PoSSUM - Day 3

This will be a very short overview of a very long day. Woke up at 5:30 to be on the bus by 6:30. Drove down to Melbourne (a little over an hour away with 15 full-sized adults in a van - and I was crammed into the back corner) to go to the Southern Aero Medical Institute for high altitude hypoxia training. We entered a big, metal tube, three at a time, and slowly lowered the air pressure and oxygen to the levels you would find at 21,000 feet. As our bodies ran out of oxygen, we had to be aware of our own personal symptoms, so we could recognize them again if it happened in a real flight. For me, I felt cold along the tops of my legs (but that could have been the chilly room), a slight tightness across the chest and a light-headed, almost dizzy feeling. As soon as we started feeling something, they had us put on our oxygen masks then brought us back to normal pressure. Here's a view of the chamber through the front door.

We finished up a little ahead of schedule, so we skipped the Cuban restaurant we had planned on and returned to Daytona Beach, where we all went to dinner at a place right by the beach called the Ocean Deck. Afterwards, we all went out to the beach and took a lot of goofy pictures. We were trying to do our own version of the "bunch of astronauts, walking side-by-side in dramatic slow motion" video, but on the beach. Our fun, however, was short-lived. We had to get back to Embry-Riddle by 7:00 for three more hours of briefings, on things like celestial navigation, mission design parameters, the spacesuits we'll be trying on and the flight camera systems. Now, finally, it's bedtime. More fun awaits tomorrow!