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