Jim Voss has been busy in space for many years, but he likes his new gig as a faculty member at the University of Colorado-Boulder in Aerospace Engineering Sciences, the Bioastronautics group.

He told the Boulder Rotary Club on October 2 that he’s delighted to return to CU, where he earned a master's degree some years ago.

Voss, an astronaut from 1987 until his recent retirement, was a member of the second expedition to the International Space Station and spent six months there, orbiting the Earth some 240 miles above the ground.

"The Space Station is about the size of a four-bedroom house," Voss. "Our team trained for four years for the expedition." The international team included two Americans and one Russian.

Once on the Space Station, they focused on the effects of microgravity on living organisms, both human and plant.

"We did daily monitoring of our human bodies to see what an extended period of living without the normal gravitational load on our movements would do to muscles and bones," he said.

The result? Significant loss of bone mass – about 1 percent of total bone mass each month. They also observed that renal calculi, commonly known as kidney stones, grew faster, "but we don't know why," he said.

These observations are likely to place restrictions on travel by humans to other solar system destinations.

"It took almost three years back on Earth for me to come back to normal, as determined by medical tests," Voss said.
He also experienced muscle weakness because of easier movement of arms and legs in a low gravity environment.

"We just lay down when we got back, feeling weak all over," he said.

Looking to the future, Voss said the space program seeks to search for life beyond Earth, to help in understanding solar behavior and to prepare for future human exploration.

The space shuttle, used to move astronauts to and from the Space Station, is showing its age and will retire in 2011 at the latest. Its replacement, the ARES 1 crew launch vehicle, will not be ready yet so people and equipment will travel to the Space Station on Russian space capsules.

As a final temptation to engage in space travel, Voss showed spectacular pictures from 240 miles up of Manhattan, Lake Powell and the delta of the Nile.

"As we orbited the Earth at five miles a second we saw sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes," he said. "It's an unforgettable experience."




For more information on Rotary, see www.boulderrotary.org or www.rotary.org.

BOULDER ROTARY CLUB
5390 Manhattan Circle, Suite 101 Boulder, Colorado, 80303
303-554-7074 Rotary@roycearbour.com
Fax 720-304-3255 www.BoulderRotary.org


NEWS FROM BOULDER ROTARY CLUB
Contact: Sue Deans, 303-579-9580

Views: 61

Reply to This

 

Milestones

Milestones are back up! You can submit and view engagements, wedding, anniversaries and birth announcements at Prairie Mountain Media's Milestones form. Obituaries can also be found at DailyCamera.com at dailycamera.com/obituaries.

Badge

Loading…

© 2024   Created by Matt Flood.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Privacy Policy  |  Terms of Service