‘Cities Look Like Jewellery Adorning Earth; No Countries, No Borders Visible’
Srinagar, Oct 4: First “I saw how beautiful the horizon is” and then “I observed lights of cities donning the plant earth like glittering jewellery” and finally “I observed the Himalayas bordering Kashmir and China.” That is how the two-time NASA Space Shuttle Astronaut, Dr Mary Ellen Weber, described her journey into the space, first in 1995 and then in 2000.
Weber, one of the youngest astronauts ever to be selected by NASA, shared her experiences in space with the students at Kothibagh Higher Secondary School here. But before that, Weber had a message for the young students: “It is important for you to keep your eyes open for opportunities and experiences, especially the rare ones.”Dr Weber has been a NASA Astronaut for 10 years and is the 30th woman to fly in space, having travelled 297 earth orbits and 7.8 million miles.“Astronauts get to do many things in life and one among them is to share their experiences at space with people on ground. For many thousands of years, human beings have looked at the night sky with curiosity as to what is out there. And in this history of planet earth and history of mankind, we happen to be born at a tiny moment in this great history,” she says, as she begins sharing her experiences.“I was older when occurred to me that I could visit space. I thought of it when women were not allowed to fly into the space. And during my college, when I decided to fly to space, I’d never believe that is going to happen one day. But I took it as a goal, a goal beyond one’s imagination. As I felt asleep, I would dream about it. I thought to do more and be more and try this.”Having hogged over 4000 skydives as on date, Weber told the students that “in my college when I would study chemical engineering, I saw an ad in a newspaper on sky diving. I talked to friends about it. I tried and made it happen. Had I been afraid to take that opportunity, my life would have been different. I took the opportunity about the world that I knew nothing about.”Wearing a blue-flight suit, Dr Weber, who is presently the President of Texas University in USA, said “this suit that I am wearing is the one astronauts wear in jets. These suits only look blue but they are very useful: they won’t burn in accidents.”And she continued: “Space driving is about studying and learning. The technical background about mathematics and sciences is very important. We got to understand how space shuttle works, understand how its various components work and how to navigate. There is a lot of book learning and studying that is required to become an astronaut.”Dr Weber’s lecture, first of its kind in Kashmir, was organized by the US-based Non-Governmental Organization, Mercy Crops, in collaboration with American Centre. This is for the first time that the American Centre has organized such an activity in Kashmir since 1989, according to David Mees, who was part of the endeavor. Mees is Cultural Attaché at US Embassy New Delhi.“This is for the first time the US State Department has asked a NASA astronaut to share experiences in Kashmir. We are here after over two decades,” Mees said.He said since the “situation in valley has improved after a lot of political strife, the Department has taken this initiative as part of a people-to-people contact endeavor,” he said.THE FLIGHTWeber said it is going up thousands and thousands of miles. “And at one point in time you would feel as if you are coming down. You have to go up at an incredible speed, very fast. It is like a baseball. If you won’t hit that with speed, it would come down to earth. So the space shuttle, like that baseball, is to be thrown at an amazingly fast speed so that the shape of the curve, which it makes in the air, would be larger and the shuttle would not hit back earth.”Alen says “you have to go with the speed which is 25 times more than the speed of sound. It is 17000 miles per hour. And it is this speed that makes space flights so risky an affair. It requires incredible power to get you going on that speed. You have to be fully able to navigate and control things.”THE RISKWeber, who has set a world record for the largest freefall formation with 300 skydivers, said the space flight is a huge risk. “If commercial flights at the Delhi airport were as risky as space shuttles, there would be at least 10 catastrophic crashes every single day there. The astronauts therefore go up in space with a huge risk which they embrace. But you got to understand that what you are doing is worth a risk: helping humankind get to that goal. It is therefore important to have goals and careers that you are willing to risk you life for,” she told the students.Referring to astronaut Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-born American astronaut who died in a space shuttle crash in 2003, Weber said she knew the risk. “I also knew the risks. But it was worth it. It was my dream to go to the space,” she said.‘CITY LIGHTS APPEAR LIKE JEWELLARY’According to Dr Weber, life in space is entirely different than what is being perceived. “Everything floats in space. When you try to brush your teeth, you got to catch hold of the cap of the toothpaste and the tooth brush itself. So you can understand how complicated it would be to manage equipments there,” she said.She said “looking back at planet earth from space is one of my vivid memories. It is for the first time I saw the horizon much above earth. It is so beautiful. You see earth as a planet. You don’t see countries. There are no borders. There is no evidence of human beings during the day. But yes during night, you see cities as jewellery adorning the planet earth. On ground, human beings feel we are something. But above, you feel you are nothing.”Meteorites, Weber said, is another thing you experience so closely. “I saw 13 meteorites hitting our planet. I saw the power of planet earth; Saw Himalayan mountains surrounding Kashmir and China.”She said in space you observe how fragile and small our atmosphere is. “It appears like a very thin and delicate area. And when radiations from sun hit this atmosphere, it glows like a delicate air blanket.”THE POWER-POINT PRESENTATIONDr Weber gave a power-point presentation revealing their journey to space: the way astronauts live there, communicate there and the journey back to ground zero.In 2000, Weber flew abroad Atlantis on mission STS-1010, a pioneering and critical early construction mission for the International Space Station. She also flew abroad Discovery in 1995 on mission STS-70. Dr Weber received an MBA from Southern Methodist University and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California.IMPRESSIVE QUESTIONSThe students asked her a number of questions. The questions, according to Dr Weber, were “very impressive and reflected the urge of the Kashmiris students for information and knowledge.”And finally, Dr Weber had a word about Kashmir as well. “I knew about Kashmir but I had never been to the Valley. Now that I am here for the past two days, I am overwhelmed at how intelligent, warm and talented people of Kashmir are,” she said.Weber said the purpose of her visit to Kashmir “is to share my experiences about space.”Fatal AddictionBEFORE Dr Weber spoke, Valley’s noted psychiatrist Dr Arshid Hussain made a passionate appeal to the students to “be the agents of change.” Hussain made the appeal in the backdrop of a couple of bitter experiences he had at a city hospital recently.“I recently visited Bed No. 13 at Ward 6 of the SMHS Hospital where I saw a woman sobbing. I tried to console her. I looked at the file of her 25-year-old son who was suffering from convulsions. I tried to dig out his history. His brother had died four days back. This boy was taking all types of harmful substances like shoe polish and codeine. He had suffered convulsions because of the grief of his bother when he didn’t get these substances for many days,” Hussain said. “His bother told me that her elder son died because he too was addicted to same substances. And his uncle told me that their youngest brother has also started taking the same substances. I wondered as to what their mother would have thought about them on their birth. And that is why I thought this occasion to be an opportunity to pass on the message to youth that they must be the agents of change for a better future.”Hussain had another experience to share. “A person had opened a medical shop in a village in Pattan as a side business. Within a short span of time, he found that the business of selling substances and drugs, which the youth consume, is picking up fast. But one day, he was shell-shocked to see his own son falling to these substances.”