Progetto FuturaSubs

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41

Ecco il mio pezzettino, di prima stesura:

S: […] and, you now, we are all adapted to be earth-bound human beings and, you know, by the time you’re my age, mature adult, we are all very adapted to this, there are very few surprises, uhm… and then you find yourself in this completely different environment where you float around all day and this seems… you know, it has this fun component, you know, you’re floating around all day but it also means you have to relearn a lot of basic skills, you know, from, you know, the really basic skills that a child has to learn, how to use the rest of the toilet, you have to relearn that, I mean. I’m pretty sure is gonna be challenging the first days: how to set up your work environment, how to organize your life; and it’s not only the microgravity, it’s the Space Station environment that’s quite complex. I think that at the beginning there is a pretty big learning curve where you can put together all the stuff, all the things that people have tried to teach over the years, but also the stuff that you’re learning day by day from your more experienced crew mates or just by making mistakes, I guess. And then I think you progressively turn yourself into this human being that is adapted to living in space and living in the International Space Station, and people say it it takes about a couple of months until they sort of reach that, you know, the curve sort of flattens out and I’m just looking forward to experiencing that and observing myself as I grow into a space human.

I: As you think about what you’re gonna do, what would you say it is that we are learning from this mission to the International Space Station that is helping prepare us for future exploration?

S: Ah… I think quite a lot actually, uhm… sometimes people look at, especially if they are not too familiar, right, to the space program that I will look at it and say “Uh, you know, we went to the Moon in the 60s and what have we done since then?” You know, we never as far again and I’m like actually challenging that point of view because, yes, it’s true that there was this great human adventure, you know, Apollo and going to the Moon in the 60s and early 70s, however, you know, those crews went, stayed for a very short time and came back, and all of the time, not quite being sure whether it would work out or not, with a pretty big risk factor. What we’re doing now and what we’ve done in the past 15 years is robust operations: we have learned how to conduct operations in Low Earth Orbit in a continuous manner for 15 years, uhm, with an increasing level of complexity. I mean, people really should not underestimate the complexity of the Space Station environment, I mean, the technical complexity of this huge outpost of humanity in space. I mean, it’s just amazing, I mean, it’s worth of a science fiction book, really, I mean there’s… And the fact that we can run robust operations for so long and involving so many, you know, international agencies and countries, if we want to conduct further exploration in a robust manner, those are all lessons that we need to learn, and I think it would be invaluable for anything we wanna do [in the future].

42

Non c’entro nulla, ma siete stati tutti veramente outstanding! Poche ore e tutto trascritto, davvero siamo una grandissima comunity di altissimo livello culturale!

43

Grazie Buzz, per le due parole che mi erano sfuggite! :slight_smile:

4:40 - 8:40

Samantha
[…] I decided that it would be cool to spend the twelfth grade somewhere else, that’s an option, it’s like the second last year in the Italian school system. And so you have this organisation that is offering you the opportunity to become an exchange student for a year, and so I chose to come to the United States, mainly I was very interested in the country itself, again it was the country that had the most interesting and exciting space program and the country of Star Trek, and of course I was also very interested in improving my knowledge of English language. And so I spent a year in the high school in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and then I went back to Italy and I completed high school in Italy.

Interviewer
And then that [cough], excuse me, after that on the college, tell me that story and how you got into the airforce and ultimately to the astronaut.

Samantha
Yeah, absolutely. So I debated for a while on whatever I wanterto study Physics or Engineering, it was like my two big interests when I was growing up were science and technology, decided eventually to become and engineer, and I’ve decided that I wanted to go in a different country just to, you know, to master a different language, and just to have that culture experience, I was also always extremely interested in both languages and in just the fact of experiencing different cultures, not so much travelling, I mean I like travelling too, but I like to find ways of actually living in a place or somehow sharing the experience that the local people live.
So I ended it up in not going very farI went to Germany, Munich, the university of Munich, and I studied aerospace engineering there, which was a wonderful experience, and I think a very good education, and while I was in there I also had a chance of participating in other programs, so for a while I studied, or I did, a research project in Southern France at SUPAERO in Toulouse. And then I was always interested in Russia and Russian, and of course I knew that was a very important part of the space program too, my first attempt to study Russian was dated back to high school actually but not ended to be very successful.
And it didn’t look like was an exchange program between Munich and the Russian university, but then for a twist of fate eventually I found that a professor in Italy actually who had a good connection and tradition of sending students to this university in Moscow, and so I was actually able to do the research for my final thesis in the university of Moscow and so I spent about eleven months in Moscow between 2000 and 2001.
And then throughout all these years I was actually thinking about this other passion that had caught my heart which was military flying. Now, strangely enough the Italian military had not accepted women until the year 2000 I guess, so in the mid Nineteen-nineties you could hear talking, you know, ‘There will be soon a law that will allow voluntary military services for women’, but, you know, this law didn’t come and I was getting older and older of course, and normally the age limit to join the academy as a pilot is 21, so at some point I turned 21, and turned 22, and the law had not come. And then, again for a twist of faith, when the law finally was passed in '99, that was a clause that said ‘For female candidates we are going to extend by three years the age limit’ so 21 became 24. That was just for a transition period, for the first three years they wanted to help women out that had waited for so long, like me.

