When we started to discover the universe, I think it joined us together,” she said.
Reiter, who spent 179 days aboard the Russia space station Mir in 1995 and also flew with the shuttle in 2006, was just three when Gagarin achieved his first orbit, but has a distinct memory of being woken by his father to watch the Moon landing on July 21, 1969.
“That was really the moment when I was, how shall I say, when I became enchanted to take up his profession.”
The Cold War regime of competition in space had evolved into co-operation, Reiter added.
Explaining why he supported commercial space flights for tourism, Reiter said he had been mesmerised when he saw the whole of Europe in a single view from space. “I really believe that those of us who have had a chance to see Earth from this unique perspective, return with a different view, and this accompanies us for the rest of our lives. So the more people who can do it, the more it will have an important impact on life on Earth.”
Cardiovascular surgeon Mukai was nine when Gagarin blasted into space and she had been “so excited” when reading an account of that first flight. But Japan had no space programme at the time, so becoming an astronaut was “not a realistic dream” for any Japanese student, she noted.
Gagarin had visited her country the following year and had spoken of looking back from space at the “blue planet” and of how precious Earth was, she recalled. “I was very much impressed, and Gagarin’s flight paved the way for the new world (of space exploration) inducted in Japan.”
Mukai subsequently flew two missions on the shuttle: Columbia in 1994 and Discovery in 1998, becoming the first Japanese woman in space.
Ryumin, the veteran Russian cosmonaut who set two world records for space duration during his four missions in 1977, 1979, 1980 and 1998, said Gagarin’s flight had been so unimaginable at the time that it had not made any special impression on him.
However, as an aerospace engineer, he had been involved in the design and manufacture of the Soviet’s first attempt at building a space station. Arriving at work one evening, he learnt that a spacecraft that had set a duration record – then just 24 days – had landed successfully, but that the crew were all dead.
Speaking through an interpreter, he said: “I realised that one of the reasons for their deaths was that they were not properly trained… actually there were no training and stimulation facilities (at that time)… and there were a lot of mistakes. If the crew had followed all the flight documentation precisely, they would have survived.
“It was at that moment that I decided I would become a cosmonaut… I was very young, and very inspired, and very self-assured.”
Asked whether the next space missions should go to Mars or the Moon, he replied: “I believe we can hardly do anything useful on the Moon, so I would prefer Mars. That is different from our management’s position. They want to go to the Moon, and I ask the question: ‘Why?’” - Cape Argus