I’m on my way to Johnson Space Center for four weeks of US training.
Short train ride from Cologne to the Frankfurt airport early this morning and now an 11-hour flight to Houston. There’s an A380 waiting at the gate, boarding is about to start. As you can see in the picture, boarding for this “beast” is done via three jetways on multiple levels!
I’m not looking forward to the 7-hour difference in time zone. Actually 9 hours compared to Star City, where I was just two days ago. Jet lag might be the single greatest hurdle in astronaut training for me: it always takes me a week to ten days to get back to normal sleeping patterns after a intercontinental flight. Maybe because I’m accustomed to be a sound sleeper and typically fall asleep within seconds of hitting the pillow, dealing with sleep disruptions is not my cup of tea.
Anyway, I see it as part of the training. Sleep shifting occurs pretty often on the International Space Station, in particular when the crew needs to support the arrival of new crewmates or of resupply vehicles like Progress, ATV, HTV, Dragon or, in the new future, Cygnus. As you can well imagine, docking times are determined by orbital mechanics, launch windows and orbital day/night requirements, not by the sleep schedule of the crew.
I’m experimenting with a more deliberate approach to sleep-shifting. I’m wearing sunglasses this morning to reduce light exposure while it’s night in Houston. And I’ve purposely slept only a couple of hours last night, in the hope that this will help me be asleep most of the flight to the US. In a couple of weeks I’ll have a briefing at Johnson Space Center on sleep shifting techniques: looking forward to learning some helpful tricks!
28/07/2013