What makes astronauts reach for the camera when they go into space? We caught up with to find out
INTERVIEWED BY ELIZABETH PEARSON
How did it first feel when you looked down and saw the Earth from orbit? It’s a big event in your life, to fly a rocket to space. The ride is not only extremely dangerous but very demanding physically. It’s been the focus of your life for several years, but it’s also the result of dreaming and studying, and years of preparation.
But the second the engine shuts off and you’re weightless orbiting the world, the absolute compulsion of everyone onboard is to get yourself unstrapped, take your helmet off and go and look out the window.
There’s a childlike glee in seeing planet Earth and it immediately surpasses whatever it was you were expecting. The speed of it, the constant change of it. If you wait just another minute, you’re over another continent. And because you are going so fast [the ISS travels at 7.66km/s] the angle between you, Earth and the Sun is constantly changing, so the light is constantly changing. The textures that you see and the colours that are brought out with those textures are constantly changing too. So it’s like a kaleidoscope, an amazing combination of time-driven events and actual visual impact. You perpetually feel a sense of privilege. It’s almost like a sort of reverence as you pull yourself over to the window and see the world passing by.
Did you immediately feel the need to capture this on camera or did that come later? NASA doesn’t assign one second of working hours to taking pictures of the world. Their experience is that we’re going to do that in our free time anyway. Even the Gemini astronauts smuggled cameras to space because NASA said there were only so many ounces available and it didn’t want them wasted on pictures. Eventually crews got Hasselblads in 1962.
At a personal level you want to record what you are seeing; you don’t want to let it pass by, but you also feel a sense of responsibility for everyone else. You are not there on behalf of yourself alone, you’re there on behalf of millions of people who would love to be there also, so there’s a sense of being a responsible photojournalist yourself.
You did a lot of outreach work while you were up there; was this something you always intended to do? I was thinking about that recently and it occurred to me that what inspired me was when we walked on the Moon when I was a little kid. That inspired millions of people; I was one of those. The Apollo programme had an enormous impact on