MOUNTAIN TOP, Pa. — "Hi, Elizabeth! Welcome aboard the International Space Station. I've got you loud and clear." That's Astronaut Bob Hines. His roots come back to Mountain Top.
It's not every day you conduct an interview where only one of you is bound by the laws of gravity.
"Here, I'll do my best attempt at a back-flip here," he said as he demonstrated what zero gravity looks like.
He might get a little dizzy doing one too many of those, but one thing Bob Hines says he'll never get sick of during the next few months? The view!
No matter how developed our technology has become, he says no image or video will compare to actually looking out the window into space.
"We have a 360-degree view, we can see the horizon of the Earth all the way around. We can see the thin blue line of the atmosphere, and just the spectacular number of colors that are involved in a sunset up here is just amazing. The depth of the oranges, and the blues, and the purples, is just staggering."
Good thing he gets as many as 16 sunrises and sunsets every day - thanks to the speed with which the ISS orbits around the Earth - completing a full revolution once every 90 minutes.
The former Mountain Top resident's fascination with space started young. But sitting in a classroom at Crestwood High School, that dream seemed as out-of-this-world as the cosmos themselves. He thought he'd be a pilot - not an astronaut.
"To me, it was almost like those guys were superheroes, and it wasn't necessarily something I saw as attainable until much later in my career."
His message for other kids back here in his hometown? Shoot for the moon. You might land on the space station.
But don't worry - although Hines is floating above us earthlings right now - his NEPA roots are still strong.
When I asked him to name one thing he'd bring on board if he could, aside from his family, this was his answer:
"My family makes some amazing pierogies, and I would love to have some of those up here. But it turns out, I think they would make a big, giant mess. But if there's a way to make that happen, I'm all for it."
Some of the things he's working on while in space - he's studying how flames behave in zero gravity and new ways to stimulate wound healing and stimulate plant growth.
