SUITING UP Rubins trains for a spacewalk at the Johnson Space Centers Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory .
While on board the ISS , Rubins wore a special spacesuit hand-painted by patients recovering at Houston ’ s MD Anderson Cancer Center to raise awareness about the benefits of pairing art with medicine .
molecular behavior . Most of the time you ’ d like to do an experiment in a nice , calm laboratory , but there are times where you have to take the research other places . Disease outbreaks , micro-gravity research , these are remote environments . They ’ re logistically challenging , but that ’ s where we answer some very interesting and important questions .
Those answers can apply to diseases we have on the planet , as well as future exploration — how we ’ ll continue supporting humans in space , how do you go further and further with long-duration missions — Mars missions , for instance . Even common conditions like osteoporosis , there ’ s a pretty similar condition for those in orbit . Same with neurological changes , effects on the cardiovascular and immune system — the questions that we want to solve about human beings living in space for a long time , pretty much every single one of them is directly related to a physiological problem or a system we ’ re interested in studying on the ground . So you ’ re not really choosing “ Do I help out human health and disease ?” or “ Do I think about exploration ?” Truth is , we ’ re answering both questions .
Finally , I have to ask about perspective — do you have a new worldview now that you ’ ve seen our planet in such a different way ?
Because you orbit so quickly and see whole continents , it certainly has changed my sense of geography . You get very familiar saying “ Oh , hey ! We ’ re coming up on the Placencia Peninsula right now ; it ’ s so beautiful off the coast of Belize . Then we ’ ll go over to Europe and come around the top and down to India .” To see the whole planet — the scale of what your home is becomes really expanded . Honestly , it feels like the entire globe is your home .
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