As close as I'm going to get...

The photo above is of the inside of the large hall in Building 9 at JSC. I call it "Mockup City" because it is full of full-scale models of various vehicles that are used for training purposes. (That's the Shuttle mockup in the background, the FGB (Zarya) mockup on the right-hand side with all the crew plaques on it - and a mockup of the Service Module just beyond it - and a Soyuz descent module on the left.)

It's been a few years since I've assisted with crew training, and when I saw that I would be interpreting for cosmonauts that are part of Expedition 29, my mind went back to the days when the first crew - Expedition 1 - had only recently gone aboard the ISS. It just didn't seem like all that long ago, but it's been long enough.

Today's subject involved the fascinating story of stowage, or "how to find, use, replace, throw out, account for and otherwise deal with all the stuff that's up there with you."

Bags. Lots of bags. Racks. Bays. Modules. Temporary storage. Food containers.

The whole enchilada, so to speak.

A curious basic rule of flying in space is to forget just about everything you've every learned about the way things should behave. That's easy enough to say, but enormously difficult, especially considering that a good chunk of that learning is buried in your subconscious.

Back when American astronaut Dave Wolf was flying a long-duration mission aboard the Mir space station, he underscored this by noting that, if you were working on some job that required you to use a wrench and you put the wrench down on a surface the way you'd normally do on Earth and didn't strap it down with something like Velcro, the wrench would gradually float up off the surface.

So far, so good, right?

He continued by noting that, since your brain has - over many years - become used to stuff not wandering off by itself, when you turn your head and move your hand so as to again grasp the wrench, you will notice it's no longer there.

That makes sense, yes?

He then mentioned that it was entirely likely that you would not find the wrench by looking for it. He had done so, he explained in one letter to folks on the ground, and had failed to see it. Fortunately, he added, the drifting wrench bumped into his face, so he was able to recover it.

The way he explained it, the brain apparently "blocked out" the wrench that was floating in front of his face because it wasn't supposed to be there. In effect, because the wrench wasn't supposed to be there, his brain wouldn't let him see it.

That may sound funny, but it also explains why sometimes you can't find stuff here on Earth in your own digs, doesn't it? Especially stuff that someone else, standing next to you, can see at once.

Anyway, the upshot of the subject of "stowage" is that everything you live with must - at any given point in time - be either in your hand, attached to something, or put away inside of something that, in turn, is attached to something else. Nothing can be allowed to just sit around, because it won't.

* * *I've 800 words left of the long-term project that I'd like to get off my desk tomorrow morning, and some new files that also have to be finished tomorrow, because I'm back doing crew training all day Thursday.

* * *To any Marines reading this, Happy Corps Birthday! I think I've written more about the Marines over the past month than any time during the almost 10 years I've been keeping this LiveJournal. Semper fidelis!

* * *And now, it's time to wind down and get some rest.

Cheers...