Italian Paolo Nespoli, 54, has spent 174 days in space across two missions, travelling into Earth orbit on both NASA’s Space Shuttle and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. We asked what it’s like to live in space, how it felt to witness the Space Shuttle docked to the ISS and more in our exclusive interview.

How It Works: Why did you decide to become an astronaut?

Paolo Nespoli: Ever since I was a little boy I wanted to become an astronaut. I was inspired by the Apollo missions, though not really Apollo 11. I was more interested in the later missions where they drove the rovers on the moon. I thought it was fascinating, with the astronauts jumping and driving around on the surface. Life was kind of different after that. I was drafted into the Italian army (they still had the draft back then) then figured out that I could make it as an astronaut. I applied twice to the European Space Agency (ESA) and didn’t make it, but on the third selection I made the cut.

HIW: Your first mission to space was on board STS-120. What was it like going to space for the first time?

PN: I was selected fairly young and got to fly after just nine years of training, which is somewhat of a short time to wait compared to many. People asked if I was scared but I wasn’t really. I’d trained so much, I knew what to expect. Feeling the acceleration in the Space Shuttle was amazing. The first couple of minutes it really shakes you. However, I was scared in space, because we’d trained for years and we only had 15 days to complete our mission. All I kept thinking to myself was, ‘You better not mess this up. People have been working on this for years!’ The fear of failure was the scariest thing about going into space.

HIW: What was the hardest part of going to space?

PN: I didn’t mind it so much in space, but my body felt really old when I came back to Earth; the gravity was so intense. I was fine in space, but I’m not exceptional or a superhero. Of the seven Shuttle crew members and three on the Soyuz I was the worst coming back by far. The micro-gravity environment does a lot to your body. You lose a lot of calcium in space; your bones and muscles can get quite weak.

HIW: How did you ensure your body stayed in shape? How did you adapt to life in space?

PN: We’d do about two hours of physical fitness every day. I would say you come back in better shape [in terms of fitness]. Doing two hours of exercise every day for six months, I came back with more muscles and less fat than when I left.

We did about one hour of cardiovascular exercise on a treadmill and another hour of resistance exercise. Obviously, you can’t lift weights in space, so a machine simulates the strain of lifting as on Earth.

There’s no training to prepare your body for its loss of balance. You get nausea and all sorts of things. Your skeleton also stretches (I was five or six centimetres taller than on Earth), and so muscles keep their strength but they are of a different length. Your body’s equilibrium shifts, and when you come back to Earth the muscles start contracting again, but they cannot find the equilibrium point so easily. I remember shaking constantly. Also I could be sitting and feel totally tired. Coming back to Earth is definitely the hardest aspect of being in space – for me, anyway!

On the station, you are isolated and confined, with only a few other people to talk to. You can’t just go out in the evening and see people. For some reason I discovered that whatever I was doing I was seeing pizzas all over the place, such as in clouds when looking at Earth. Freud would probably have a lot to say about that! I thought the food on the station was decent but far away from what an Italian would say is delicious. It was very good from a nutritional point of view, but a little horrific for an Italian. Maybe I was craving pizza because of food like that, or maybe I was just associating pizza with going out with friends and having a beer, maybe that is what I was missing. You are in isolation up there, and there are a lot of things you can’t do, a lot of things which aren’t normal.

Sometimes you forget that you’re in space. It takes about a month and a half before you get out of your ‘Earth habits’, getting used to space, doing things in a different way. For example, we had a table in one of the nodes for eating in the evening. That table had been there for years. It was horizontal in respect to the floor of the deck, because that’s how a table is on Earth. It was protruding a lot, and you’d often hit it when going past. One day I was looking at it and I thought, ‘There must be a way to do this better. Why is this table parallel to the deck, when there’s no gravity?’ You use Velcro to stick things to the table anyway so that they don’t float away, so why not have it at an angle, like a technical drawing table? I kind of tilted it up a little bit, then more, and more, until finally, if you look at it now, it’s tilted at a steep angle because you don’t need a horizontal table and it’s much more out of the way. It was there for ten years before somebody thought to move it!

I would say that it is an environment that is closed, isolated and confined. At first, when I was told I would spend six months on the station before the mission, I thought, ‘Oh my God, six months, are you out of your mind?’ Looking back I realised that I did not have the time to do everything I wanted, like taking more pictures, looking at Earth, playing around more, calling people, doing video clips. You end up doing things up there that make sense, time flies and everything is nice, but you wish you could have done more.

