International Space Station Expedition 8 Commander Mike Foale, KB5UAC, has told students at The King’s School in Canterbury, England, that he believes human spaceflight has some significant advantages over robotic space exploration. The British-born Foale, who once attended the school, answered a dozen questions during a January 28 school group QSO with NA1SS arranged through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program.
“When the people get there they actually have to experience it firsthand, they can communicate it better,” Foale said of human space exploration, “but most important they can understand the unusual things in a way that the robots never could.” He also pointed out that people are very good at fixing things that go wrong, and added, “that’s something I do quite a lot of up here.”
In reply to a question about how well his training on Earth prepared him for living in space, Foale said his pre-flight training was sufficient to learn the technical aspects but was unable to truly replicate the environment of space–“the weightlessness, the view, and the brightness of the sun and the darkness of space.”
Foale said he believes a new phase in spaceflight is on the horizon. “I think the most significant one will be commercial spaceflight,” he told the students. President George Bush’s recent call to refocus NASA’s goals toward landings on the moon and Mars set a tone that he hopes the rest of the world will follow, he said.
At the school, control operator Carlos Eavis, G0AKI, used the call sign GB4FUN, which was borrowed from the Radio Society of Great Britain for the occasion. Among those on hand were the Lord Mayor of Canterbury, school dignitaries, representatives of the RSGB and AMSAT-UK, other students and members of the news media.
ARISS http://www.rac.ca/ariss is an international educational outreach program.