I attended a CU Alumni Engineering event tonight at the Science and Nature center in town. The speaker was former astronaut James Voss, who is now a professor in the CU Aerospace department. A veteran of five missions, he has spent over 200 days in space, which included a stint on the International Space Station. Very nice guy, enjoyed his little talk. Got to speak with him privately after the event (if you must know meeting and talking with an astronaut is like meeting a movie star for me!). I am such a geek ;-) I asked him about sleeping in space, asked him how living in Star City was, asked him if he and his fellow cosmonaut used to talk about space secrets? Sleeping is great he said. Thought there would be a huge market for older people to retire to space has he never slept better (think no pressure points!), enjoyed his time in Russia even though they were still sorting things out back in the 90s. And finally he and is fellow cosmonaut did talk about each others space program. Guess there was a mission to the Salyut one time and the thing had been totally turned off so the ship gets there to dock and nothing is on. Everything was iced...go figure. Gotta love those Soviets...
When I returned home I wikipedia'd him and discovered two of his missions were top secret military missions. I remember those days when the DoD just took over a mission. Wow that is an easy way to get two missions in the books. I wonder what they did back in the day to make it secret? He also did a lot of stuff in support of the space station...guess that was a pretty good gig.
Good stuff...
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