Nothing prepares you for the view. From space, Earth is alive. The greenest greens and bluest blues, auroras dancing at the poles, lightning storms flashing like fireflies. Landmasses defined more by ancient, tectonic textures than any arbitrarily imposed border. The impossibly thin atmosphere protecting 7 billion people from the dark, unforgiving void beyond.All seen while floating weightlessly.
Weightlessness — the experience is surreal, at least at first. Rookie astronauts bumble about like babies learning to walk and delight in sleeping on the ceiling. Arms come to rest in the zombie position. Hair stands on end as if electrocuted. Everything not pinned down floats away — glasses, tools, grains of rice scattering into a cloud of debris, while fugitive sauces paint stains on walls.
Since the dawn of the Space Age, only about 570 people have ever been to space. For the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, The Washington Post interviewed 50 astronauts from seven countries. A total of 26 reporters and researchers reached out to women and men, those who flew during Apollo and those who traveled on the space shuttles and Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They spoke to Russian cosmonauts, the first Malaysian and Afghan astronauts, and two NASA astronauts while they were on the space station. The goal was to describe what going to space is really like.
The astronauts remembered traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes, sunrise after sunset, on one constantly repeating loop. They conjured up the majesty of viewing Earth from a distance, the horribly bland food, the rattle of blastoff, the sensation of stepping outside for a spacewalk, seeing the Earth below and suffering the ultimate form of vertigo — the fear of falling all the way back down.
The 50 astronauts are (in order of citation): 
posted 06-19-2019 03:23 PM
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