My Sejour at the Landing Base

Hôpital St. Vincent de Paul, Paris, France

After a successful but exhausting landing at 8:15 Sunday evening, January 10, 1999, I slept peacefully in private quarters on the base next to my spacecraft. I spent the next five days discovering lights, faces, clothing, bath water, and best of all, milk! There were about ten other recently landed astronauts in my wing of the base whom I saw in the dining lodge with their spacecrafts, or in the astronaut lounge while my and their spacecrafts were getting cleaned in the mornings. I picked up some great communication tips with them, since the language on this planet is pretty difficult.

 

Spacecraft Mommy powered this all-terrain vehicle throughout the base. We took a lot of trips down to the dining lodge where the spacecrafts installed themselves into special open hangars (called "chairs") and discussed their landing experiences while we astronauts filled up (which they call "nursing" here) from our spacecrafts’ reservoirs.

The mornings were reserved for mechanical checks and tune-ups for all the spacecrafts in the wing, after they'd been cleaned up. Once the spacecrafts had been attended to, they came to this astronaut lounge where they received individual training from astronaut experts. The five day training course resulted in the promotion of rank from "Spacecraft Mommy" to "General Mommy" (or just "Mommy" for short).

In the afternoons, the Chief of Ground Support, "Daddy," would come meet with me. As indicated in my landing report, I had recognized his voice from the radio signals during the months before my landing. In our meetings, he didn’t say much; he mostly waited for me to say something. Of course, I didn’t know what to say either. So we spent a lot of time just looking at each other.

 

 

Spacecraft Mommy and I had several meetings with outside visitors every day, which I found very exhausting, and so I slept through most of those meetings. The rest of the time, though, I stayed awake and "nursed," even when we weren’t in the dining lodge. In fact, I found that nursing was such a satisfying experience, I just decided I wouldn’t stop! I nursed while Mommy filled up ("ate," as it’s called for non-astronauts), while Mommy communicated by land-radio ("telephone"), while Mommy read books (especially books about how often astronauts nurse, for some reason), while Mommy walked, while Mommy slept… well, pretty much all the time.

Sometimes I would take short breaks just to look around the quarters, though.

And when I could finally nurse no more, I would fall into a deep, peaceful sleep, assured that with Spacecraft Mommy at my side, all was well on this new planet.

 

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