44

mmm datemi 3 gg che ora sono a Bologna, debbo tornare a casa…

45

So I ended up not going very far, I went to Germany…

so for a while I studied, or I did a research project, in Southern France at SUPAERO in Toulouse…

46

Ecco la parte mia e di mia moglie:

…a rather complex experimental setup, so quite challenging, the first experiments that will take place in the airlock, because we will have to do part of the protocol at a reduced pressure, so it’s gonna be me and Terry in the airlock and we will reduce the pressure to about 10 psi and do a series of measurements. And the point there is to measure the mechanics of the gases exchange in your lungs, and it has of course implications in fundamental science and we want to better understand how this gases exchange functions and then also validate again some measurement technologies that can help people on the ground that have issues with, you know, breathing diseases like asthma which is unfortunately extremely quite spread on the planet.

THAT’S ALL A VERY INTERESTING SOUNDING THING. IT WILL BE INTERESTING TO TO… WE GET TO SEE ANY OF THAT. AS YOU SAID THE CREW MEMBERS ARE ALSO WORKING ON OTHER EXPERIMENTS IN OTHER DIFFERENT AREAS OF SCIENCE BEYOND HUMAN LIFE SCIENCES, CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT TWO OR THREE OF THOSE EXPERIMENTS THAT YOU ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO TAKING PART IN?

Yes, absolutely and… there’s two areas, one area is that of the life sciences that do not observe the human body as a whole but rather his… for example cell cultures. There is one that is called NATO that will bring to station cultures of like bone cells and the idea is to test the effectiveness of some specific nano-particles in preventing bone re-absorption. We we are used to think maybe, unless we know something about it, that the bone is something ah… you know it’s stiff, is rigid and we are maybe not just to think that is such a living tissue, but there is a lot going on, there’s the… the bone is constantly reabsorbed and then reformed in the body and we rely on this balance between destruction of bone mass and production of new bone mass and in space and unfortunately on the ground with people with osteoporosis this balance is disrupted and so we are trying, of course we have lots of countermeasures based on exercises, but it’s very interesting to try and look for pharmacological countermeasures and so this experiment will look into the effectiveness of these particular nano-particles in actually diminishing the re-absorption of… of the bone and so tipping that balance between absorption and production in our favor, in our balance. The other thing is physical sciences, a lot of the physical science experiments on board you have to be fair, they run very much automatically, they do not require a lot of co-interaction. So a lot of time in our training we will be trained in a facility, let’s say the material science laboratory and then the…we will be taught for example how to change a cartridge, we do not have as astronauts all the time a lot of insight, in the details of an experiment but we have to be the hands like a lab technician. We are not scientists necessarily on board, we are like lab technicians, we have to lend our hands to the scientists to physically do a few tasks that of course cannot be done from the ground like for example changing a cartridge, but once you have done that and that you have made sure that everything runs properly then they can run the experiment from the ground. Sometimes there’s a little bit more involvement like for example there’s this experiment called BCAT, which has been running for several years but with different samples every time and there is a lot of interest in the… from the industry… in this field…

Siamo molto contenti di aver contribuito! credo non ci siano stati problemi, ma sentitevi in ogni caso liberi di cambiare qualsiasi cosa se pensate di aver trovato errori.

47

Grazie Buzz! Sicuro del secondo?

