Dear Jay C. Buckey,

We have seen the first movie about space and we liked it a lot! It would be great if you put some of the questions and answers we have in the NASA Web site. Here are some of the questions we have.

What do you eat on the shuttle?

This is a particularly good question for me right now. I have to put together my menu for the flight by the end of this month. To do this, I'll pick items (main dishes, vegetables, desserts) from the list of food that we can fly on the Shuttle.

We don't have a refrigerator for food on the Shuttle so the food must be the kind that can stay at room temperature, just like food you would take on a camping trip. Most of the food is dehydrated, which means all the water has been taken out of it. You have probably seen dehydrated foods at the grocery store. For example, the "Cup of Soup" individual soups are dehydrated. To eat them you just add water.

Our food comes in plastic packs with Velcro on them. The Velcro is so you can put the food down without it floating away. On one end of the pack is place where you can insert a needle. The galley in the Shuttle has a needle on it that goes into the plastic pack and puts in the amount of water you think you need. If you want the food warm, the galley also has a heating oven where you can put the plastic pack to let it warm up.

One of my favorite Shuttle foods is the shrimp cocktail. You put in about 2-3 ounces of cold or hot water (I prefer cold) and then you mix it up well by kneading the package. Mixing is an important step. If the water doesn't get to one of the shrimps, it will be crunchy, and this is not appetizing. If you do a good job, however, you will be rewarded with a very tasty shrimp cocktail. Other dehydrated selections are: chicken with rice, beef patty, asparagus, Mexican scrambled eggs, beef stroganoff and many others.

In addition to dehydrated foods, we also have foods that are thermostabilized. This means that they can handle high and low temperatures without going bad. They do not need to have water added and they come in foil packages. Anyone who is familiar with military rations--the MRE (meal, ready-to-eat)--will recognize these foods right away. My personal favorite in this category is the tomatoes and eggplant. I used to like the spicy meatballs, but they are no longer on the list.

Another category of foods on the Shuttle are the intermediate moisture foods. These aren't dehydrated, but they aren't in their natural form either. Some examples are smoked turkey and dried beef.

We also have food in cans (ham spread, chicken salad spread), and foods you would find in the grocery store (individual puddings). We have M&Ms (plain and peanut), cashews, and trail mix. On the first few days of the flight we will also have some fresh fruits and vegetables, but these have to be eaten right away or they will spoil.

The drinks come in foil packages. You add water to the package to make the drink. We have coffee, tea with lemon, orange juice (no Tang), and many others. My personal favorite is the orange-mango drink.

If you are not a picky eater you can have a very satisfactory meal on the Shuttle.

How fast can the shuttle go?

To get into orbit around the Earth you need to be going 17,500 mph. The Shuttle gets up to this speed within 8 minutes. For comparison, an airliner goes about 300-400 mph. During re-entry the Shuttle is going 25 Mach or twenty-five times the speed of sound. The fastest fighter jets go about Mach 2.

Can you eat ice cream in space?

If you had some ice cream you could eat it. Unfortunately, we don't have a freezer we can use for food. On Neurolab, we will have a freezer but it will be used for samples that are collected on the mission.

What do you do in training?

The goal of the training is for us to become very good at doing the experiments, both when they are going well and when they break. We spend a fair amount of time doing simulations. For this, we go into a mockup--something that is built to look just like the Shuttle or the Spacelab. (The Spacelab fits in the payload bay of the Shuttle and is where we do the experiments). Tomorrow, we will do a simulation of our first day in space on Neurolab. We will get out of our launch and entry suits, put them away, activate the Spacelab and start some of the experiments. Everything has to move along smoothly and on time or we won't be able to complete all the experiments we have planned on this mission,

How do you feel about going into space?

I am very excited about this opportunity to go into space on Neurolab. The ability to leave planet Earth is one of the most remarkable achievements of mankind, and I am very honored to be part of this continuing adventure.

Will you get hot going into space when you're so close to the Sun even though your going to be in the spaceship?

As it turns out, we will be in an orbit about 175 miles above the Earth. So we won't be all that much closer to the Sun than people on Earth are. But we will be outside of the atmosphere. The atmosphere, the air that surrounds us, keeps temperatures on Earth within reason. On the ground it doesn't get too hot when the Sun is shining or too cold at night. In orbit, however, it is a different story. The temperatures outside the Shuttle are very hot when the Sun is shining and extremely cold when it is not. But, the Shuttle has a very effective system to keep things in control.

Is it air conditioned in the shuttle?

Yes, it is. The biggest temperature problem on the Shuttle is getting rid of all the excess heat produced by the equipment, experiments, and people. The inside of the payload bay doors are actually radiators that help get rid of this excess heat. If the payload bay doors don't open in orbit, the Shuttle has to come home or else it will get too hot.

We tried the URL for NASA and didn't get anything.

Try this: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/neuron/