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CNN Live At Daybreak

Expedition Crew Talks about Living in Space

Aired August 29, 2001 - 07:51   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: So what's it like to live onboard the International Space Station? Well, we don't know, but three people behind me -- well, you're seeing some video of them there. We -- they are the experts because they were the space shuttle crew who returned from the second Alpha mission to Earth last week. They are astronauts Jim Voss in the middle, Susan Helms off to the right and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev. They join us from the Johnson Space Center near Houston.

Good morning to all of you, and welcome home.

YURI USACHEV, COMMANDER, EXPEDITION TWO: Good morning.

SUSAN HELMS, EXPEDITION CREW MEMBER: Morning.

JIM VOSS, EXPEDITION CREW MEMBER: Morning, thank you.

LIN: Colonel Voss, was it -- was it strange not to get out of bed and do flips in the air?

VOSS: Yes, it's a little bit harder this past week to get up and to walk to the bathroom in the morning. It's much easier in space.

LIN: Colonel Helms -- Susan Helms, you were the first woman to actually live on the International Space Station. What was it like for you? Were there privacy issues?

HELMS: There were no privacy issues at all. We're a good team up here and we've been working together for years and years and everybody's got mutual respect for everybody else's privacy. And the space station affords enough space so that that is just simply not an issue.

LIN: I heard that the lowest point of the mission for you was actually getting onboard the shuttle and coming home. What is it that you miss about being in space?

HELMS: Well, there are a lot of things I'm going to miss about being in space. I think I got very used to the peaceful life that we have up there without things like phone mail and cable TV and all the noise that you get from daily life. And then it's just in addition to that, we had a lot of great work and had a chance to accomplish a small part of a very major important mission and we'll miss being part of that. LIN: Yuri Usachev, what was the mission like for you? What did you learn about your American compatriots?

USACHEV: Yes, it was a very good experience to me. And we spent four months -- four years, excuse me, before flight to -- for train. And to me, personally, it was like one more orbit. You know I flew twice the Mir station and now we have like two mission controls and it's a real international space station. It was a very good experience to me.

LIN: Amongst the three of you, who was actually out on the two spacewalks?

VOSS: The first spacewalk was Susan and myself. When we first arrived onboard the shuttle, we did some assembly tasks outside to prepare for the Canadian arm that came up later on. And then Yuri and I did a spacewalk actually inside, we just stuck our heads outside for a short time to move some -- a docking cone around so that a Russian module can mate with the space station in about a month from now.

LIN: Colonel Voss, for those of us who have no idea what it's like to be out in space, I mean compare it to when we walk out our front door and go to work. What's it like to enter into space and walk around, float around?

VOSS: That's a pretty good analogy to walking outside. When you look out a window you can see a certain amount of trees and outside, and when you go outside, you have a much broader view. And it's the same thing when you go outside the space station or the space shuttle, you have just a spectacular, wonderful view of the Earth from there. And once in a while we get to take a moment during our very busy spacewalks to enjoy that view.

LIN: Susan Helms, you talk about the quiet. Is the quiet in space different than the quiet that any of us experience here on Earth?

HELMS: I think because it's an enforced quiet with really no opportunity to add more noise with cable TV or phone mail or anything like that, I think it is -- it is just something you get used to and it's not something that changes. People on Earth, if they want to experience this quiet, they can do so but there's always the risk that others will intrude and the quite will go away. Well on the space station that really isn't going to happen because of the way the communications are set up. So again, it was just one of those aspects of living in space that I didn't expect but that I really enjoyed.

LIN: And one of the things that I really enjoyed reading about was one of the experiments was fixing two suitcase-like packages to be outside of the space station. It's a device outside to record the conditions in space, to help researchers build a better space capsule, to develop materials that can withstand the -- I guess the word that I would have for it is the weather out in space. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

VOSS: Yes, that was an experiment that was placed outside by the last crew who came up. In fact, the crew that brought us home. They placed those outside, and they have many, many different materials that are now exposed to space. And they're going to find out exactly what the effects are on all these different materials by leaving them outside for a period of time.

LIN: And in terms of the effects on space, can you smell things in space? Does food taste any differently? Yuri, maybe you want to answer that.

USACHEV: Station smells?

VOSS: No, (OFF-MIKE) smell of space.

USACHEV: Oh. Yes, you know the first time I had EVA, I noticed it's a different type of smells, and we tried to identify what kind of smell it is. And we try -- we thought maybe it's like just, you know, warm metal or something else. And we decided we should name just like: Outside the smell -- a wet kind of smell.

LIN: An outside smell.

Well, someday a civilian, other than the one that already went up in space, may have that experience themselves. Congratulations to all of you, and I'm sure at some point you'll look forward to going back.

USACHEV: Thank you.

VOSS: Thank you.

HELMS: Thank you.

LIN: All right. Thanks so much, live from the Johnson Space Center.

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