STEVEN SWANSON
The three-time NASA astronaut tells us about life in space and the significance of Artemis
During his career at NASA, Swanson logged over 195 days in space, undertaking five spacewalks. His three missions to the ISS include two Space Shuttle flights (STS-117 and STS-119) and one Soyuz flight (TMA-12M).
How does NASA select astronauts?
Nobody knows for sure. Really it’s up to the chief of the astronaut office to make that selection, and sometimes others depending on how high profile the mission is. But it’s partly just where you are in the queue, because we come in as a group together. The people who came in the group before will fly before you do. I didn’t think about an astronaut career until I was about 25. It took 12 years from that point to become one, and I ended up working 11 of those years at NASA as an engineer.
What’s it like to spend significant time away from Earth? I spent about six months in space, and it’s not tremendously difficult. Family and friends is the first thing you miss, but we could Skype and the communication with our families was good. You can get down periods when you get a little tired of it – you haven’t really gone outside and the food gets old after a while.
How much have the spacesuits improved for Artemis? The biggest difference is in the shoulders. You get the ability to really reach around and have more movement, like you would without a suit on. They also have better mobility on the legs. On the International Space Station you didn’t really use your legs much for anything, so it didn’t matter how much mobility you had in your lower body. Now it’s going to matter tremendously on the
Moon, so they’ve modified the lower part to be more moveable.
What changes can the Artemis crew expect in their bodies?
The first thing we have to worry about is muscle and bone loss. Astronauts now work out two hours a day, so we do a pretty good job of mitigating that, but we still see some muscle loss. Bone loss is pretty much covered now. I only had one per cent bone loss from six months on board, and that was a good number. That comes back after about a year.
In our experiments while we were up there, we found that 30 to 40 per cent of the astronauts are getting major changes in their vision, and we haven’t figured out exactly why. That’s an ongoing process right now. There’s just many things that change while you’re up there. We’ve known for a while that the immune system gets degraded, so we’re very careful about being quarantined before we go so nobody takes any germs or bugs with them on the way up. You don’t want to get sick up there.
How significant do you think the Artemis program is?
The real goal is Mars. And we will use the Moon as a testbed because Mars is a very difficult mission. It’s going to take almost three years, and you can’t come home early on a Mars mission. It’s a seven or eightmonth journey to get there and you have to wait 15 months there for the planets to align correctly again before you return. It has to be very well thought out, and the best way to do that is on the Moon. As well as Mars, we can also use the Moon as a testbed for other things – to see how we can actually gather materials from the Moon itself and maybe use that to make our fuel.