Eugene native Dr. Stanley G. Love described his day at work on Feb. 7 as “pretty intense. Usually there are dozens of people working around the pad and often there is no Shuttle there. This time there were only us and our seven-person strap-in crew. Everybody else had been evacuated to keep them safely clear of the fully (fueled) rocket, which stood there, tall as an office building, hissing and steaming. And I was about to go up and climb into it…”
Some Eugene residents might be convinced they’ve gone to outer space, but Love is one of the select few who really has. The Eugene-raised NASA astronaut blasted off this past February to work on the International Space Station. He described his experience in detail in an e-mail interview with the Emerald.
Love’s father, Glen Love, is a professor emeritus of English at the University, and his mother, Rhoda Love, is a retired biologist. In an interview, Rhoda Love said she, Glen and their daughter watched the launch on television in Eugene, all holding hands. She remembers the tension. “Our hands were kind of sweaty at the time,” she said.
The launch went as smoothly as blasting through the atmosphere can go, but after they reached the space station, one of Love’s fellow crew members fell ill. Although he hadn’t been trained for it, Love had to fill in for him on a spacewalk.
Paradoxically, the draining challenge of an unplanned spacewalk gave him the opportunity for his first good night’s sleep in space: “I didn’t sleep very well during the flight, but I got a decent night’s sleep when Rex and I were sealed in the Station airlock at reduced pressure to get the nitrogen out of our systems so we wouldn’t get the bends when we got in the space suits the following morning to go out in the vacuum of space, 200 miles up, and climb around the outside of the Shuttle and Station on a spacewalk. I had never trained with $2 billion worth of European space hardware at stake. By that time, all that seemed left was to do the job. I suppose there’s a lesson in that somewhere.”
But looking through the face mask of his survival suit during his spacewalks, Love was struck by the view.
“The Earth is the most interesting thing in space. It’s impossible to describe how huge and beautiful it is,” he said. “Everything about it is fascinating: the patterns of the clouds, the colors of the land, the shading of the oceans. At night you sometimes fly right through the aurora. You can see lightning discharges cascading for tens of miles across gigantic tropical thunderstorms. Space gives an amazing perspective on the Earth.”
The return flight to Earth reunited Love with gravity, air and his family after nearly two weeks apart.
“Three days after our return, I still felt dizzy; just walking around the halls in my building at work was a fun and exciting experience,” Love said. “I’m also appreciating things like trees and wind, which are in short supply in space.”
With more than a month’s perspective, Love reflected on life after the voyage.
“It was certainly worth the years of hard work, even more so because the work itself was so interesting. It’s not like the work was a price I had to pay to reach the goal of flying in space,” Love said. But at the same time “it feels wonderful to be back on Earth, at home with my family.”
Rhoda Love said her son will be coming back to Eugene to visit with them and to bring back objects he brought to space from the schools he attended.
She said she was nervous when her son rode a rocket 200 miles into the sky, but Rhoda Love said she’s had some time to get used to the idea.
“This is what he’s wanted to do since he was five years old,” she said.
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Here is the entire transcript of the Stanley G. Love interview:
Oregon Daily Emerald: What was your group mission and what were your group and individual responsibilities?
Dr. Stanley G. Love: I flew on Space Shuttle Mission STS-122 in February of this year. Our primary objective was to carry the European Space Agency’s “Columbus” laboratory module up to the International Space Station, lift it out of the Shuttle’s payload bay with the Station’s robotic arm, and permanently attach it to the Station. We did three spacewalks to outfit the outside of Columbus and a lot of work inside Columbus to prepare it for the research work it was intended for. We also dropped off French astronaut Leopold Eyharts to begin his long-duration flight on Station, and brought home American astronaut Dan Tani, who had been on Station for four months.
I had a lot of different responsibilities on this flight. I was the primary operator for the Shuttle’s robotic arm, which we use for almost a whole day early in the flight to inspect our heat shield for the kind of launch damage that caused the Columbia accident in 2003. We repeated the inspection just before re-entry. I also helped my crewmate Leland Melvin to operate the Station arm during one of the spacewalks. We used the arm like a cherry picker to move one of the spacewalkers around to different work sites on the Station. I worked with my German crewmate Hans Schlegel to convert the Shuttle’s cabin from launch configuration to orbit configuration when we got to orbit, and back to entry configuration when it was time to come home. Finally, I did two spacewalks with crewmate Rex Walheim.
ODE: Did you run into any problems executing them or did everything go as planned?