HIW: What was your favourite aspect of living in space?

PN: I loved taking pictures, looking at the Earth and [re]discovering it. It was very enjoyable. You just go to the window and there you have it – a great and gorgeous view. However, when you go to the window randomly, more often than not you’re just going to see an ocean with clouds. It’s nice and blue, but that’s about it. Sometimes you see a piece of land going by and it’s not so recognisable. It’s not easy to figure out what’s what, except Italy! When you start talking about the UK and Ireland it gets complicated because of the angle, cloud coverage, time of day and sun reflection, etc. In the beginning you try to figure out where you are without using the software that tells us, but little by little you start to know what’s going on. By the second/third/fourth months you look out the window and you know where you are – the continent, information, features that are there that you might want to take pictures of, or if it’s boring you might spend a few minutes on something else.

I started using more and more powerful lenses to capture some interesting details that I could see from up there. First I tried to see the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and other landmarks. I wanted to see an aircraft carrier at sea, some volcanoes, special islands, and then I started looking around randomly, taking pictures of things that were astonishing and different. I had this feeling that I was a scientist peering down a microscope that allowed me to take pictures of this small sphere rotating below, discovering microscopic things. I’d look at the pictures and realise that those things were 20 kilometres [12.4 miles] in diameter. You can’t really see things that are any smaller than that.

I became really interested in taking photos of landmarks and countries. I started using social media like Twitter and Flickr because I thought those things were interesting. I decided to start tweeting them to see what people thought. That turned out to be a pretty good source of enjoyment: finding something special and tweeting it to people, asking them for quizzes or riddles from space and seeing all the comments. It turned out to be a very enjoyable way to spend time, letting everybody participate in this adventure.

HIW: Were you asked to take the pictures by NASA or the ESA?

PN: I wasn’t asked to do it by NASA or the ESA. Some of the other astronauts had done it before me. I was not the first. Several of them told me that it was enjoyable. I did not tweet before I went into space because I don’t have much time to do it. I see some people go around with phones all day, typing what they are doing, clicking, clicking, clicking, but I have so many things to do. However, in space it worked out pretty well. Sometimes when I was taking pictures I was asking for help from ESA to identify what I was looking at. Other times I would guess but sometimes I would make a mistake, and people would correct me, so I learned that it was better to verify what I was seeing before half of the world thinks, ‘What is that stupid astronaut doing up there?!’ One of the first weeks I was up I tweeted a picture of a European city and really thought it was London… Turns out it was Paris. How can you make a mistake between London and Paris? It was beyond me. But in space, you travel so fast that you pass by so quickly, and you only have a few seconds to snap a picture. You have no time to research, so mistakes do happen.

HIW: Did it feel like you were travelling at 17,000mph?

PN: Well, it depends. If you are above an ocean, for example, which happened often, it doesn’t look like you are going very fast. But if you want to take a picture of something specific, then you understand how precise you need to be. I’m always on space time now. When I’m at home in the evening, and I look outside and see a sunset or moon. I see a nice picture and think, ‘Okay, I’m going to get my camera and I’ll take a picture in 30 minutes’. In space if you see the moon and you like it, you better take that picture in the next ten seconds because [otherwise] it’s gone. A good sunset is eight seconds and you think, ‘Oh, that’s a nice sunset, I’ll just get my camera… Holy cow, I need a picture now, where’s that camera!’ If you take out the card or wrong lens, then it’s gone. [This is how I mainly perceived speed on the ISS.]

You don’t feel anything physically on the ISS or the Soyuz capsule though. I remember when we detached from the station on Soyuz coming back to Earth, there is a moment in which the engine fires and you slow down and go into the atmosphere, and the capsule breaks up into three pieces. You are in the middle, the only one that gets to Earth; the others burn up in the atmosphere. At that point you are tumbling, finishing with a braking burn. The capsule has separated and you are waiting to be captured by the atmosphere. Then you look outside and realise you’re tumbling. It’s not a nice feeling. Are we supposed to be tumbling, you think. If you don’t look outside you don’t feel it, even at mach 25.

Astronauts Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan break into song during the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972.

