Houston, We Have Short Wave On The Line

Short Wave

NPR

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🗓️ 4 January 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Speaking to Short Wave from about 250 miles above the Earth, Josh Cassada outlined his typical day at work: "Today, I actually started out by taking my own blood," he said. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station are themselves research subjects, as well as conductors of all sorts of science experiments: Gardening in microgravity, trapping frigid atoms, examining neutron stars. Then, there's the joy of walks into the yawning void of space. Speaking from orbit, Cassada told fellow physicist and Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber about research aboard the station, what it takes to keep the ISS going and which countries' astronauts make the best food.

Curious about the other goings-on in space? Beam us an email at [email protected] — we might answer it in a future episode!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Station, this is Houston. Are you ready for the event?
0:03.0	You're listening to Shortwave.
0:05.8	From NPR.
0:09.8	NPR, this is Mission Control Houston. Please call the patient for the waiting.
0:13.5	Recently, I got to do something I'd only dreamt of.
0:16.5	Talk to an astronaut who's hanging out on the International Space Station,
0:21.0	that global party house and space lab orbiting Earth 16 times a day.
0:25.4	Uh, station, this is Regina Barber with NPR Shortwave podcast. How do you hear me?
0:31.1	Hi Regina, I've got you now. I've got you loud and clear. How me?
0:34.3	Yeah, you sound great. I want to thank you.
0:35.7	I talked to astronaut Josh Casada, a fellow physicist.
0:39.0	And honestly, before anything else, I had to know.
0:41.9	Can you describe the ISS? Like, can you run us through your day today?
0:47.6	Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so let me do my best to try to describe this place,
0:51.7	but I'll be honest. I feel a little guilty sometimes,
0:54.2	because I just want to bring everybody I know up here and show it to them and just have them experience this.
0:59.3	But my day today, just a typical day, I actually started out by taking my own blood.
1:05.2	You know, we tend to be the subject of a lot of different experiments.
1:08.9	So we get trained and being able to do that.
1:11.2	And then Josh says, the specifics kind of vary.
1:14.7	Some days it's big ticket items like a spacewalk where he's tethered to the ISS,
1:19.2	but outside fixing the station itself.
	...

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