SGL: Every space flight runs into problems. The things we do are very complicated, and many of our machines run at the ragged edge of their capability. But during the years of planning and training that precede every flight, we try to think of everything that could possibly go wrong a either work out a way to prevent it, or, if it can’t be prevented, make plans for what to do if it does happen. As it turned out, our flight was relatively trouble-free. The biggest change to our flight plan occurred when one of our spacewalkers fell ill and the surgeon and the Flight Director said he couldn’t do the mission’s first spacewalk. The backup plan was to send me outside instead of him. That was quite a surprise, but they gave us an extra day to prepare and it worked out all right.
ODE: What was your training like? What did you have to do both physically and mentally to prepare?
SGL: I arrived at NASA in 1998 and started general training in Shuttle and Station systems, flight training in our T-38 trainer jets, robotic arm operation, spacewalking (wearing a spacesuit and floating around a full-size model of the Station in the giant swimming pool we have here), orbital rendezvous, and a ton of other stuff. My crewmates and I were assigned to STS-122 in May of 2006, after which we started training for the specific tasks we would do on our flight. We did a lot of work using computer-based simulators for robot arm training, and spent a lot of time in the big pool getting ready for our spacewalks. We spent many full days in mockups of the Shuttle and Station getting ready to work the onboard systems and learning what to do if there were malfunctions.
Getting ready for flight is interesting work. No two days are alike. The training takes a lot of concentration and mental energy. The hours are not too bad, maybe 50 a week, but you’re sure ready for the weekend when it comes!
The only physical training we had for flight was preparing for the spacewalks. Your legs are useless in the space suit, which means you have to do everything with your hands, forearms, and shoulders. So the three of us on the spacewalk team spent a lot of time in the gym. As launch day approached, I was spending 6-10 hours a week doing weights and aerobic and interval training. Even with all that preparation, the spacewalks were very challenging physically!
ODE: What were the days leading up to the flight like? What did you have to do then? Were you able to stay with your family?
SGL: Shuttle crews tra
in very hard during the last few weeks before launch. Then, one week before launch, we go into quarantine so that we don’t catch a cold and carry it into orbit! We spend three days in a small sequestered building here in Houston, then go down to Florida and spend four more days in the quarantine facility at Kennedy Space Center. In quarantine, we can only have contact with people who have been through a medical screening process. So if our spouses are healthy, they can visit us in quarantine. Unfortunately the doctors consider children to be too much of a health hazard, so we can’t see our kids during quarantine week.
In quarantine, there is not very much to do, so we try to get as rested and relaxed as possible before we launch. We watch a lot of movies and try to get plenty of sleep.
ODE: What was it like seeing the shuttle on the launch-pad ready to take-off?
SGL: The morning of launch, we were driven out to the pad and given a few minutes to walk around and look before we went up the elevator to get strapped into the vehicle. It was pretty intense. Usually there are dozens of people working around the pad and often there is no Shuttle there. This time there were only us and our seven-person strap-in crew. Everybody else had been evacuated to keep them safely clear of the fully-(fueled) rocket, which stood there, tall as an office building, hissing and steaming. And I was about to go up and climb into it…
ODE: What was takeoff like? Did it hurt? What was it like to break through the atmosphere? At what point did you first feel weightlessness? What did it feel like to suddenly not have gravity?
SGL: I rode into orbit on the Shuttle’s lower deck, which has no windows. So I couldn’t see anything but the tool locker in front of my face. But I could certainly feel everything! I felt the rocket twitch under me when they turned on the hydraulic system and swiveled the main engine bells through their steering range. I felt the rumble and vibration when they lit the mains, then the huge shaking and push of the seat against my back six seconds later when the solid rocket boosters ignited and we jumped off the pad. I could feel the rotation when the Shuttle stack rolled to line up with our target orbit plane. As we accelerated through the speed of sound, the wind scream outside was loud enough to be heard through the hull and my helmet and over the engine noise. The wind noise faded as we got higher and the air got thinner. Two minutes into flight, the solids burned out and were jettisoned with a loud thump and a jerk. After that, even though the main engines were still burning, it was much quieter. There was no way to tell when we had left the atmosphere, except that Steve Frick, our commander, called on the intercom to congratulate the rookies (myself, Leland Melvin, and our pilot Alan Poindexter) on making it to space.
Near the end of the eight-minute ride to orbit, the big external fuel tank is nearly empty and therefore very light … but the engines are pushing as strongly as ever, which means that the vehicle is picking up speed pretty fast. We feel about 3 Gs of acceleration for the last minute of powered flight. It doesn’t hurt, but with an 80-pound survival suit on it takes some concentration to breathe! When the Shuttle reaches orbit the engines shut down and you go from 3 Gs to zero instantly. Your arms float up, and you come out of your seat a little, held in only by your seat belt. There was little time to marvel at weightlessness, though, because we had to get out of our seats and go to work immediately.
