How've you been, Ms.Williams...?

O.k. so Sunita Williams, the astronaut with the mop of hair my bald pate is extremely jealous of, is back on earth with her fellow crew members. Welcome home...how've you been, Ms.Williams?

After spending more than six months at the space station, she has set an endurance record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 195 days. During her stay, she also set the record for most time spacewalking by a woman.

I wondered what must have tempted her to stay so long in zero gravity, the record notwithstanding, where even the most mundane tasks like shampooing her hair (oh, that flowing tresses!) takes such an effort. Not to think of having to eat on flying saucers and to swallow tooth paste after use since there’s no sink in there…

Not just that. Actually, the astronauts use a Russian-designed lavatory that, "sucks waste away with a vacuum." The waste is stored in buckets, which are moved into a Russian cargo pod that eventually "burns up in the earth'satmosphere." Now you know what people mean when they say,"It's raining buckets."

May be she found living on earth far too expensive. Who would say no to a free trip around the sun?

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Closest I got to a spacewalk

I can think of at least three rewards for taking a leap toward the unknown. First, simply acting on our fear releases us from self doubt. Even if we don’t defy gravity and fall flat on our faces our worst-case scenarios are often worse than the actual experiences of defeat. Second, we feel a sense of satisfaction for having achieved what we set out to do. It provides us with a greater sense of self, and builds our esteem. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the experience serves as a personal springboard to take another risk, then another. We tell ourselves, “If I tackled this, I could certainly handle that!” What freedom and power we give ourselves by taking leaps (or even baby steps) toward our dreams. Either way, we are winners!

This was metaphorical to the famous spacewalk by astronaut Sunita Williams. Sunita has now set a new world record for the longest uninterrupted space flight by a woman. She is scheduled to return home this thursday after NASA cleared space shuttle Atlantis' thermal protection system for re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. I had read her Pre-flight interview in a NASA publication and she was quite ecstatic about it all.

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I may probably never get to do a real `spacewalk' in this life, but I have this sense that I am doing it virtually everyday - the closest I could get to Ms.Williams !

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Congrats Sunita, make sure all the tiles are in place in your shuttle's heat shield. Safe landing !

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