CRITICAL THINKING


A NEW VIEW OF NEW MEXICO


Morgan, the Expedition 62 flight engineer, inside the ISS’s “window to the world,” the cupola, in April 2020. The orbiting lab was flying above the state of New Mexico.


called the Mighty Mouse study—and that looked at providing a treatment to mice that blocked a pathway that normally inhibits bone and muscle growth,” Morgan said. Blocking the pathway allowed the bones and muscles of the mice to grow larger and denser than usual. “Tat was very interesting because [that treatment] is something we could potentially see as a countermeasure for the effects of living in space for a long time, but also has informa- tion for how we treat muscular, muscle and bone diseases on Earth as well,” he added. Te experiment, officially called Rodent Research-19, had its result published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in September.


Because the ISS is an international venture, astronauts can’t just while away the days experimenting with scientists


in the United States—they also have to navigate international relations. However, being in space provides an interesting perspective for diplomacy, and it isn’t as difficult as you might think.


“Te international aspect is something that is one of my favorite parts of work- ing on the space station,” McClain said. She emphasized that both she and Morgan flew on the Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakh- stan—she in 2019 and he in 2020—and that her own flight crew had Canadian and Russian personnel. When she arrived on the space station, there were three astro- nauts already on board: German, Russian and American. “Our crews are very inter- national but, interestingly, what I enjoy most about that day-to-day is that we don’t really think about it,” she said. “We know them on a human level, a person- to-person level. Tey know us, we know


their families, they know our families, and these are our coworkers and our friends all across the world. To me what it’s done is that it has made the world a little bit smaller.”


McClain often likes to flip the ques- tion of international politics on its head. Rather than politics informing the rela- tionships of those aboard the ISS, she said the relationships between the crew- mates should inform the politics. “I feel a burden, a responsibility to say, to kind of spread that word and say, look what we can achieve when we do something together,” she said. “Because this is an amazing feat—the International Space Station is the largest manmade thing out there [in space], and it was put together by all these different countries all around the world.... And we launched parts of it from Russia, from Europe, from Japan, from the U.S.,


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