SPACE STATION 2020

Personal Habitat 1 Function: Provide Living Quarters for four crew Sleeping Quarters Washing Facilities Toilet Facilities Laundry These are the living quarters of four crew members. As well as missing the familiar tug of gravity you may find you miss everyday sounds. There will be the sounds of equipment on the space station, for instance the fan that moves air around inside (without this you would suffocate in the carbon dioxide that you exhale, which would just hang around your face). There will be the voices of the crew and those of mission control over the radio. However, you won't have any noises from the outside. No birds singing, dogs barking, distant traffic, airplanes, thunder, wind or rain. You may want to take some music CDs to compensate for this. Then there are smells that you may miss. The pleasant smells of food cooking in the kitchen, tree blossoms, or a salty wind off the sea, are not going to waft through your quarters. Some astronauts in previous space stations have reported the smell being overwhelmingly of old metal, others of their fellow passengers! Yet others report the complete lack of the smell sensation. In this case it can become a personal problem. The senses are deprived and the desire for smell becomes almost an obsession. There are reports of astronauts passing around lemon impregnated hand-wipes just for the citric fragrance. Life on the Shuttle © Image: NASA Projects: Preparing for life on a Space station Task 1: Make a music selection of six CD's and say why you chose each particular tape or CD. Task 2: List twenty personal items that you might take to make your six-month stay more pleasant. Remember you are limited by volume and weight. CD players, TV, radio and computers are already provided. Task3: Think about the scents you would miss on the Space Station. List them. By 2020 it will be possible to provide them. Design Scheme Draw a view of your quarters on board the space station on the computer using an art package, with the colour scheme you would prefer. Will you choose one "wall" to be your floor, so that your eyes, if not the balance organs in your ears, know which way is "down"? Go to Space Station 2020 Specification Return to title page

Teachers and those in a hurry may take the quick route to the lessons via the index. Enter the Teachers' Wormhole to go to the Main Index Page. Follow Henna Rashid on Spacestation 2020 and learn about Microbiology