‘Earth to orbiting Space Station, over’
Students chat with astronaut who is 250 miles above San Bruno
An astronaut flew over San Bruno on Wednesday and revealed to the 800 earthlings below that he wears socks to work, eats lasagna and spent part of this week fixing the space station toilet.
And the Internet doesn’t work any better in near-zero gravity than it does on Earth, spaceman Scott Tingle said.
“It’s very slow,” he said. “But it’s better than nothing.”
The 11-minute shortwave radio conversation with Tingle — orbiting the Earth aboard the International Space Station — was the biggest thing to hit Parkside Intermediate School in some time. That’s because classes were canceled while Tingle spoke from 250 miles overhead on his special radio
hookup. Students and teachers crammed into the school’s gym, where local ham radio clubs had set up their equipment.
Principal Kerry Dees blew a whistle and called the proceedings to order. She declared it a great day in the history of the mighty Parkside Panthers.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Dees said. “This is beyond your imagination!”
And then a dozen students trooped up to a bank of shortwave radios and read their questions into the mike. Each student had been instructed to say “over” at the end of each question, so that Tingle — who was fed the questions in advance — could rattle off his answers. All eyes were on the clock, because radio contact with the space station would last only about 11 minutes.
At the precise moment, the radio folks twiddled their dials and history arrived at Parkside over frequency 145.805 megahertz.
“Good to be with you, Panthers!” said Tingle from on high.
Speaking fast — and remembering to say “over” at the end of each question — students asked if it was OK to bring pets into space, whether astronauts wear special shoes, if being an astronaut was bad for your health, and whether Tingle had ever traveled outside the Milky Way galaxy.
Tingle said pets aren’t allowed, astronauts wear socks instead of shoes, working out on the space station exercise equipment keeps astronauts fit, and that he had never been outside the Milky Way, but that it would be “awesome” if he could.
To most questions, Tingle replied that being an astronaut was “awesome” or “really neat” or “pretty cool.”
It turns out that talking to such school assemblies is a fairly common thing for Space Station astronauts, who have months of time on their hands. Maintaining public interest in the space program since the last moon landing in 1972 and the last space shuttle launch in 2011 continues to be a big part of an astronaut’s job — one that could come to an end if the Trump administration is successful in making the space station a private entity as planned by 2025.
Ham radio hobbyist and Parkside parent Nick Hart organized the event, borrowed the radios, erected the antennas on the roof, snaked the wires through the gym and arranged for emergency batteries just in case something went wrong.
As for the Space Station, which has orbited the Earth 106,000 times since its launch 20 years ago, it’s running about as well as any other vehicle of its age. Tingle told the students that its “systems get old and you have to fix things.” This week, he said, he worked on the cameras, the computer, the exercise equipment and the toilet.
And then, before more students could ask about space suits, dizziness, injuries, dreams, or how exactly one fixes a space station toilet, the International Space Station flew beyond radio range. The conversation and the school assembly came to a crackly, static-filled end.
Gym students were ordered out to the track to run two laps, and science teacher Linda Ballentine ushered her pupils back to their classroom to write a brief essay about the chat and what they had learned, science-wise.
“There’s no free lunch at Parkside,” Ballentine said.