Shannon Walker, American Scientist and NASA Astronaut. VOA
Walker says seeing the Milky Way from the space station is a beautiful thing. She says without atmosphere and clouds blocking your view, the number of stars and the colors you can see is incredible.
Walker adds that rocketing to space and back produces some one of a kind feelings.
"You're sitting on a launch pad a couple of hours before you take off, and you've done all your system checks, and you're waiting and you're waiting. And then shortly before the launch, you can hear the very top of the rocket, and so you can hear things happening beneath you, because all of a sudden the valves are opening and the fuel is starting to flow, and you can sort of hear it and feel it inside the capsule, so you know you were getting ready to go. And then, when the engines light, there's just so much noise and vibrations and you can feel. You know the forces of movement are shoving you back in your seat. Now coming back is sort of a different set of vibrations and noises, because you've been floating for months and months, and then you get into a little tiny capsule to come home and you fire an engine and that's not really a big deal, but once you start getting into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, you can actually see the way the Soyuz is built," she says. "It's got a heat shield on the bottom that is designed to burn away. And we've got some windows and so you can see bits of your spacecraft floating off and floating by, and everything's heating up, and you can see sort of the glow of the heat as you're coming through. And so, you know something's happening coming through the atmosphere, and it just gets to be more and more intense as gravity builds up. You start feeling really, really heavy. And then the most exciting time I think is when the parachutes come out. You're just bouncing around underneath the parachute for a pretty long time before everything settles down, and then you're just gently floating down to the ground. Both are totally exciting and each in a completely different way."
