LIVING IN SPACE

For 30 years, the space shuttle, which now orbits the Earth 16 times a day at a distance of 350 km, has been the craft used to build the International Space Station (ISS), and it has taken astronauts to work in space in periods of up to two weeks. Since 2000, 57 teams of astronauts from different countries have lived and worked on it on missions lasting one year at the most.

Although we have not gone very far from our planet and there are still many mysteries to solve and challenges to overcome, space travel has provided us with a great deal of knowledge. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s explorers, and the current mysteries will be future discoveries. Ellen S. Baker, a doctor and former NASA astronaut, will talk to us about what astronauts do in space, from maintenance of the spaceship to research, and she will tell us about the effects of space flight on the human body.