9. Bunny hopping on the moon

Gene Cernan discovers a new and easier way to get around on the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission by jumping with two feet rather than more traditional walking methods.

8. Alan Shepard plays golf

Becoming the first and only person to play golf on the Moon, Alan Shepard takes a couple of shots during the Apollo 14 mission.

7. Armstrong and Aldrin unveil lunar plaque

Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin unveil a plaque left behind on the Apollo 11 mission, which finishes by stating: “We came in peace for all mankind.”

6. Hammer throw

Astronaut Jack Schmitt throws his geology hammer into the distance before Apollo 17 takes off after pleading for permission.

5. Galileo proved corrrect

During the Apollo 15 mission, commander David Scott drops a hammer and feather simultaneously to show that, in a vacuum, all objects fall at the same speed with an absence of air resistance, proving Galileo’s hypothesis.

4. Astronaut takes a tumble

Proving just how difficult it is to cope with the Moon’s weak gravity whilst wearing top-heavy space suits, Jack Schmitt has a couple of falls during the Apollo 17 mission before being called “twinkletoes” by mission control.

3. On board a lunar rover

Astronaut John Young takes the lunar rover out for a spin on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission of April 1972. Although only designed to reach about 8mph (13kph), Young unofficially holds the Lunar Land Speed Record of 11mph (18kph).

2. First man on the Moon

Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to set foot on another celestial body at 0256 GMT on 21 July 1969. Many people believe that he fluffed his famous lines as he stepped on to the surface, missing out the “a” as he proclaimed it was “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” However, listen closely and you can almost make out an “a” just after he said “for”, and Armstrong later insisted that he did say “a man”. What do you think?

1. Last humans on the Moon

Marking the end of NASA’s missions to the Moon, the ascent stage of Apollo 17′s Lunar Module takes off on 14 December 1972. On board were Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Eugene “Gene” Cernan, the last humans to set foot on the Moon. The footage was taken by a camera on the lunar rover left behind on the surface, tracked manually by mission control on Earth.

Rockets like Saturn V, the one used to launch NASA’s Apollo and Skylab programs, are multi-stage liquid-fuelled boosters. The Saturn V is considered to be the biggest, most powerful and most successful rocket ever built.

The Saturn V was 110.6m tall, 10.1m in diameter and had a payload of 119,000kgs to low-Earth orbit.

There were three stages, followed by an instrument unit and the payload (spacecraft). The total mission time for this rocket was about 20 mins. The centre engine was ignited first, then engines on either side ignited. The first stage lifted the rocket to about 70m and burned for 2.5 mins.

When sensors in the tanks sensed that the propellant was low, motors detached the first stage. The second stage continued the trajectory to 176km and burned for six mins. About halfway through this stage’s ignition, the instrument unit took control of calculating the trajectory.

Second stage complete, solid-fuel rockets fired it away from the third stage. The third stage burned for 2.5 mins and stayed attached to the spacecraft while it orbited the Earth, at an altitude of 191.2km.

It continued to thrust and vent hydrogen before ramping up and burning for six more minutes, so the spacecraft could reach a high enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity.

1. Volcano creates new island

Volcanic activity in the Red Sea led to the formation of an entirely new island on 19 December 2011. Currently unnamed, the island was the remains of a lava fountain from an underground volcano that reached heights of 30 metres (90 feet). The eruption, off the west coast of Yemen along the Zubair Group of islands, was observed by nearby fisherman. Later analysis confirmed a presence of sulphur dioxide, a clear indication that a volcanic eruption was responsible for creating a new island where previously there had been uninterrupted water.

2. One billion apps downloaded

For the first time ever, the one billion mark has been reached in app downloads in one week. The landmark was achieved in December of 2011, with new gadget owners flocking to online apps stores to beef up their latest devices. In total 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in the final week of December around the world, according to analytics firm Flurry. The US was responsible for nearly half with 509 million downloads, followed by China with 99 million downloads and the UK with 89 million.

3. Apes gamble just like us

Proving that humans aren’t the only animals willing to take a risk, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics found that apes gamble in a similar way to us. When given a choice between a safe bet of a small piece of banana or a larger piece hidden beneath one of a number of cups, the apes chose the riskier option the majority of the time in the hope of winning the greater reward. An increase in cups made the apes more cautious as they realised that their odds of winning were diminishing.