48

Non suona molto bene grammaticalmente, ma secondo me è quello che dice…

49

Anche noi abbiamo trovato (pochissime) cose che grammaticalmente non tornavano molto, pero’ abbiamo deciso di rimanere fedeli all’audio originale…

50

Tra oggi e domani mi ci metto

51

Sicuramente, se vi sono errori di grammatica li “sistemeremo” nell’adattamento italiano, ma la traslitterazione inglese è da intendersi letteralmente.
Grazie a tutti coloro che hanno già inviato la loro parte :beer:

52

Ok, dopo aver dimezzato la velocità del video qualcosina sono riuscita a capire, ma purtroppo devo darvi del lavoro da fare :frowning:
Più di così non riesco a capire. (Mi sa che la prossima volta lo lascio fare a chi sa farlo :smiley: )

SAMANTHA: That was just for a transition period, for the first three years they wanted to help women out that had waited for so long, like me. And so I was actually able to finish my engineering studies and there (was day) here I spent in Moscow. While I was there I also applied at the Air Force academy, I had actually to come back a couple of times to do part of that selection process and then basically it was back to back a big rush so I finished my engineering studies, I turned in my thesis, and almost the next day I should (up at) the Airforce Academy for my studies (…). In a way it wasn’t an obvious choice because I was… in a way I was (stroing?) away my engineering studies fully because I had to start again from (scratch?) with, you know, colleagues that basically (worked) out of school and so do undergraduated studies again but, you know, at the end I think it was worth it, so I spent four years there, then I went to the United States again for pilot training, I got my wings at Sheppard Airforce Base up in northern Texas, she is the (…) school, and then went back to Italy. I had to wait a little bit for further training, and then I did my operational conversion on the AM-X which is the (…) attack combat aircraft, and then for another twist of fate pretty much on the same time as I was doing my operational conversion, which is a very very demanding (as like …) training, really at the same time I was going through the selection process for ESA, which in a way was a pity because I was again giving up my operational career that was just starting, but in Europe we just (… have selections that often that? ) regularly, so in a way I really felt it was a once in a life my opportunity and I had to grab it, and so that process to come to (career?) and then (eventual) it was like enough to be one of the six people who joint ESA as astronauts in 2009.

INTERVIEWER: Was that astronauts selection something that you knew about and applied to or had you just put in an application open in the “there will be” selection coming up?

SAMANTHA: Yeah, no no, there is no unsolicited application: you have to wait for a selection to come up and, again, there have not been one for a lag of fifteen years, so… and then, you know, I was not somebody who had a lot of connections in the space business, I mean not at all, so I didn’t have an insider when was a selection going to come up you know, I was, you know in a very demanding training program in the Airforce, and fully engaged in that and I was very happy into (in) what I was doing, but then this news came out, then… the selection was open, and again, you know it could be another fifteen years until the next one comes around , so I really had to grab that chance.

INTERVIEWER: Now that you are an astronaut, do you feel that you will be a role model for other european women who have an interest in this field?

SAMANTHA: I hope… It’s a question I get asked a lot and, you know, in a way I really hope to be a role model for anybody who’s interested in this field, I don’t think the experiences that specific, I mean the might (… gender …. issue?), but I don’t think the experiences so specific that, you know, you have two compartments alas. You’re role modelling! …Role… I think growing up, you know, I’ve looked up to men and women equally and tried to learn from other people that I thought could be (rawl) models, something that I could apply in my life. Now, of course, what can be especially important for women is that it can be encouraging to see that, you know, women can do that and in fields where there aren’t that many women it can be quite important, actually… and that’s certainly a privilege position to be in.

53

Eccomi, posto anch’io la mia parte.

…from the industry in this field, the field of colloidal… physics, and there’s a little bit more of astronauts’ involvement in that… in those type of experiments, because you actually have to go in, shake the sample with the magnet, and then you have to set up a camera in a very specific way, so that it can take pictures at a certain interval and then the scientists will actually observe those pictures to understand the details in microgravity of colloidal physics.

WE HEAR SOMETIMES YOU AND THE STATION CREW MEMBERS TALKING WITH THE INVESTIGATORS ON THE GROUND, IN CIRCUMSTANCES, I THINK, THAT ARE SOMEWHAT LIKE WHAT YOU DESCRIBED THERE. IT MUST BE PRETTY INTERESTING… PRETTY NEAT TO GET A WORD WITH THESE BRILLIANT PEOPLE ON THE SCIENCE.

