It’s embarrassing to float up to a window, glance outside, and then have to ask a crewmate, “What continent is this?” If I turned my concentration away for too long, even just to grab a camera, I could miss an entire land mass. I found that at this speed, unless I kept my nose pressed to the window, it was almost impossible to keep track of where we were at any given moment-the world below simply changes too fast. In orbit, racing along at five miles per second, the space shuttle circles the Earth once every 90 minutes. Yet, to the astronauts it is an absolutely startling sensation: The islands really do look as if that part of the world has been carpeted with a big page torn out of Rand-McNally, and all we can do is try to convey the surreal quality of that scene. When people first hear that, they wonder what should be so surprising about Hawaii looking the way it does in the atlas. While flying over the Hawaiian Islands, several astronauts have marveled that the islands look just like they do on a map.
Eight and one-half thunderous minutes after launch, an astronaut is orbiting high above the Earth, suddenly able to watch typhoons form, volcanoes smolder, and meteors streak through the atmosphere below. And the difference is enormous: Space flight moves the traveler another giant step farther away.
An articulate traveler could describe the sights but would find it much harder to explain the difference in perspective provided by the new view from a greater distance, along with the feelings, impressions, and insights that go with that new perspective. Imagine trying to describe an airplane ride to someone who has never flown.
I find a way to answer all of them, but it’s not easy. And naturally enough, people want to hear about it from an astronaut: “How did it feel?” “What did it look like?” “Were you scared?” Sometimes, the questions come from reporters, their pens poised and their recorders silently sucking in the words sometimes, it’s wide-eyed, 10-year-old girls who want answers.
Everyone I've met has a glittering, if vague, mental image of space travel.
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