Q&A Steve Swanson
A NASA astronaut, Swanson’s three missions to the International Space Station delivered and installed two of the station’s Truss Segments
Swanson has spent over 195 days in space during ISS missions
© Alamy
How many ISS missions have you been sent on?
I was on three different missions. The first two were on the Space Shuttle and the third was the Soyuz. On the first I was a flight engineer, on the flight deck with two minor pilots of the shuttle. I had to go through the checklist for launch and landing and all the phases of flight. For that mission I did a spacewalk and used the space station’s robotic arm. On the second mission I was a spacewalker, and did the engineering jobs too. We all have other little jobs alongside the main ones. There were over 300 experiments going on while I was up there, and I probably worked on 120 of them myself. We then spent about 40 per cent of our time maintaining the space station.