Hi All,

Its my pleasure and honour to welcome Edward Lu, An Astronaut (Yes! Rub your eyes and read again! An Astronaut! An Astronaut!) for Coffee With Experts. I never even dreamt that I would be doing this one day!

Also special thanks to Varun for this intro & introducing me to the Ed Lu’s video which inspired me to put this interview.

Dr. Edward T. Lu is a former NASA Astronaut. He is former worldrecord holder for being in space for the longest duration (in a single mission - 184 days).

He has flown on almost all of the flying objects that might qualify to being inhabitable in our solar system outside earth, including the MIR, Soyuz, Space Shuttle, Space Station. (well excluding the Asteroids ;-) -which probably doesnt qualify for inhabitable objects). He is younger than the rest of the world by 0.007 seconds due to time dilation (a phenomenon explained in Einstein’s Relativity theory where an object flying faster experiences slower time than others) and has accrued more Frequent flyer miles than most of fellow earthlings. (Yes! People who live on earth :-)) He is a Doctorate in both Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. Dr. Ed Lu is now working at Google. Dr. Ed Lu is arguably the first blogger in space!. His blog about his Expedition 7 at the ISS can be accessed at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp7/luletters/.

Other resources about Ed:

http://www.edlu.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Lu
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/lu.html

Ed went up to the space station just after the Columbia Disaster, when the time was running short and they had to get supplies into the ISS without the Space Shuttle. We at CWS are honoured to have interviewed our hero.

Ladies and Gentleman, Coffee With Dr. Ed Lu.

“It does not take Rocket Science to read the blog, but Rocket Scientist’s interview certainly makes CWS an interesting blog”

Coffee With Edward Lu! - An Astronaut

Me: Sundar Rajan G S
EL: Ed Lu


Me: Hi Ed! Welcome to CWS! How many ppl travelled with you to space? How long were you there?
EL: Two of us travelled. Yuri (Yuri Malenchenko) & I went to space for 6 months. From April 25 2003 to October 27th 2003

Me: What is the first change u notice there?
EL: Newton’s first law, which states that objects in motion will tend to remain in motion, and objects at rest will tend to remain at rest, is the very first thing you have to deal with. When flying across the module, you will continue in a straight line until you grab onto something or you hit the far wall. Similarly, if you are floating in the middle of a module and not moving, you will stay there until you push off some other objectMe: Oh you mean you actually fly! :-)
EL: Yes! The main difference between life up here and life down there is that things don’t drop to the floor here including yourself. Rather than walking around as we do on the ground, we fly around inside the station. It takes some practice getting used to it, but you get better rapidly.

Me: What is the work you do out there?
EL: I worked on an experiment that looks at how metal alloys crystallize as they cool. Meanwhile, over in the Russian Segment of the Space Station Yuri has worked on an experiment that looks at what are called plasma crystals. There are a whole host of other experiments up there, ranging from medical investigations with us as the subjects, to experiments on magnetized fluids, to ultraviolet observations of lightning storms.
Me: Readers, visit Ed’s blog (link at the top for more details)

Me: Ed, Lets talk about some of the day to day activities. How do you eat out there?
EL: We don’t have a real kitchen up here, but we do have a kitchen table. You might wonder of what use a table is if you can’t set anything down on it, but we have bungee straps and Velcro on the tabletop so you can keep your food containers, spoon, napkins, etc. from floating away. Of course there are no chairs around the table, what we do is float around the table while we prepare our meals and eat. There are a couple of handrails on the floor to slide your feet under to stabilize yourself. Ofcourse, You have to move fairly slowly when eating, or the food will literally fly right off your spoon (and onto the wall).

Me: What about the toilets and bathrooms in space?
EL: The toilet is operated by air pressure. A fan does the work that gravity does on the ground. Urine is sucked inside the toilet and is collected in a 20-liter container. Regarding the bath in space, We don’t have a shower up here (the water wouldn’t go down through the drain anyhow), so we wash using no-rinse soap and shampoo and a towel. It is the same stuff they use in hospitals for bedridden patients, and it works really well.

Me: What about sleeping in space?
EL: We get 16 sunrises/sunsets a day! So, to get to sleep at night (according to GMT) we have to cover the windows to keep it dark in here, so right after getting up one of the first thing to do is to uncover the windows.

Me: Do you do any exercises out there?
EL: Exercise up here is even more important than it is on the ground. On the ground you get a lot of exercise without even knowing it because your body is constantly working against the force of gravity. Up here, As far as your muscles and bones are concerned, life is just effortless. Since we hardly have to exert any effort to get around in space, we have to maintain our fitness levels by working out twice a day.

Me: How does earth look like from there?
EL: Whenever I get a chance, I spend time just observing the planet below. It turns out you can see a lot
more from up here than you might expect. First off, we aren’t as far away as some people think -
our orbit is only about 240 miles above the surface of the Earth. While this is high enough to see that the Earth is round (believe me, it is), we are still just barely skimming the surface when you consider that the diameter of the Earth is over 8000 miles.

Me: Thanks a lot for sharing your experiences. Its indeed fascinating to see or rather hear about it.
Me: Dont get me wrong. I am playing a devils advocate here. We have so many problems on earth to solve. There is poverty, unemployment.. There is so much more *on earth* to be fixed.. which needs huge amounts of money! In this case, why are we spending huge amounts of money for space exploration.. What do we get out it!
EL: I often hear this from people who don’t know how much money is spent on space exploration. For example, in the United States the annual budget for the manned space program is about 7 billion dollars per year, or less than 1 percent of the total money spent on education in the United States (on the federal, local, and state levels). It is also less than 1 percent of the amount spent on social services. So my question back to you is, if we were to eliminate the spending on spaceflight, and add 1 percent to the amount we spend on either education or social services, would this eliminate our problems in those areas?
But I would argue that our society would be worse off. I think our balance of spending is about right (roughly 100 times more on social services).

Me: That clears a lot of doubts. Can you share links to some of the photos.
EL: Sure, All the photos are from NASA and are public. Here are the links:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/jsc2003e31966.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e05847.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e06446.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e06702.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e06975.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e07306.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e08251.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e06083.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e10974.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-7/html/iss007e14641.html

Readers, A special thanks to Ed for these queries. He is a very busy man and he answered some of the questions. And the rest of the questions were so frequently asked to him that he blogged about them. With his permission, some answers taken directly from blog.Dream come true is something I cant say here. Coz, I didnt even dream about taking an interview of such a great man! :-) I am indeed proud of my blog today!

Originally found at: http://coffeewithsundar.com
Subscribe here: http://coffeewithsundar.com/feed
If you havent subscribed till now, it is high time you do.. :-) Special thanks to Ed & Varun once again. It was Varun who downloaded the video talk (at Google). He only asked me to watch it. I was really impressed by the video and mailed Ed Lu, who was kind enough to reply back.

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