American astronaut David Wolf said of his mission with the space shuttle Atlantis that he delights in the moniker “history’s most traveled Jew.”
The 46-year-old Indianapolis native, now on his third space mission, made the remark in an interview from the International Space Station Monday.
Wolf spent more than four months on the Russian space station Mir in 1997, where he logged more than 80 million miles. His first space mission was a two-week shuttle in 1993.
On his planned 12-day spaceflight, the physician and 10-year NASA veteran is the lead spacewalker and is installing a $400 million truss segment to provide power and life support to the growing station.
Wolf said that because he is Jewish, he thought he would be the only crew member with a particular interest in viewing Israel from orbit, but this had been proven completely untrue on each of his missions.
“The whole Mediterranean pass into Israel and Egypt, the Red Sea area, is a pass all astronauts love to come up and see,” he said. “They all want to see the cradle of civilization go by, the odyssey goes by, and history goes by in front of you. It has spectacular colors. The weather appears good in Israel, as it usually is right now.”
When asked if he had any advice for Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who’s scheduled to fly on the STS-107 mission tentatively scheduled for January, he joked, “We’re trying to get Ilan to determine how to fast on Yom Kippur — it’s great.
“Because we are traveling up here at 18,000 miles an hour, we experience sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes, which makes things for us Jews a bit confusing. Since we’re not sure if it’s 16 times a day or 16 days in one, we need an Israeli to help us figure that out.”
As he has on previous missions, Wolf devoted a portion of his tightly regulated size and weight limit for personal effects to include a few mezuzot, tallitot and siddurim given to him by friends, family and his hometown synagogue Beth El Zedek in Indianapolis. Upon Atlantis’ return to Earth, the synagogue items will be sent back to Indianapolis, where they will be placed on display along with items from his previous two spaceflights.
Wolf also carried souvenirs from close friends, including a Mayan Indian relic, which a cousin found on an environmental trip in Central America.
On his current flight, the major task has been to move the Starboard 1 truss from the shuttle’s cargo bay to its permanent new home on the International Space Station. The truss is a 12,572-kilogram, 13.7-meter-long portion of the space station’s “backbone,” which provides power to various modules and is the fourth of 11 planned trusses, which will eventually span about 100 meters.
During his brief orbital pass Monday, Wolf compared the short shuttle missions to long-duration space station stays as a “sprint versus a marathon — both foot races but extremely different approaches. The shuttle missions have extremely intense task-based training, where the astronauts practice every conceivable scenario as much as possible, while training for long duration flights is more oriented toward learning general skills which can apply to many different tasks.”
Wolf is the second American astronaut who lived aboard Mir to also get the opportunity to visit the International Space Station.
Wolf said the living quarters on Alpha are extremely similar to the Mir core module. Although he sleeps aboard the shuttle, Wolf said, “It’s very reminiscent. When I go in the simulators I feel like I’m back on Mir.”
There is one major advance — “The Mir baseblock had a large console of hard switches that had an ivory color to them, it looked like the Jules Verne spaceship with the red leather seat behind it. And now that’s gone on Alpha — it’s a laptop computer. I just miss that panel of switches and gauges. There’s a certain classic spaceship appeal that we’ve modernized out.”
Wolf’s shuttle crew remained docked to the ISS until Wednesday.
Wolf says if he gets the opportunity to do another spaceflight after the STS-112 mission, he would like to do another long duration mission, living aboard Alpha for several months.