Oh, it’s one of the privileges of being an astronaut, is that you really work with, I say hundreds, maybe it’s more, of people who are really top experts in their fields. I mean, it’s a unique position in which we are in. Sometimes we’re actually so busy absorbing information that we do not take full advantage of it… like… you know, sometimes I find myself thinking, “you know I just spent thirty minutes talking to that person, if I had a chance to, if I had had a chance to meet this person like years ago, when I had plenty of time and not so many opportunities maybe I would have tried to talk to him or her for hours, asking questions, and it’s… you know in our life the way it’s set up right now, you talk to him or her and then you move on to the next person… so, in a way it’s unfortunate because you don’t take full advantage of these opportunities of interaction you have, but on the other hand, as you said, it’s an incredible opportunity.

BESIDES THE WORK THAT YOU DO WITH SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS, THE CREW MEMBERS ONBOARD ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING SURE THAT THE STATION KEEPS OPERATING, BUT TELL ME ABOUT SOME OF THE OTHER KINDS OF WORK THAT YOU DO ONBOARD DURING A TYPICAL DAY OR WEEK.

Yeah, the station has to be kept in a good functioning state, and so there is normal maintenance that you have to do. Just like your car, like, periodically every so many months, you will bring it in, and the technicians will take care of replacing certain parts that need to be replaced after a certain time. And the space station is the same, there are specialists on the ground that keep track of how often you have to do a specific maintenance on a piece of equipment. And the station, being so big and so complex, of course, there is a lot of that going on. And now unfortunately, of course, sometimes there are also situations in which things break. And then again, as crew members, we work closely with the ground, we describe as much as we can the situation: what broke, how does it look, is there any weird smell, do I have a suggestion on how we could fix it, we take a lot of pictures, the ground teams love pictures, and then all together we come up with a solution and we try to fix it, and sometimes occasionally something will break outside and we actually have to suit up and go outside on a spacewalk to go and fix something, and that of course becomes quite a bit more complex, but as recent history shows, the program’s actually capable to turn around very quickly and react to a failure outside.

THOSE ARE WHAT ARE CALLED CONTINGENCY SPACEWALKS: “SOMETHING IS BROKEN WE GOTTA GO OUTSIDE”. THERE’S A PLAN FOR SPACEWALKS DURING YOUR TIME ON ORBIT. ALTHOUGH THAT MAY CHANGE AS THESE THINGS TEND TO DO, WHAT IS THE PLAN FOR SPACEWALKS DURING YOUR SIX MONTHS, WHO’S GONNA GO OUTSIDE, WHAT ARE THEY GONNA BE WORKING ON?

Erm, the plan is really in flux for our expedition, so it’s really hard to say, if you had asked me a month ago I would have told you “Terry and Butch…”

54

'E un peccato aver visto ora perché avevo tempo libero oggi e potevo provare a dare un’altra mano. Ho fino a Martedì la programmazione fitta più di Samantha (proprio tutti i pomeriggio riempiti). Se mi ricordo e se trovo tempo ci provo :smiley:
@marcozambi si potrebbe fare un post di riepilogo delle parti finora fatte totalmente e di quelle invece da rivedere per un’idea più generale di cosa manca effettivamente?

55
\'E un peccato aver visto ora perché avevo tempo libero oggi e potevo provare a dare un'altra mano. Ho fino a Martedì la programmazione fitta più di Samantha (proprio tutti i pomeriggio riempiti). Se mi ricordo e se trovo tempo ci provo :smiley: @marcozambi si potrebbe fare un post di riepilogo delle parti finora fatte totalmente e di quelle invece da rivedere per un'idea più generale di cosa manca effettivamente?

Lo preparo prestissimo, nel weekend. Se vuoi dare una mano ho una parte, quella di Astro_Livio, che rimane da sistemare.
La vuoi/puoi fare tu? In caso affermativo fammi sapere e comincia pure!

56

Eccomi!
Scusate, un viaggio a Bologna terribile, mi è morto un parente strettissimo.
Inizio questa sera stessa, anzi sono a metà, se sono in difficoltà fischio

57

Tanti cari abbracci a te e alla tua famiglia Astro_Livio.

58

Purtroppo come scrivevo ho tempo martedì. Se tu non puoi prima di martedì ci penso io :smiley:

59
Purtroppo come scrivevo ho tempo martedì. Se tu non puoi prima di martedì ci penso io :smiley:

Ho già fatto metà, magari ti passo la mia parte incompleta, sono in difficoltà con alcune parole perché samantha parla velocissima, ti aggiorno!

Grazie Astra! :smile:

60

Io seguo il vostro coordinamento, se ci sono problemi fatemi sapere, anche per PM.
Come ho gia’ detto in privato ad Astro_Livio, nessun problema, e soprattutto, sempre family first.