How Do Astronauts Check Their Kids' Homework?

Sept. 1, 2009 — -- When Nicole Stott went on her first spacewalk she knew her seven-year-old son Roman would be watching.

Lots of moms have jobs, and lots of moms figure out how to make job and family work. When a parent is an astronaut there are extra challenges. It's a high-risk, high-altitude -- and high-profile -- job.

Parents in the military, as well as some in business, face similar issues, and digital technology has made communication easier. For astronauts there's the complication of being in orbit.

Stott is the sixth woman to be assigned a long mission on the International Space Station -- three months. Her colleague Mike Barratt is on a six-month rotation. They have both figured out unique ways to stay engaged with their children.

Stott wears a bright yellow bracelet that reads "Mommy loves Roman." She also brought up a stuffed animal and promises to shoot pictures of it as it floats around the space station.

"You have to figure out how to engage them, how to share the experience with them," she said. "A lot of that is going to come through the pictures I take, through the video clips -- this is how Mommy brushes her teeth or washes her hair, what I am looking out at through the window."

Long, Long Trips

Barratt, a father of five, launched to the space station on a Soyuz rocket earlier this year. His daughter Meeta brought the house down when she told him, during a live TV transmission, that she was proud of him -- and said in a stern voice, "Don't break anything."

Barratt checks his children's homework by having them scan it and e-mail it to him. Astronauts also have voice-over-Internet phone service and video teleconferencing, which helps them stay close with their families so far away on Earth.

NASA recognizes that it has to take extraordinary measures to accommodate families as missions get longer -- just think about a mission to Mars, which could take three years.

When Mike Fincke was on the space station in 2004 his wife Renata went into labor with their daughter Tarali. He coached Renata through labor from orbit, but didn't meet their new baby girl until he returned to Earth four months later.

Cady Coleman, a veteran of two space shuttle flights, is training for a long mission on the space station next year. The training has required her to spend months in Russia, and she has worked out a good system to help her son understand what she does for a living. She travels with a stuffed monkey and takes pictures of it all over the world.

When Mom is an Astronaut

Parents in space aren't new, but attitudes have changed about family relationships. In the early days of the space race, when American astronauts were all male and mostly military test pilots, they later admitted, often with regret, that they fell out of touch with their children.

Things were different by the time Shannon Lucid became the first woman to spend months on orbit – from March to September 1996 on the Russian space station Mir, which wasn't nearly as cushy as the International Space Station. Lucid's children were older at the time, and they picked out books to be packed on board a supply ship for her during her stay.

Staying in Touch

Today's astronauts have iPods, movies can be uploaded, and every so often a supply ship arrives with fresh fruit, veggies and treats from home.

There is always work. Stott has a jam-packed schedule for the next three months.

"There is something really just fundamentally exciting about putting together space hardware," she said. "First of all it is in space, you know, you think about it. Yeah, it's just a treadmill, but it's a treadmill in space."

All the astronauts who launched with Stott on the space shuttle Discovery Friday night have children -- many in elementary school. They got to skip school for a couple of days waiting for liftoff after a week of technical and weather delays. But if they have to write a report about what they did, it would start something like this: "My mom launched at midnight on the space shuttle Discovery and it lit up the whole sky!!!"