4. LHC finds new particle

Amid the furore that was caused by a possible sighting of the Higgs boson it went largely unnoticed that elsewhere at the Large Hadron Collider, where many different experiments are carried out, an entirely new particle was discovered. Dubbed Chi_b (3P), the particle is composed of a quark and anti-quark and should help scientists understand the force that holds these two sub-atomic particles together, known as the strong nuclear force. This force also holds together protons and neutrons with atoms but, until now, it has proven hard to determine the exact nature of it. Scientists hope the discovery of Chi_b (3P) will lead to a greater understanding of sub-atomic physics and ultimately help in the search for new particles such as the Higgs boson.

5. NASA plans to harpoon comets

Retrieving samples from a comet is a tricky business, but NASA hopes to bring the first material from a comet’s surface back to Earth by using a revolutionary new harpoon method. Instead of landing on the celestial bodies, a spacecraft would fire a harpoon that could penetrate the surface of the content and collect underground samples, before being winched back to the spacecraft in orbit above the comet. The revolutionary technology is being used on the ESA’s Rosetta mission to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, scheduled to arrive in October 2014, but unlike NASA’s proposal the ESA mission will not be able to bring samples back to Earth.

6. Elephants have six toes

In a remarkable discovery that has eluded scientists for centuries, it was recently revealed that elephants have a hidden sixth toe in each of their feet. The additional digit, thought to have evolved over 40 million years ago based on fossilised evidence, is believed to help elephants support their huge weight. Since the first elephant was dissected in 1706, the additional structure was regarded as merely a useless piece of cartilage, but its purpose now appears to have been determined.

7. Hackers plan new Internet to beat SOPA

In an attempt to combat the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently being considered in the USA, which has been widely derided by companies such as Facebook and Google for threatening to create a censored Internet akin to that in China, hackers have proposed a plan to independently launch space satellites into Earth orbit and run their own Internet separate from the World Wide Web. Outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin in late 2011, the proposal would develop a grid of ground stations to communicate with the satellites to create an uncensorable new Internet.

8. Slow and steady does win the race

A recent study at Ohio State University, USA, has suggested that the increased decision making time often apparent in elderly people helps ensure accuracy over speed. While people of a younger generation can be quick to jump to an occasionally irrational conclusion, the more aged among us deliberate slightly longer in order to ensure that their response to a given situation is the correct one. This goes against the theory that people take longer with their decisions as they get older due to their brains slowing down.

9. The Mars rovers are eight years old

On 3 January 2004, NASA’s golf-cart-sized Mars rover Spirit landed on the Red Planet and, three weeks later on 25 January, it was joined by its sister Opportunity. This year the rovers enter their eighth year on Mars and, although only Opportunity is still active, the feat is a technological marvel nonetheless. Initially expected to last just 90 days in their search for past or present water on Mars, the rovers have exceeded all expectations, covering a combined distance of 26.15 miles (42.08 km). In August of this year NASA’s next Martian rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down, with a possibility that it could last up to ten years or more thanks to its radioactive power source as opposed to the solar panels that power Opportunity, which is constantly under threat of failure due to dust and wind damage, a fate which befell its compatriot Spirit in March 2010.

10. Birds can count

Researchers at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, have announced that pigeons appear to possess the ability to count, a skill previously thought to be held only by primates. Publishing their results in the journal Science, the scientists trained pigeons to peck a touch screen a certain number of times depending on how many objects appeared on screen, with a reward granted for a correct response. When the numbers were increased, the pigeons subsequently increased their pecks corresponding to the number of objects on screen, performing the task as well as monkeys can.

The popular How It Works Book of Space bookazine has been given a fantastic new revised edition, giving you 80 new pages of amazing questions answered. Brought to you by the experts behind How It Works magazine, the Book Of Space is an in-depth guide to our solar system. Examining the planets, stars and asteroids, this book will guide you through space and history, from the Big Bang to the Space Shuttle. You’ll also learn about the telescopes used to gaze at the stars, how astronauts stay safe and the robots we’re using to explore even further.

Helen Laidlaw, Editor of How It Works magazine, said: “Space is a hugely popular section of the magazine and we’re very excited to present readers with this extended Book of Space. The bookazine is packed with explanations of the most spectacular phenomena the cosmos has to offer, making it the ideal reference material for budding space enthusiasts eager to discover the wider universe.”

