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Rookie Astronaut Victor Glover, Navy F / A-18 aircraft carrier pilot, is accustomed to high-speed maneuvers and sharp acceleration flying high-performance jets. But nothing prepared him for the sounds, sensations and prolonged acceleration he felt in 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 is,” he told reporters Thursday at an orbital press conference aboard the International Space Station. It might not have helped that he ended up in a recessed sleep station in the ceiling of the Harmony module in the lab.
“I don’t know if it’s because I’m a newcomer, they made me sleep in the ceiling,” he laughed. “So every time I stick my head out, the whole space station is upside down. So I stay upside down as much as possible.”
He said daily chores took longer as he adapts to the environment, “but it’s an interesting challenge that I actually find a little fun. So it’s been a whole lot of emotions and honestly I’m still dealing with it. “
NASA television
Glover, Commander Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi took off from Kennedy Space Center on Sunday night strapped in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
After a 27.5-hour rendezvous, they docked at the space station Monday evening, 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 launch of Crew Dragon marked the first operational use of the commercially developed spacecraft, intended to help end NASA’s post-shuttle dependence on Russia for flights to and from low earth orbit.
Because the crew buckle up before refueling begins, Hopkins said they could hear the thrusters pumping into the tanks below and “you can tell he wants to take off.”
“And he just jumped off the mat,” he says. “It was amazing. About 40 seconds into the flight you started accelerating (the engines) a little bit and you definitely noticed it, but when it was time to start over it really picked up and yes it was really moving.”
The separation of the first and second stages of the rocket “is always pretty exciting, I think, on any rocket and this one is no different.”
Willliament Harwood / CBS News
“And then that slow, steady build-up of Gs all the way through orbit. We were all very excited. When we passed the one hundred kilometer point (marking the lower atmosphere limit), we all said, ‘Welcome to space ‘to Ike. “
Glover’s teammates jokingly call him Ike, an acronym that means “I know everything.” Describing his launch impressions, Glover, the first African-American to perform an extended flight at the station, said “the short answer is, it was awesome.”
“I could sit here and tell you throughout this conference how great the race has been,” he said. “But the staging was dynamic. The second stage is much closer to our spaceship, so you felt it was a lot closer and personal.
“And then when that motor cut off, and we’re in orbit, I mean it’s surreal. I saw tons of pictures, but you know, when I first looked at Earth times out the window it’s hard to describe. There are no words, there are no words to describe it. It was an amazing feeling once in a lifetime. “
Said Rubins: “I was so excited to see Ike’s face go through that hatch. We thought about that moment here with the two Sergeys, waiting for our four teammates. … We were really, really excited to see- pass them through the hatch. “
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