HOUSTON — Readjusting to gravity after five months in space has been as tough physically as the three-a-day football workouts he remembers as a college athlete in Nebraska, NASA astronaut Clay Anderson said Thursday.
The 48-year-old astronaut returned to Earth on Nov. 7 aboard the shuttle Discovery, after a 152-day mission to the international space station.
“It’s a lot like when I played football at Hastings College, when we started three-a-days and my body was not used to that,” the Nebraska native said in his first series of interviews since landing. “I’m sore all the time.”
Anderson is in the midst of a NASA rehabilitation program that all U.S. space station residents must undergo to rebuild muscles and bones weakened by months of weightlessness.
“It gets a little better every day. We do aerobics, weightlifting, balance exercises and agility drills,” he told reporters. “It does feel like I’m back in football camp.”
During his stay aboard the station, Anderson joined Russia’s Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov to prepare the orbital base for the arrival of European and Japanese science modules.
His duties included a pair of spacewalks, which he found inspirational.
“It’s spectacular, and I wish every human being on the planet could have that view because it would change their perspective,” said Anderson.
“To be able to look down at the Earth with nothing hindering your view and see the glory and beauty of the planet was just an awesome experience.”
Anderson’s mission was the result of a lifelong desire to fly in space.
It began as he huddled before the family television in rural Nebraska over Christmas in 1968 to follow the Apollo VIII mission that sent three U.S. astronauts around the moon. He joined the space agency in 1983, after earning a master’s degree in aerospace engineering.
His 15 applications to the astronaut corps are a record.
“Looking back on the journey, it’s been tough,” he acknowledged. “Now that I’ve been able to do it, it doesn’t seem nearly so bad.”