Dedicated to delivering in-depth knowledge about how the world around us works in an entertaining and engaging way, How It Works books are presented in a style that makes even the most complex of subjects fun and easy to understand. A worldwide phenomenon, How It Works books offer the most diverse and comprehensive way to feed the hungriest of enquiring minds.

The How It Works Book Of Space Extended Edition is on sale now from www.imaginebookshop.co.uk and all good newsagents, priced £9.99.

The Mars500 mission was an important study to ascertain the mental and physical strain on humans in closed isolation on a long-haul trip to Mars. The mission was a join project between the ESA and Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems, beginning on 3 June 2010 and culminating on 4 November 2011. In it, six candidates (three Russians, two Europeans and one Chinese) were sealed in an isolation chamber for 520 days, the approximate journey time for a real mission to and from the Red Planet.

The isolation facility they were held in was based in Moscow and consisted of five modules; three to replicate the spacecraft (where the volunteers spent the majority of their time), one to replicate the Mars-lander astronauts would travel in to the surface and another to simulate the Martian surface, with a total combined area of 550 m³ (19,423 ft³).

To accurately simulate a mission to Mars, the volunteers were subjected to the same conditions that would be apparent for astronauts making the trip for real. For example, all communications outside the pod were given a time delay, ranging from one-minute when near “Earth” to 20 minutes at “Mars”, while the crew were also given a diet identical to that of astronauts on board the International Space Station.

The volunteers carried out the same tasks that astronauts would in a real-life Mars trip, including simulating a Martian landing and performing experiments. The participants were able to talk to friends and family via video link at various points in the mission, albeit with the aforementioned time delay.

With the mission finished, future astronauts making the long-haul trip to our neighbouring planet will have useful knowledge of the conditions they might expect when being in isolation for such a long period of time and at such a great distance from home.

Mars500 images courtesy of ESA

A satellite that has exceeded its useful purpose has several different potential final resting places. These depend on the amount of fuel still available on the satellite, and whether ground control is still able to manoeuvre it. One technique is to move the satellite slightly higher in its orbital band, into a ‘graveyard orbit’. This is an area where no other satellites are orbiting, and the dying satellite can be left to degrade over time. However, as it breaks up and potentially shifts in orbit, this could still prove dangerous to other satellites.

Some satellites are merely left in their current orbits, either by choice or through necessity if they are uncontrollable. Other satellites are purposely moved lower into the atmosphere, where they are left to burn up and hopefully disintegrate before reaching the Earth. While this is usually the case there have been some notable exceptions, including NASA’s Skylab station that failed to deteriorate completely in July 1979, spreading debris over western Australia. More recently, debris from NASA’s UARS satellite is scheduled to fall back to Earth at some point this evening, with a 1 in 3,200 chance of hitting a human.

The overriding principle of 3D printing is that hundreds of layers about 0.1mm thick are stuck on top of each other by a machine to eventually produce a solid, 3D object from a computer model or a replica of the mould. In essence it works in much the same way as a traditional inkjet printer, where the ink is printed in layers to form a image. Instaed of ink, however ,a 3D printer uses molten plastic, thick waxes and other materials to create the desired object.

There are several different methods of 3D printing that can vary somewhat in application. A binder 3D printer uses a fine dry powder with liquid glue to form layers and ultimately a solid object. Another method, photopolymerisation, fuses liquid plastic with a beam of ultraviolet light that solidifies the liquid. Selective laser sintering, meanwhile, uses a laser to melt a plastic powder that solidifies to form a particular layer.

Survival training

NASA’s first manned space programmes involved landing space capsules in the ocean. Astronauts were trained for surviving on the ocean and also had jungle training.

Centrifuges

To gain experience of high g-forces experienced from high levels of acceleration, trainee astronauts are spun on the end of a long arm that rotates at high speed.

Fitness

Astronauts have to be fit and healthy. Fitness programmes in the early days of space exploration were intensive and involved training in oxygen-deprived environments.

Floating

Astronauts are given the sensation of working in spacesuits in giant water tanks. NASA uses the worlds largest indoor pool-holding shuttle and station mock-ups.

Simulators

Astronauts train for their mission in mock-ups and simulators. These give a realistic impression of the tasks that they will carry out and the living conditions.