It was sixty years ago this month when NASA astronaut Ed White opened the hatch on his two-man Gemini space capsule and floated outside on the first “spacewalk” which lasted about twenty-three minutes. Astronauts routinely work in the vacuum of space outside the International Space Station, making repairs to the outpost, or conducting experiments. The U.S. record for the longest spacewalk is jointly held by retired Astronaut Jim Voss, of Opelika. He floated outside ISS for close to nine hours.
Alabama Public Radio will premiere its new interview program “APR Notebook” on June 27th at 7 pm. Voss will be one of my guests. The Opelika native, and Auburn University grad, joined the space agency in 1987 and made his first of five space shuttle missions, including one trip up and one back to Earth when he served as a crewmember of the second full-time expedition aboard ISS.
“It was really nice,” recalled Voss. “Because shuttle flights are scheduled every 15 minutes is blocked. Sometimes it's an hour-long thing, but they use 15 minute time periods, and you are really busy, scheduled all day long. And it's very, very intense, busy times, usually pretty big events. The space station had a lot of those, but they were spread out. So maybe one, one day out of seven or eight, you'd have some pretty busy, intense, big activity, but most of the time it was routine, routine operations. We did a lot of installation of things, check out, of systems, things that were just there, and then we had to activate them.”
Joining the Astronaut corps includes an interview by managers at the space agency, who anecdotally ask questions like “what did you do in high school.” Voss says he responded with a list of things he did like athletics, but the chairman of the panel looked like he wanted more. Voss thought for a moment, and then said that he was a member of his school’s “Slide Rule Club.” The retired astronaut said his interviewer looked unimpressed over such an idea, until another panel member spoke up. It was Apollo 16 moonwalker John Young.
“He (John Young) reached down and grabbed his briefcase off the floor, and he picked it up, and he slammed it on the table, threw it open and pulls out a slide rule, and he said, ‘well, I still use mine.’ And it just broke everybody up. And it relaxed me,” said Voss.
Upcoming guests on “APR Notebook” Will include part-time Huntsville resident Yaryna Zhurba, who’s from Ukraine. She founded a company that sell jigsaw puzzles that depict Ukrainian cultural landmarks destroyed in the war with Russia. “APR Notebook” premieres June 27th at 7 pm on Alabama Public Radio.
