At 25,000 ft...the air is a little thin...

NOTE: Any pictures in this post are not mine, I couldn't bring my camera into the chamber. All images are from a group that did this a few years ago, found here, which is why there are no pictures of me or my team. In roughly 4-6 weeks, I should be getting copies from the NASA photographers.

If you've flown on a commercial airliner, then you've gone up and past 25,000 ft in the air. However, you've probably never experienced what the air is like up there. Unless, of course, you've hiked a really tall mountain, though I'm not sure how high even Mt. Everest is in the atmosphere.

One of the prep steps for our flight next week is going through training in the hypobaric chamber. Friday morning we got up early to travel to Johnson Space Center and go to a 4 hour long lecture. We were lectured on everything from how your body reacts to decreasing outside air pressure, to the composition of the atmosphere, to what hypoxia is, to what causes motion sickness and how to avoid it.

For example, did you know that the composition of the atmosphere is the same throughout, though the partial pressure of oxygen decreased with increasing distance upwards. And that when you go up 25,000 ft outside of a pressurized cabin, the gas in your GI track, ears, and teeth (if you had any dental work done lately) will expand. Hypoxia is a condition that comes on when the body experiences a large decrease in oxygen. One might get dizzy, euphoric, irate, confused or just completely out of it.

After the lecture we traveled over to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or NBL. This is the facility where the astronauts train for their shuttle missions. It holds the 40ft deep pool that contains a full scale mock up of the ISS. They were in there for a number of hours training for the next mission - whatever that may be.

We were fitted for our oxygen masks and helmets - all in your basic military green. Apparently, I have a really small face, so even the smallest mask was a bit large. Apparently they were made for men in the military and men's faces are not super small.

After familiarizing ourselves with the equipment, we all tromped out to the hypobaric chamber. It looks like this:

It is a rectangular box with blue bus seats and consoles for each person. I was seat #16. We hooked ourselves into the oxygen hoses, com mics and went over the flight pattern one last time. We finally got going and starting breathing pure oxygen for 30 minutes. This flushed out about 30% of the nitrogen out of our blood. This helps prevent development of the bends from ascending and descending.

We then 'rose' to 25,000ft at a rate of 5,000ft per minute. Basically, they just sucked the air out of our chamber with a giant vacuum pump. In turn, we dropped our masks and tried to fill out a questionnaire while breathing air severely lacking in oxygen. I got dizzy when I couldn't get enough oxygen; my brain felt really really foggy.

We gently began to descend, at a slower rate than descent, and then it was all over! We marched back to the briefing room and watch the tape of ourselves experiencing hypoxia, filled out a survey, and then took an open-book, open-neighbor quiz over the morning's lecture.

Then our day got a bit more stressful, as we had learned that the people in charge want us to do a full ground test Monday morning at 7:45am. We were not ready, still completely are not, but we had to skip the tour of the NBL to run back to Ellington field to try and get things as ready to go as possible. Please pray that everything goes well on Monday, or there is a possibility that we won't fly :(

And that is how our Friday ended, with a lot of stress. All I did back at home was curl up and take a long nap, eat dinner and go to bed, as I am now, so - goodnight!