Journalist report, 02/27/18: In case of emergency
As today’s EVA was planned on the afternoon, our sport session was delayed by one hour. Yet I obviously forgot to change my alarm clock, and I was the only one to be woken up at 6.30am. Hopeless to get back to sleep, I decided to wait for our evil session: the 3 times 20 second mode was back today. However, it seems that the workout benefits to everybody. We indeed all beat our personal scores in nearly every exercise: Louis for example could do 70 push-ups, Jérémy was able to deliver 90 half-squats, while I was capable to do 85 lunges, all in 1 minute. Laurent even succeeded in making 104 head shakes, though real crunches would have been better. After around 10 days in the station, we are all getting in a better shape: each one lost about 2 to 3 pounds of fat!
The day was dedicated to emergency procedures. Our health and security officer Laurent prepared us a 2 hours briefing on the morning. He explained at first the good habits to have when one finds someone injured. What is the most important is to make a statement of the situation: if the place still can be dangerous, what the causes of the incident are, how the victim is behaving. Gabriel was the one to play the victim for a while: he was repeatedly placed in recovery position and was flipped over onto his back. After these global gestures, Laurent became more specific in his showing. We are not in a Martian simulation for nothing! In such environment, these gestures would indeed be mainly practiced through spacesuits… Some gestures are indeed becoming much more complex: in the case of a vertebrae issue, it would be impossible to maintain the head because of the helmet. Cardiac massage would be compromise, and even acknowledge if someone is breathing or not becomes a hard task. Finally, even repatriate someone to the station would be problematic: with our spacesuits, everyone is 20lbs heavier, and there is no solid hold on it.
Laurent was thus leader of today’s EVA, where he would be able to try these procedures on the outside in real conditions, along with Louis, Jérémy, Victoria, Gabriel, Benoît. Jérémy and I would be the only two to guard the fort. While Victoria, Gabriel and Benoît made a short detour to our instruments, in order to change the battery of the MegaARES, Louis and Laurent dealt with some small tasks around the Hab. While the other half of the team came back shortly after, they were ready to go on with the procedures. Victoria seemed to quite enjoy the recovery position, as she has often been in this situation. The team dealt with a lot of different situations and diagnosis, in order to cover a large amount of the injury possibilities that could one day happen into space. In the meantime, I served as HabCom for the team: I was their referent inside of the Hab, harvesting the data they give me about the resources of the station, such as water level, the state of our vehicles, etc. They finally came back into the Hab after only 2 hours, as they had completed everything they wanted to do.
Our evening was punctuated by our traditional KTNE session, which is becoming increasingly harder: instructions are now incomplete in each manual, and teammates have to be coordinated in order to be able to succeed. Gabriel also gave us the first ranking: Victoria and I are at the moment on the top, yet things will certainly change rapidly, as the hardest part is to come! Benoît also seems to be getting some issues dealing with food: while we split our remaining energy bars yesterday between the crew, he already ate almost half of them! It will be hard to keep going like this until the end of the mission!