Life in space: hair, laundry & CO.
A few days ago Samantha Cristoforetti came back to Earth: have you ever wondered how it was her life in the space? From the hair washing to the cooking, here there are some interesting facts about our spacewoman routine in the International Space Station during these months!
The sky and the Universe have always fascinated men who have begun to investigate it from ancient times.
From the moment of discovering of the stars and planets and from the scientific theories on the rotation and revolution movements, we have come a long way and the technologies of the last century have allowed us to reach unimaginable goals: for example, in 1961 the Russian cosmonaut Jurj Gagarin was the first man to fly in the Space.
From that time human beings has organized several missions, including the latest on the International Space Station: it has been a very important moment for the Italian proud because Samantha Cristoforetti has taken part to it and she is the first Italian woman to have reached the Earth’s orbit and have joined to the ISS crew, acronym of International Space Station, the largest station in the Space at 400 kilometres far from our planet, launched in 1998.
Samantha Cristoforetti left for the FUTURE ESA mission (European Space Agency) six months ago, along with two colleagues, the American Terry W.Virts and Russian Anton Shkaplerov, to perform experiments on microgravity and its effects on the human body.
Now she is back to Earth, but how will she feel like? Indeed, life in the Space is very different from our routine and requires adopting new habits because of the absence of gravity: read on and you will find really extravagant facts relating to cooking, sleeping and daily hygienics!
Let’s start with basic needs: how can you sleep and eat on a space station?
Time in the Space is very different than Earth: in the ISS specific case, the astronauts see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in 24 hours every day because the station is able to orbit around the planet in just 90 minutes. For this reason they schedule more or less 6 hours of sleeping every 17-18 hours, into sleeping bags anchored to the wall. To eating, anyway, they can use the fridge, the chafing dish and some magnetic trays to keep the cutlery fixed, while all liquid foods are ingested through the straws.
And what about the daily hygienics?
It is an hard matter for astronauts: indeed, cleaning themselves is not easy because of the possibility of scattering liquids inside the station and, in the same way, even cleaning your hair can become a complex task, as Samantha has showed us during these six months.
Do you want to know how to?
Thanks to the pictures posted on Twitter some weeks ago, our spacewoman described us such steps you need to follow to clean the hair and give them a trimmed: first of all, Samantha dampened the hair with small water drops through a spout and, using hands, she distributed them evenly on the hair, from the roots to the tips, to avoid the scattering into the surrounding environment. Later, she applied on the scalp a shampoo without rinsing of all lengths; for drying, finally, she waited that the water evaporates naturally. For the hait-cutting, instead, she needed the help of her colleagues: Virts cut the hair and, in the same time, Shkaplerov aspired cutted locks. A nice team effort that has ripped us more than just a smile!
It is clear that the operations are a bit complex: maybe, could it be the reason why that the astronauts agree into declaring that it is better to undertake space missions with a really short hair cut?!
In conclusion, we can say that the daily beauty routine is minimized…
Even for clothing things are not easy: indeed, you can not carry a very large luggage because there is a real impossibility to wash clothes. The destiny of dirty clothes can be: a re-using on the station (but who could wear twice a pair of underwear without washing it?), the decomposition in the Space (thanks to a special hold that, filled, is sent with an hypersonic speed in the terrestrial atmosphere, crumbling) and, finally, the possibility to make them as a fertilizer for plants.
For the beauty and fashion addicted “life in Space” it would be really tough: destroying the clothes, no beauty-daily routine for months…
In our life we are not spacewomen and, indeed, we can have fun to cuddle us with shopping and beauty treatments for body and hair that gives us … hair like a star!
So we can feel, like Samantha, a star of the firmament!
Source photo of Samantha Cristoforetti: www.ilpost.it
