Nicholas Patrick, 44, astronaut, Nasa

“It’s hard to sleep in space, your mind is always racing, thinking about what has to be done the next day. During the 13 days I spent in space aboard the shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station in December 2006, the schedule was jam-packed every day.

“The launch occurs mid-afternoon, then you spend your first evening in space configuring the shuttle for orbital flight. You take off your space suit, put away the seats, fire up the loo and the galley and get out all the things you are going to need to transfer to the space station when you get there two days later.

“The shuttle itself isn’t very comfortable. It’s like going on a camping trip with six other people and staying in the car for two weeks. But there’s more room than you would think: the weightless environment means that you can hang out on the ceiling. And the view is breathtaking.

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“On Day 2, as the robotics expert, I led the postlaunch inspection of the heat shield with the shuttle’s robotic arm as the other crew members prepared for docking and their first spacewalk. After docking at the space station, you get into a routine where you alternate days of spacewalking preparation then a spacewalk. As well as operating the robotic arm and manoeuvring the truss – a segment of the space station’s backbone – from the shuttle to the space station, I had other responsibilities. I was in charge of the computer network on board the shuttle and was given a lot of the basic engineering tasks.

“I have a PhD in engineering and worked in the aerospace industry before I joined Nasa. In training, they teach you the basics about the space shuttle and the space station. They also give you a broad understanding of the sciences to prepare you to do some experiments on the space station. When you get assigned to a flight there’s about a year of intensive training using flight-specific hardware. One of the main purposes of the training is to condition you so that you are not overwhelmed by the novelty of space flight. You have already pressed all the buttons and switches in simulators so nothing surprises you.

“At the moment I do a fairly minimal amount of training to keep my skills sharp but my primary day job involves using my engineering expertise, working on the design of the cockpit for the next spacecraft, Orion. The variety of work is one of the great things about being an astronaut. Yes, space flight is wonderful and the training is really interesting, but there’s an awful lot of fascinating engineering to be donehere in Houston.”

A SECOND OPINION

Sarah Giwa, 24, payload system engineer, Surrey Satellite Technology

“Before I studied space engineering in my final year of university, I thought it was just about designing rockets, but it actually requires many different skills. Today I work in a team designing telecommunication and navigational payloads [hardware] for commercial satellites and for institutions such as the European Space Agency. I have to be aware of many aspects of engineering from mechanical and environmental engineering to signal processing. My specialist expertise is making sure that the satellite’s signals are strong enough to be picked up [on] earth.

“The first challenge in space is that if something goes wrong, you can’t send someone out to fix it. You have to be really rigorous in the design and testing stages and be very careful about every single thing that you do. If you change one parameter on a satellite, it produces a succession of other changes.

“As a team, we take what the client wants to do – for example, launch a new television satellite – and translate it into the technical hardware, known as the payload, that can do that job in space. My role involves theoretical design; I work with specialist software, running analyses and simulations of the payload. We work closely with the other teams here, particularly the platform design team – the shell of the satellite that supports the payload – who tell us whether we can fit the payload into the satellite. If they say no, we go back to the drawing board and run the simulation and analysis again. I also meet clients to explain what can and cannot be done.

“Every mission is different and requires different technology; you have to keep up to date with the latest hardware and consider how you can use new technologies on any particular project. As well as teamworking and technical skills, time management is important because you are working on about three projects at once and each one has a different schedule.”

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