Question: What is it like speaking to astronauts

Andrea Boyd answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Pretty fun 🙂

It is a bit of pressure though because you have to think about what to say and choose words carefully, listening to the astronauts and listening to the science+engineering specialists and the flight director and you’re doing all of this at light speed whilst chatting to the Astronaut in space!

You have to be mindful that space to ground voice communications are always broadcast live in all the mission controls and on the internet so pretty often the astronaut and I say something and 2minutes later it’s been quoted on twitter.

I find that it is different depending who I’m talking to and will adjust the space-to-ground conversation to their working style – we already know each person’s preferred style from their astronaut training plus we ask them how much/little they’d like to talk. Some crew (Don Petit) like to talk a lot and some (Scott Kelly) use few words. In the final Eurocom preflight briefing we ask crew ‘on a scale of Don to Scott’ how much they’d like to talk in general 😉

Also, I’m glad that it is audio only from flight control side because I have a very funny looking ‘thinking face’ when I’m talking to space!!!