Astronauts on the ISS Have Trouble With Work-Life Balance, Too
NASA
The good news: Even astronauts feel like they don't have enough time. The bad: Even astronauts feel like they don't have enough time.
What's one thing astronauts wish they had more of (aside from showers and Snickers and, occasionally, gravity)? The same thing most of us would like more of: time.
At an event at NASA's Washington headquarters this morning, three astronauts currently aboard the ISS -- NASA astronauts Kevin Ford and Thomas Marshburn, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield -- answered audience questions about everyday life on the orbiting laboratory. And one thing they agreed on about that life: It's busy. Really, really busy. Astronauts who get to live on the ISS often talk about the wonder, the literal awesomeness, of the experience. ("It's a little bit like being in a dreamland up here," Fold said today.) But they have to take time to schedule in all the awesomeness -- because, orbiting Earth, as far-removed as possible from the mundane pressures of everyday life, they actually have very little time to themselves.
As Ford explained: "We have a very busy life up here, to be quite honest with you. The work week is pretty full." (And, yep, astronauts on the Space Station do get weekends.) ISS denizens joke, he said, that there are pretty much two days on the station: Monday and Friday. Monday goes by ... "and then it's Friday again." Time flies, apparently, when you are literally flying.