How do astronauts live and work in space?
Home Above the World
How do astronauts live and work in space?
Two hundred and fifty miles above your head, a small group of people are floating around a building the size of a football field. They're not on vacation. They're at work, eating breakfast, fixing pumps, and sleeping in bags strapped to a wall. Welcome to the most unusual home address in the universe: the International Space Station.
The first thing space steals is "down." On Earth, gravity glues your feet to the floor. Up here, the station is falling around the planet so fast that everything inside falls together — astronauts, pens, water, crumbs — so nothing presses on anything. We call it weightlessness, and it means there is no floor, no ceiling, just six walls and a body that drifts.
