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Rookie astronaut Victor Glover, a Navy F / A-18 carrier pilot, is used to high-speed maneuvers and sharp accelerations flying high-performance aircraft. But nothing prepared him for the sounds, the sensations, and the prolonged acceleration he felt as he entered orbit. on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Or the view from 260 miles up. Or the feeling of weightlessness.
“My brain is constantly trying to figure out where it is,” he told reporters Thursday during an orbital press conference aboard the International Space Station. Maybe it didn’t help that it ended up in a sleeping station embedded in the ceiling of the lab’s Harmony module.
“I don’t know if it’s because I’m a new kid, they made me sleep on the roof,” he laughed. “So every time I stick my head out, the entire space station is upside down. So I stay upside down as much as possible.”
She said that daily tasks take longer as she adjusts to the environment, “but it’s an interesting challenge that I actually find a bit of fun. So it’s been a lot of emotions and I’m honestly still processing it.
NASA TV
Glover, Commander Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi took off from the Kennedy Space Center Sunday night tethered to a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
After a 27.5-hour encounter, they docked at the space station Monday night, greeted aboard by Expedition 64 commander Sergey Ryzhikov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, who arrived at the station on October 14 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The Crew Dragon launch marked the first operational use of the commercially developed spacecraft, intended to help end NASA’s post-shuttle reliance on Russia for flights to and from low Earth orbit.
Because the crew buckles up before refueling begins, Hopkins said they could hear the thrusters pumping into the tanks below and “you can tell it wants to take off.”
“And he just jumped off the platform,” he said. “It was amazing. At about 40 seconds into the flight, you rev a little (the engines) and you definitely realize that, but then when it was time to get going again, it really accelerated and yes, it really moved. “. . “
The separation of the first and second stage of the rocket “is always quite exciting, I think, in any rocket and this one is no different.”
Willliam Harwood / CBS News
“And then this slow, steady build-up of Gs to orbit. We were all very excited. As we passed the hundred kilometer point (which marks the boundary of the lower atmosphere) we all said ‘welcome to space’ for Ike.”
Glover’s crewmates jokingly call him Ike, an acronym that stands for “I know everything.” Describing his impressions of the launch, Glover, the first African-American to make a long flight to the station, said “the short answer is that it was amazing.”
“I could sit here and tell you throughout this conference how wonderful the trip was,” he said. But the staging was dynamic. The second stage is much closer to our spaceship, so you felt it was much closer and personal.
“And then when that engine shut down and we’re in orbit, I mean, it’s surreal. I’ve seen tons of images, but you know, the first time I looked out the window at Earth, it’s hard to describe. There are no words, no words to describe it. It was an incredible feeling that occurs once in a lifetime. “
Rubins said: “I was so excited to see Ike’s face come out of that hatch. We’ve been thinking right now up here along with the two Sergeys, waiting for our four crewmates … We were really very excited to see them come in through the hatch “.