ODE: At what point were you most excited? Most afraid? What did you feel most while in space?
SGL: I was most excited and floating in the airlock getting ready to go out the hatch for my first spacewalk. There were a couple of scary moments in the flight (like when we heard the klaxon that warns of a leak in the hull!) but they were all short-lived. (A few seconds after we got the cabin leak klaxon, Mission Control called and told us it was a false alarm caused by a failed sensor. Whew.)
As for being afraid, the nervous anticipation in the days and hours leading up to the flight was a lot worse than the actual experience. I didn’t sleep very well during the flight, but I got a decent night’s sleep when Rex and I were sealed in the Station airlock at reduced pressure to get the nitrogen out of our systems so we wouldn’t get the bends when we got in the space suits the following morning to go out in the vacuum of space, two hundred miles up, and climb around the outside of the Shuttle and Station on a spacewalk I had never trained with two billion dollars’ worth of European space hardware at stake. By that time, all that seemed left was to do the job. I suppose there’s a lesson in that somewhere.
We have only a few Shuttle flights left before they cancel the program, and there is a giant mountain of work to do to complete the Space Station … and most of that work can only be done by the Shuttle. So Shuttle flights are packed with work. In space we work about sixteen hours a day. Time to rest and eat is programmed into our daily plan, but more often than not we must work straight through those periods. So unfortunately there is little time to appreciate where you are, and most of your attention is consumed by the tremendous amount of work you have to do before the end of the day.
ODE: What were everyday activities like while in space (bathing, sleeping, eating, drinking)?
SGL: The phrase “time consuming” leaps to mind. So does the phrase “gravity is your friend.”
It is impossible to take a bath or shower in space. Water goes everywhere if you let it, and you don’t have enough time to clean up a big mess. For bathing, we squirt a little water into a washcloth and take a sponge bath. There is some no-rinse soap (in a pouch with a little nozzle) that you can add to your washcloth. It’s better than nothing. We also have no-rinse shampoo that works better than you might expect. You lather up, then rub your hair with a towel. Everything that was in your hair ends up on the towel. Since you only have time to wash your hair every four days or so, it is best not to look at that towel after you’re done with it. Sleeping is better. You string your sleeping bag wherever you want it (floor, ceiling, diagonally across the wall) and climb in. After you get used to it, it is more comfortable than any bed on Earth. For eating, we don’t have refrigerators so everything is in pouches. A lot of the food is dehydrated (with a complicated little valve so you can squirt in water to reconstitute it without making a mess). They give you scissors so you can cut open the pouches and a spoon to eat stuff with, but food does not stay on the spoon very well. I ended up just cutting a corner off the pouch and squeezing the food into my mouth. Despite all that, the food is pretty good. There just isn’t much time to eat! Our drinks are powdered stuff (juice, coffee, tea) in pouches with valves to put water in, and a sealable straw to drink from without letting the liquid get out when it’s not wanted.
ODE: Did you do anything fun up there?
SGL: After our three spacewalks were done, we got a day added to our mission. I didn’t have too many duties on the schedule, so that was “fun” day. I spent some time just floating around the Station, which is big enough for somersaults and stuff. I looked out the window and took a lot of pictures of the Earth. I got some good ones of Eugene, the Oregon Cascades, and the coast. The sand dune fields around Florence are very prominent even from 200 miles up. I also spent some time playing with food. You can release a handful of candies and then chase them around and try to catch them in your mouth. Good fun!
ODE: What did the Earth look like? Did you notice anything interesting about it? What about the stars, the sun, the moon or other planets?
SGL: The Earth is the most interesting thing in space. It’s impossible to describe how huge and beautiful it is. Everything about it is fascinating: the patterns
of the clouds, the colors of the land, the shading of the oceans. At night you sometimes fly right through the aurora. You can see lightning discharges cascading for tens of miles across gigantic tropical thunderstorms. Space gives an amazing perspective on the Earth.
The Space Station orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 200 miles. The Earth is 8,000 miles in diameter, so we were not very far out into space at all–barely skimming the top of the atmosphere. The Sun, Moon, stars, and other planets look about the same from orbit as they do from the surface of the Earth. The main differences are that there are no clouds and our 90-minute orbit period means that the nights are only 45 minutes long!
ODE: What was your space-walk like?
