Archive - Apr 4, 2006 - Story
William McArthur and Jeffrey Williams were spending the night in the station's Quest airlock in conditions of lower air pressure to test a new routine for preparing the body for a spacewalk. To prevent nitrogen bubbles from entering the bloodstream and causing painful decompression sickness, nitrogen needs to be expelled from the body before astronauts venture into space in their low-pressure space suits.
Usually, crew members breathe pure oxygen to purge the body of nitrogen. But spending time in a low-pressure environment may speed up the process from hours to minutes. So the two astronauts camped out in the closet-sized airlock on Monday and lowered its pressure from 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi) to 10.2 psi to test how well the airlock maintained its pressure and oxygen levels.
QSL cards from all 50 of the United States of America have now arrived at the ARRL QSL bureau in Newington, CT and the process to file for a special "WAS from Space" for Bill McArthur can begin.
Former Microsoft software developer Charles Simonyi is set to become a space tourist for a visit to the International Space Station (ISS), the orbital tourism firm Space Adventures said Monday.
Simonyi, a 58-year-old American and co-founder of Intentional Software Corp., will ride a Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS for a one-week science mission aboard orbital laboratory, Space Adventures said, adding that a contract for the spaceflight is in hand.