Go to space

“It’s like a submarine door and you hear this steel bang and they lock it down and you think ‘I’m stuck here, I’m not getting out’,” Boshuizen recalled. “It felt no worse than a steep airplane take off,” Boshuizen says, dispelling the idea that the sheer force of the propulsion would rattle and shake the capsule “like the movies”. “It only takes four to seven minutes to get to space,” Boshuizen says, adding: “It’s very, very quick.” “It was more beautiful and more dazzling and more frightening than I ever imagined.”

“After seeing the Earth, I looked down the payload bay at the telescope, and the thing I noticed was the light from the sun. The sun on Earth is filtered through the atmosphere; it can appear bright yellow or as that golden hue you get at sunset. In space, sunlight is nothing like sunlight as you know it. It’s pure whiteness. It’s perfect white light. It’s the whitest white you’ve ever seen. I felt like I had Superman vision. The colors were intense and vibrant—the gleaming white body of the shuttle; the metallic gold of the Mylar sheets and the thermal blankets; the red, white, and blue of the American flag on my shoulder. Everything was bright and rich and beautiful. Everything had a clarity and a crispness to it. It was like I was seeing things in their purest form, like I was seeing true color for the first time.”