SGL: I did two spacewalks, the first of which was planned for someone else! That one was very challenging. Not only was I getting used to being outside and moving in the space suit, but I was not very familiar with the tasks I had to do. We ran behind schedule and I got very tired. I was very focused on my work and had little time to admire the surroundings. But every once in a while I had a moment to look up from my work and see the Earth rolling below us. On one occasion we were flying right over east central Florida, and I could look right down and see the little pale patch that was the launch pad we had taken off from a few days earlier, and also the three-mile-long runway we would be landing on a week or so later. Pretty darn cool.
After the difficult first spacewalk, the second (the one I’d actually trained for!) was wonderful. I felt like I knew what I was doing, and there was more time in my schedule to admire the surroundings and even take some pictures with the camera we had brought outside with us. We got all our work done, and even had time to do a couple of extra items.
ODE: What was it like to leave space and come back to Earth?
SGL: Coming home is the most important part of the mission. As pilots like to say, takeoff is optional, but landing is mandatory! It takes the Shuttle about an hour (and half a revolution around the Earth) to drop into the atmosphere and bleed off all that speed we got during launch, coming to a smooth landing on the runway in Florida. Again I was riding on the lower deck, but the guys on the flight deck had a small video camera with a repeater screen downstairs where we could see it. We could see back along the hundred-mile-long plasma trail the Shuttle leaves behind as it screams through the upper atmosphere, heating the air to several thousand degrees. We could see the view out the front window as we came in over Florida, our speed now reduced to “only” a few times the speed of sound. Steve flew a great approach and put us down on the runway smoothly. After we rolled to a stop the landing crew met up with us and helped us get out of the vehicle.
ODE: What did gravity feel like after being away from it?
SGL: Being in space causes a lot of changes in your body. Normally, gravity keeps a lot of fluid in your legs; when you get into space you dump all that fluid. Expect to spend a fair amount of time in the potty soon after reaching orbit! Normally, your legs do a lot of work to keep you upright and moving; in space, you hardly use your legs at all so they can get pretty weak. Normally, your sense of balance uses cues from your eyes and inner ears; in space the gravity sensors in your inner ears are totally useless and your brain has to rewire itself for orientation. That process takes a couple of days and it makes a lot of people nauseated.
When you return to gravity, your body has to undo everything it did to get used to being weightless. So a bunch of fluid pools in your legs, and you have to drink a ton of salt water to make up for it, or else you have a good chance of fainting. Some people feel faint even with the salt water. Because of lack of exercise, the big muscles in your lower body get tired easily. As your sense of balance rewires itself back to normal, it’s common to feel dizzy and nauseated for a couple of days after landing. Three days after our return, I still felt dizzy; just walking around the halls in my building at work was a fun and exciting experience!
ODE: What is it like to be back on Earth?
SGL: It feels wonderful to be back on Earth, at home with my family. It was tough on my wife and kids to have me working so hard getting ready to fly, and then being at risk during the flight. So they are happy to have me back safely! I’m proud of the work my crewmates and I did. I’m also appreciating things like trees and wind, which are in short supply in space.
ODE: Do you plan on going back to space?
SGL: I’m interested in going back, but my wife isn’t to keen on the idea! She’s a Ph.D. biologist with a career of her own, and she thinks it’s now her turn to do something cool. It’s tough to argue with that!
ODE: What are you doing now? What are your career plans? Has your life changed since returning?
SGL: Now my crewmates and I are doing a lot of postflight public appearances. I’m going to visit all the schools I attended and the places I worked and talk about our flight. I don’t have immediate career plans. Before I can make any, I need to finish everything associated with our flight, and work out a way to balance my wife’s career with my own.
ODE: I remember hearing that you’ve dreamed of going to space for more or less your entire life. What is it like to have realized that dream? Was it worth the years of hard work?
Is it difficult to have to change focus now that you’ve accomplished that goal? How has it been moving on?
SGL: It’s very satisfying to have had the chance to do something that I’ve dreamed about since I was a little kid. I know that not everyone is so fortunate. It was certainly worth the years of hard work, even more so because the work itself was so interesting. It’s not like the work was a price I had to pay to reach the goal of flying in space. The flight was a natural extension of work that I was already doing because I thought it was cool.
As for changing focus and moving on, it’s far too soon to tell! The flight ended on February 20, but I’m still working hard to complete all the things associated with it. At some point I’ll have to make future plans. I don’t yet know what they will be. I’m sure that whatever I do in the future will have something to do with space. It’s in my blood.
ODE: What do you think now when you look up at night?
SGL: It was good to be up there, and it’s good to be down here.