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On Oct. 13, 2000 - at about 4:00 p.m. CDT, Japanese astronaut Wakata e-mailed his answers from Discovery against the questions which he received through the STS-92 home page. (Japanese language) Answers to questions in Web site The following are answers to a couple of the questions sent to my Web site. What does food on the Space Shuttle taste like? On the second day of the mission, I had Japanese rice, miso soup, shrimp cocktail, and drank green tea and grapefruit juice. Everything was quite good. Floating in the Space Shuttle, I also enjoyed eating crisp rice crackers that were sent from Souka, a city close to my home town. In the early days of space travel (1962-1963), the only food available was food in tubes or one-bite cubes, but the variety of food available has increased, and now you can eat almost anything that you can eat on the ground. NASA currently provides about a hundred different types of food and beverages, including chicken stew, beef stroganoff, pilaf, strawberry yogurt, grapefruit juice, and lemonade. The food provides a good balanced diet, but you never feel quite full because not only is the size of each serving small, but it is also impossible to feel any heaviness in your stomach because of the weightlessness. What is the orange-colored suit astronauts wear during takeoff ? At the time of launch and re-entry, astronauts wear orange pressurized suits. These are designed to protect astronauts from hazardous gases, from the loss of oxygen and cabin pressure, and from the low temperatures at extremely high altitudes of up to more than 30 kilometers from sea level. They are also designed to be waterproof to prevent water from entering the suit in the case of an emergency evacuation when the crew lands in water. When the crew members wear these pressurized suits, they carry parachute packs on their shoulders, which are fitted with parachutes, emergency oxygen systems, inflatable rafts, drinking water, and a survival kit. Wearing these pressurized suits together with the parachute packs thus makes it possible for astronauts to be prepared for emergencies. There are also white space suits called Extra-VehicularActivity, or EVA, suits worn by astronauts when working outside the Space Shuttle or the International Space Station. In addition to being tightly sealed, the EVA suits have a temperature and humidity adjustment function. This makes it possible for astronauts to work safely in the harsh space environment, in which the temperature difference between day and night could be as much as 200 degrees Celsius. Inside of the EVA suits, it is pressurized with pure oxygen and kept at 1/3 of the atmospheric pressure. On this flight, four astronauts will perform four EVAs, each of which will last approximately 6.5 hours.
Koichi Wakata, Astronaut, National Space Development Agency of Japan
from the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-92) Last Updated : October 19, 2000
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