I caught up with former NASA astronaut Ron Garan, who has both flown and walked in space, at the One Young World Environment Summit<\/a>. More often than not the pictures we see of and from space are accompanied by commentary \u2013 so to kick things off I wanted to know whether the International Space Station (ISS) is as silent as space itself.<\/p>\n What does the ISS sound like?<\/strong><\/p>\n There is noise all the time \u2013 from fans and pumps, as well as radio communications.<\/p>\n Did you ever get any time to yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n The ISS is not a small place \u2013 it is about the size of a football field [presumably American football, not soccer]. Sometimes you might be on a task that takes you away from the other crew, and you might not see them for an entire working day. Even though every hour was always scheduled, occasionally floating over to the window to look at Earth gave wonderful moments of solitude.<\/p>\n Did you get lonely?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, clearly, you miss your loved ones, but you are with other people \u2013- and hopefully you like those other people. I can imagine if you didn\u2019t get on with the rest of the crew it could be pretty lonely, but I didn\u2019t have that experience.<\/p>\n What was it like having cameras following your every move?<\/strong><\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just mission control watching by camera, but everything was broadcast over NASA TV. Thousands of people might be watching you have breakfast. Luckily the cameras don\u2019t point everywhere, and they could be switched off.<\/p>\n Is it feasible that regular people with no training will be able to leave Earth?<\/strong><\/p>\n My first flight was a two-week stint on the Space Shuttle, and my second a six-month stay on the ISS. They both required specific, and different, skills and capabilities. However, to put it in perspective: the first cohorts of airplane passengers were not the general public. Yet flying is now commonplace, and we don\u2019t even think of the ages or backgrounds of the passengers. It is accepted as a normality. Eventually, space travel will reach this level \u2013 and I look forward to that.<\/p>\n As chief pilot for a company that will offer balloon flights to space, do you find any conflict between space tourism and protecting the environment? <\/strong><\/p>\n Not at all. First of all, although the company<\/a> does have a branch that covers space tourism, the main focus is to provide platforms on balloons for similar activities that are carried out by orbiting satellites: communications, Earth observation, weather, etc. There are holes in our collection of human knowledge that we have about the upper atmosphere, and this limits how we can model climate change, weather patterns and so on.<\/p>\n We intend to fly research platforms that will give us a better understanding of the upper atmosphere. We can also reestablish communications during disasters when communications go down, during forest fires or for other agricultural and environmental applications.<\/p>\n When we do fly people in space \u2013 though I wouldn\u2019t use the phrase \u201cspace tourism\u201d \u2013 I believe the more people who can see our planet from the perspective of space, the better off we are down here. I don\u2019t know of anybody who has been to space who doesn\u2019t have a greater appreciation for the ecosystem that we call Earth.<\/p>\n Precious helium is used in balloons, so what are the resource implications?<\/strong><\/p>\n Helium is a byproduct of the petroleum industry, and so the company was using something that otherwise went to waste. But in the future, as soon as possible, we plan to use hydrogen, which is cheaper than helium as it can be made from water.<\/p>\n If we made such a mess of the Earth that we had to leave, would we have the moral or ethical right to travel to terraform Mars?<\/strong><\/p>\n We can\u2019t terraform the Earth, so I\u2019m not sure we could terraform Mars. I don\u2019t really know the answer. Maybe I lean more towards yes, but if we got to the point that we could terraform Mars, then we should also be able to fix the Earth. Then Mars becomes another place where life flourishes. Another point is that a single planetary species tends not to survive. Mars could be like Noah\u2019s Ark, with a place to conserve many species in the eventuality that Earth became uninhabitable.<\/p>\n You\u2019re a Catholic. Did being in space enhance your spirituality?<\/strong><\/p>\n It enhanced a lot of things, not just spiritual, but responsibility \u2013 the idea of leaving behind a better place than we found it. It reinforced the idea of taking care of people and the Earth. My circle of kinship has increased, from beyond family and country to the entire planet. A lot of the beliefs I held before were reinforced by the experience of being in space.<\/p>\n Monica Grady<\/a>, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Professor Monica Grady explains why she thinks space travel will make earth a better place to live. There is a small but growing set of people who have had the opportunity to see the Earth as a planet, and view its changing seasons and weather patterns from above. Astronauts are a rare breed: men, and, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":3420,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[491,1818,2081],"class_list":["post-3416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-space","tag-communicating-academic-excellence","tag-professor-monica-grady","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/62e528761d0685343e1c-f3d1b99a743ffa4142d9d7f1978d9686.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com\/files\/125912\/width754\/image-20160609-7079-yzwgu2.jpg\")
\nNASA<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/62e528761d0685343e1c-f3d1b99a743ffa4142d9d7f1978d9686.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com\/files\/125913\/width754\/image-20160609-7083-ezsxia.jpg\")
\nNASA<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.edu.au\/content\/60727\/count.gif\")
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