Alienus

Space (Sorry, I'm bad at chapter titles :P)

Another week passed by, and without all the life-or-death drama of the previous week, our life in space was starting to become a boring routine. Every day it's basically the same thing; first, you wake up and brush your teeth, next you eat breakfast, and then get down to business Following that, there's studying to be done on various space-related things like, memorizing constellations, looking through a telescope the planets--mostly Mars- and the moon, and mapping them, and doing lots of advanced calculus to "stay sharp" (the calculus part was not my idea).

It's my job to check the control panel in the morning to ensure nothing has the possibility of exploding, combusting, or venting (an astronaut's term for 'stuff leaking into space'). Jon is the one who skims over the gigantic tablet, after I'm finished with it, to look at the alignment patterns of the probes and satellites, so they'll actually orbit (or land on) the moons.

One thing you can't neglect in space is exercising. When you're in an area with no gravity for a long time, your muscles will grow weak, since you don't need to use them to lift things.

Have you ever broken a bone and had it in a cast for a while? If you have, then you know how much weaker your limb is after it hasn't been in use for a long period of time. If you are one of the fortunate people who have never broken a bone, you can ask someone who has. Now after that sensation is in your mind, picture what it would feel like after being in a body cast for six months.

That's what would happen to long distance astronauts who didn't exercise, but worse! Also, once you landed on Earth, you would be crushed by the gravity, because you wouldn't be strong enough to hold yourself up.

Because in space there is no weight to anything, you could lift a five thousand pound weight as easily as raising your hand. Therefore, lifting weights wouldn't build muscle strength at all. On the other hand, we still are able to pull on things. That's what we do to exercise. There are different resistances on the exercise machines, (the 'resistance' is stretched elastic). Each elastic ring you add on makes the bar of the machine ten pounds more difficult to pull. Since we keep in shape the muscle atrophy issue is avoided.

At around 1200 hours we have lunch. Jon checks the control panel after our midday meal.

More space related things are studied; books are read; and doodles that lack so much artistic skill they would strike fear into the hearts of little children, are drawn on the back of papers by astronauts bored out of their minds. If a big event is happening, or if we run out of ideas to idolize in terrible sketches, we may broadcast something to Earth.
Emiley skims over the computer after we eat dinner. Hygiene routines are performed, including showers. Showerhouses were invented about eight years ago, in 2027. They're essentially showers that function in zero gravity. Acting like a touch-free car wash, you go into an opaque chamber, and it sprays you with pressurized water using jets about as hard as your shower at home. After a short while, the water is vacuumed back into the sides of the showerhouse and there is a pause. During that time you shampoo your hair, soap yourself down, and occasionally shave, using the dispensers on the side of the showerhouse walls. Standard liquid soap and shampoo would be a nightmare without gravity to keep it on your hand (or head). Instead, we use Shampoofs™.

Shampoofs™ are these little spheres of shampoo, conditioner, shaving cream, or soap. They have a mesh casing around the product that allows you to rub it onto your skin or hair without it going everywhere. It's an ingenious design. The holes in the mesh of the Shampoofs™ are just the right size to keep the various soaps inside, but when pressure is applied they comes out easily.

Another fun thing to do in zero gravity is to spike your hair in the shower. It's kind of immature for a thirty-year-old to make two-foot-tall Mohawks, gigantic unicorn-horns, or halos out of their hair, but I don't really care. It's a pretty good stress reliever; every time I look in the fog-resistant mirror I start laughing.