What's missing in space: storms, crowds, soda

When it comes to long months in space, the "right stuff" for astronauts is a lot less heroic fodder for movies than being able to survive the little things – like the way a crewmember chews his food, the unshowered feeling, or peculiar longings for tortillas or traffic jams.

With Monday's scheduled touchdown of shuttle Endeavour, astronauts Daniel Bursch and Carl Walz set a record for longest US space flight: 194 days. With their record comes increasing understanding of how modern explorers cope – or not – in far from earth, but still under the pull of earth-bound psychology.

While the Russians have long sent cosmonauts into space for a year at a time, NASA still tries to keep its astronauts up for no more than six months or 180 days.

Asked last week if they'd be interested in going for the world record of more than a year in space, Mr. Bursch and Mr. Walz were emphatically not interested. "I'm ready to come home," said Mr. Bursch. "Without a shadow of a doubt ... the biggest challenge has been mental and psychological."

Like most astronauts, the two say they've missed their families the most – but ranking just behind that are their cravings for pizza and sodas and showers.

Alan Bean, who in 1969 was on the second mission to the moon and later spent 59 days on the Skylab in 1973, says he simply missed "hanging out with groups of people." And he describes how, on his return to earth, he'd "go to the mall and get an ice cream just to have people all around me. I was never like that before."

Likewise, Shannon Lucid, the previous US spaceflight record holder at 188 days, says her earthbound proclivities changed, too. After six months of sponge baths, she says she no longer craves a shower a day.

The world record for space flight is held by Valery Polyakov, a Russian doctor who lasted 438 days on Mir in 1994 and 1995. Other astronauts describe him as jovial and mishievous to an extreme. One of his pranks involved a distress call to his ground crew over a buildup of ear wax. It prompted a flurry of questions, consultations with specialists, and a special shipment of medical equipment on the next supply ship.

But Mr. Polyakov's demeanor meant much to Norman Thagard, who spent 115 days in space as the first American to work aboard Mir. Though he only overlapped with Polyakov for a six-day crew-change, Mr. Thagard says: "That's what boosted my spirit about a long flight. I thought, if this fellow looks as good as he does and is in as good of spirits as he is, then I can do it."

One of the hardest aspects of space flight for Thagard was the down time – and there was plenty on the aging, malfunctioning Mir. "It's best, in an environment like that, to keep busy. I spent a lot of time looking out the window at earth," he says.

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