ISS Expedition 8 Commander Mike Foale, KB5UAC, took the controls of NA1SS aboard the International Space Station November 25 for his first school group contact. The QSO with youngsters at the Renmark Primary School in South Australia was arranged via the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program. Foale predicted during his ham radio conversation with the Renmark pupils that humans would one day colonize the moon.
“People should be living on the moon in another 10 years,” Foale told the youngsters, and I hope some of them will be you.” Foale and Russian cosmonaut Alex “Sasha” Kaleri, U8MIR, have been aboard the ISS for about one month. Foale said he’s already a bit homesick, and he expects that to get worse after the Christmas holiday.
The British-born Foale, who did a duty tour on the Russian Mir spacecraft in 1997, said he has wanted to be an astronaut since the age of six. “People laughed at me when I was a little boy, but I kept thinking about it and studied hard at school and eventually ended up getting to the ISS,” he said. Living aboard the space station, he explained, is “like living in a laboratory” and involves a lot of hard work.
In response to one youngster who asked what it sounded like in space, Foale remarked that the sound of the air-circulating fans is pervasive. “We hear fans running all the time circulating air,” he said. “One time, we turned off all the fans, and it was dead quiet.” The fans are necessary because of a lack of convection currents in the spacecraft’s microgravity environment. Foale pointed out to the students that the crew could not leave the fans off for very long without risking a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide.
The selection of food aboard the ISS is good, he said. “I went to boarding school in Britain,” Foale quipped, “so I can eat most any food. The food here is better than boarding school.”
Foale also noted that he does not get bored in space and always has something to do in his off-time. In addition to e-mailing family and friends, he said he enjoys computer programming and also keeps a journal.
Making the Renmark school group contact possible involved arrangements on two continents. Members of the Riverland Radio Club
ARISS http://www.rac.ca/ariss/ is an international project with participation and support from ARRL, NASA and AMSAT.