Steven Swanson, Astronaut 03/10/23
---------------------------------------------------------------------
My existence  happens to  coincide with a  number of  very interesting
human achievements,  not the least  among them space travel.  I recall
watching the challenger  explode on TV at school; they  had let us all
out of class to watch in a  central area where they could setup a set.
To  be honest,  that was  the last  I really  paid attention  to space
travel, outside of science fiction.

And while I'm being honest, I'm  sort of ashamed of my inattention. We
reach for the stars and actually touch  them, and then we go about our
business.  Or  worse, we  make  an  international competition  out  of
reaching for the stars, and then punish one another with our tech. For
me personally,  the age  of home computing  was more  interesting than
space. I guess a few things are, to this day, more interesting to me.

To  get to  the point:  I was  needing to  see the  inside of  a space
station the other day, as a reference for a drawing that I was helping
my daughter  with. I  looked about  on the  image search  engines, but
wanted more  of a feel  for the  inside of a  space station, and  so I
turned  to  YouTube.  I  located  an old  video  that  claimed  to  be
the  absolute best  tours of  the International  Space Station.  Well,
specifically it claimed:

"ONE OF THE MOST DETAILED ISS TOUR!!"[1]

The video  has been viewed almost  8mil times and has  been online for
six years, and they haven't fixed the singular "TOUR!!" yet. Or maybe
they added "ONE OF" or something. I guess it adds charm.

Ashamed again, I admit that I've never  bothered to look at a photo or
a video of the inside of the ISS. I've read about it, looked at how to
track it, and generally kept it in the corner of my consciousness, but
I've never looked inside! What is wrong with me? Am I the only one, or
have you also never looked?

Well,  for multiple  reasons, I'm  extremely glad  that I  watched the
video. First,  the ISS is  absolutely stunning. The entire  feat, from
start  to  finish.  It's  beautiful, really.  And  who  doesn't  enjoy
watching people floating  in zero gravity? Plus,  the toilet--don't we
all want to know how the most fundamental human tasks are performed in
the darkness outside our firmament?

I was taken aback by something, which I didn't quite realize until the
very end of the video. The  astronaut giving the tour, Steven Swanson,
seems  to  be  a  sort of  naturally  gifted,  unobtrusive  optimist.
Everything he looked at  in the video, he looked at  through a lens of
gratitude. Well, maybe not every  single thing, but overwhelmingly the
man is positive.

How  many  people  are  we  around each  day  who  are  overwhelmingly
positive? Heck, even  when I'm alone all  day long I'm with  a guy who
complains a bit more than he should, and I'm making efforts! It seemed
to come naturally to him, way up there dangling over Earth.

Just one  little example: at the  very end of the  video, he's showing
viewers the Soyuz that he arrived in.  It has a tiny control room, and
a slightly larger  room connected to that. If you  read about his last
mission[2] you'll see that what was supposed  to be a 6 hour flight to
the station turned into a multi-day flight. In the video, he describes
being stuck  in the  little capsule  for that  time, much  longer than
anticipated at takeoff. And yet he  says something along the lines of,
"but, you know, the good thing is we made it" ... or something of that
nature. Just endlessly positive.

I do want to re-watch, but I  wanted to talk about it with gopherspace
too. If  you're looking for  some really humble positivity  to lighten
your mind, and  a cool tour of  the ISS, you can't go  wrong with this
video.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvTmdIhYnes
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Steven Swanson