Kimbrough Reflects on Six Months in Space

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Kimbrough Reflects on Six Months in Space


Alumnus is back on Earth after mission aboard the International Space Station




By
Jason Maderer | April 13, 2017
• Atlanta, GA








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Georgia Tech graduate and astronaut Shane Kimbrough talks about his six-month stay on board the International Space Station. He launched into orbit on October 17, 2016 and returned to Earth on April 10, 2017.

On Wednesday, Shane Kimbrough admitted his body was sore from sitting and his feet ached from walking. It was better than Tuesday, when he felt a little wobbly getting around and didn’t have much of an appetite. Blame it all on Monday, when Kimbrough felt gravity for the first time in nearly six months.

Kimbrough is finally back on Earth. The Georgia Tech graduate landed in Kazakhstan early Monday morning to wrap up a 173-day mission in space. As commander of the International Space Station (ISS), he circled the globe 2,768 times and traveled 73.2 million miles.

On Wednesday, already back at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, he spoke to Georgia Tech about the mission that began on October 17.  

“I feel pretty good today, much better than yesterday,” said Kimbrough, who earned his master’s degree in operations research in 1998 from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “My balance is a little off because my inner ear doesn’t know where it is. But I’m much more stable than I was on Tuesday.”During his stay on board the station, Kimbrough conducted four spacewalks totaling more than 26 hours. He and the crew also welcomed five visiting spacecrafts — Kimbrough grabbed a few of them with the ISS’s robotic arm.After nearly six months, you would think he would get some days off work. But the next six weeks are important, as NASA conducts experiments on him to learn more about how ...

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