Sometimes the world lets you down, it makes you feel terrible, closed in, and you feel like there is no way out. Slowly, the sun starts setting, the moon comes out and as the clouds start fading a mesmerising view appears. Little dots of light, millions of them, some in recognisable structures appear in the dark, lighting the world up together with the moon. As you lie there, looking up at the universe, the dots of lights that are somewhere a thousand light years away or just outside our atmosphere, you notice one that's moving. Maybe it's an airplane, however the lights of an airplane normally flicker. With your eyes you keep following the moving star until it disappears out of your sight. After it's gone you decide to google 'moving star' and somewhere in the thousand results it tells you that it might have been ISS (the International Space Station) with a link to a website that shows you the route of the ISS, and guess what....
This is kind of what happened to me not too long ago, although not quite in that order. First I went to a lecture on space and astronautics by André Kuipers (famous Dutch astronaut), where I learned that on Wednesday the 2nd of November ISS could bee seen flying over Holland. Then on the 29th of October I visited the SpaceExpo and ESA ESTEC in Noordwijk where I learned a lot more about the history of space travel, the latest developments, the part Holland plays in international space travel and a lot of interesting general facts on space and the life of an astronaut. The lecture, SpaceExpo and ESA ESTEC were all very interesting but my intergalactic adventure reached it's climax when on the 2nd of November I looked up to the sky and noticed this moving star. At that point I realised how tiny yet powerful we humans are as a species and how big, vast, and complicated the universe actually is. It left me breathless, to know that we are busy conquering the universe and that I could sort of see six humans working on all sorts of experiments at a height of approximately 350 km, from were I was standing, bound to the earth by gravity. For me that experience gave me the cosmic feeling André Kuipers told us a lot about in his lecture.
He told us a lot about how he managed to become an astronaut, including all his previous professions and the job application he replied to that eventually led to him going to space. A journey that took much longer than I originally expected, for some reason I still believed there was a college course called "how to become an astronaut" instead of gaining a masters or PhD degree and so many years of experience in certain fields of work before you can even apply for the job. Then there are the physical and mental tests you need to pass and then, when you've been selected as an astronaut to be, you're still not certain of going to space anytime soon, or anytime at all. André Kuipers was lucky enough to be sent to space TWICE! In his lecture he showed us some short videos he shot regarding showering in the ISS, sleeping, doing sports, the experiments he did there, the different areas of ISS and, and how you function and move without gravity. He also showed us the impact of energy on certain objects and how little energy you need to use when moving stuff around when there is no gravity to push them down.
Oh and then there was the most beautiful thing of all, we were shown videos and pictures of the view from ISS. From outer space we truly are Spaceship Earth as André called it. A tiny planet on which we build our existence and how we are slowly destroying our little spaceship when we don't have anywhere else to go yet. But we are improving, we are learning, we are evolving and we are doing better for our planet. This might have been one of the most moving parts of the lecture. André was telling us some stuff about climate change and how we were destroying our own planet, but also how we were fixing what we had done. He showed us the gap in the atmosphere we created and how it had shrunk over the last couple of years. This restored my faith in humanity as the predator species on this planet when I was starting to lose it. Because even though we are can be very very stupid sometimes, we keep learning, we keep evolving in ways that help us fix the problems we created and I think that that is the most important lesson I learned that day. That even though we make mistakes, we learn from them and we also learn how to fix the things we broke and that that makes us human and it shows how we keep evolving.
André Kuijpers, thank you so so much for one of the most inspiring nights of my live! I will not forget any bit of it, you are an inspiration for so many and I hope that somewhere in the future my own great grand children will still be able to live on Spaceship Earth in a natural and safe way!
Lots of love,
ThatDutchgirl96
By the way for those of you who want to know what earth looks like from outerspace NASA is streaming live from ISS: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/
Also a little video about André Kuipers and the road that took him to becoming an astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkOY6EzuMP8
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