This is a compact version of my day in a nutshell.
7:30 am – Alarm goes off; wake up. Sit on the living room couch for 5 minutes. Drink water. Go to the bathroom.
8:00 am – Check weight, BMI (Body Mass Index), Body Fat &, Fat-Free Body Weight, Subcutaneous Fat, Visceral Fat, Body Water, Skeletal Muscles, Muscle Mass, Bone Mass, Protein, BMR (Base Metabolic Rate), Metabolic Age, SpO2 (Blood Oxygen), Blood Pressure, BPM and blood sugar.
Yes, keeping your health in check is of critical importance not just for astronauts but for any regular human being.
8:15 – 9:30 am – Shower and personal hygiene, Breakfast, clean up work desk, log in to work, and check emails.
1:00 PM – If there are meetings, then lunch gets pushed to 2:00 pm. Half of the core SRE team sits in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), so timings can get pushed back and forth. Mostly, it’s a salad and fruits or the leftovers of yesterday’s evening cooked food + eggs.
1:00 PM to 5:30/6:00 PM – Play. It’s hard to explain to people that my work, hobby, and passion are the same thing, so I’m never really “working” by definition. I can go on for hours, but we should caution restrain.
6:00 PM to 10:00 PM – Cook food, workout for an hour (Everything is in-house) – rower, step machine, abs, weights. 2.5 mile runs at 8-8:15 minute mile pace or slower on the Hoboken waterfront. (The aim is to touch the heart rate above 180 BPM and maintaining it for more than 5-10 minutes)
10:00 to 11:00 PM – Shower, dinner, brush, hygiene, read, research, and study different topics, astrophysics, orbital mechanics/astrodynamics, black holes, etc. It just never stops. Eventually, by 12 or 1, I pass out in bed.
I’ve been doing this every single day for 2 years now. Weekends are a bit different. Saturday is spent time with family. Sunday is “me” time, books, blogging, cleaning the house, learning a new skill, looking up new advancements of NASA and SpaceX.
This is my life in a nutshell. It’s not fun, but the discipline and routine make it fun for me. Once or twice a month, when I lay in my bed, I contemplate, what if all this leads to nothing? Will I regret it later?
Then I realize that I’ve never regretted anything in my life till today; why will I regret this. I have a slight smirk on my face, and I know it will lead to somewhere eventually, maybe mars.