The two-to eight person crew occupies a two-level cabin at the forward end of the orbiter. They operate the vehicle from the upper level, the flight deck. The flight controls for the mission commander and pilot are at the front. A station at the rear, overlooking the payload bay through two windows, containing the controls a mission specialist astronaut uses to operate the Remote Manipulator System arm which handles some items in the payload. Mission operations displays and controls are on the right side of the cabin, and payload controls on the left. The latter are operated by payload specialists, who are usually not career astronauts. The living, eating and sleeping area for off-duty crew members, called the middeck, is located below the flight deck. It contains pre-packaged food, a toilet, bunks, and other amenities.The daily routine for crew members aboard flights will vary according to crew assignments but each member will follow a detailed schedule each day. Time is allotted for each person for sleep, personal hygiene, work, meal preparation, and eating as well as routine Orbiter subsystem housekeeping. Housekeeping duties include cleaning the waste compartment, dumping excess water, replacing the carbon dioxide scrubbing canisters, purging the fuel cells, giving daily status reports to the ground controllers, and aligning the inertial measurement unit (the device that directs the vehicle attitude in space). A 24-hour time period is normally divided into an 8-hour sleep period and a 16-hour awake period for each crew member.
Spacelab: Science in Orbit
Periodically the Shuttle is scheduled to carry a complete scientific laboratory called "Spacelab" into Earth orbit. Two complete Spacelabs (plus instrument-carrying platforms exposed to space, called "pallets") have been built by the European Space Agency (ESA), which paid for the development expense and manufacturing costs of the first one. NASA purchased the second unit. A Spacelab is similar to a small but well-equipped laboratory on Earth, but has been designed for zero-gravity operation. It provides a shirt-sleeve environment where up to four people, who eat and sleep in the orbiter, can perform scientific tests utilizing the high vacuum and microgravity of orbital space, and make observations above the abscurring atmosphere.Spacelab payload specialists are men and women of many nations, experts in their fields, who must be in reasonably good health. They are required to have only a few weeks of spaceflight training, but may have spent years preparing to perform their experiments in orbit.
Currently, most of the experiments on a given Spacelab mission are devoted to a single broad field, such as medicine, manufacturing, astronomy, space physics or pharmaceuticals. Some previous Spacelab flights combine experiments from several fields. One mission utilized an all-pallet configuration, where all the instruments were exposed to space and operated from inside the orbiter.
Astronauts adjust to the microgravity environment aboard the Space Shuttle, in this photo taken from the mid-deck.Spaceflight is no longer limited to intensively trained, physically perfect astronauts. Experienced scientists and technicians can fly in support of their payloads. Crew members experience a designed maximum gravity load of 3g during launch, and less than 1.5g during re-entry. These accelerations are about one-third the levels experienced on previous manned flights. Many other features of the Space Shuttle, such as a standard sea-level atmosphere, make spaceflight more comfortable for the astronauts.
The Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas maintains a site of Astronaut Biographies.
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