It is a misconception to say that the space race is long dead and over. As of last year, seventy different countries have operated their own government space agencies. Thirteen of the seventy have full launch capacities and eleven are active participants on the International Space Station program. NASA has thirty-nine active space missions and just recently the agency released a very interesting video featuring astronaut Tim Peake from the European Space Agency.
This week, NASA released a clip of Time Peake sharing a glimpse of what it looks like to watch the earth from space. While only 17 seconds long, the video featured most of the coast of the Arabian sea bordering Iran and Pakistan.
"A peek out of the window. Our view from space in real time. #Principia" read Tim Peake's tweet sent out last January 24, 2015.
Tim Peake has been in space for more than 300 hundred days. He is joined in the station by NASA's Scott Kelly, Tim Kopra and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko, Yuri Malenchenko and Sergey Volkov.
Aside from the video which can be viewed here, Scott Kelly has since participated in a recent Reddit AMA. During the question and answer, the astronaut provided an insight on what it is really like to spend almost a year in space. According to Kelly, one of the few things that took him aback is the sleeping situation. Kelly explains that sleeping in space is a lot harder in space. It is not as restful unlike if one sleeps on a bed and it takes some getting used to.
Sleeping here is harder here in space than on a bed because the sleep position here is the same position throughout the day. You don't ever get that sense of gratifying relaxation here that you do on Earth after a long day at work.
Read the rest of the AMA here.
