This astronaut spoke to us from space: 200 experiments, including on herself

Lt. Col. Anne McLain, of Spokane, Washington, spoke to KUOW’s Angela King on Wednesday from the International Space Station about her perspective of earth from there.

It is so profound to see with your own eyes. You're seeing this planet where everything that's ever meant anything to you is located — all of the people that you've ever known, all of the books and the movies and the culture and the experiences you've had is all contained in one view.

It has shown me how dependent we are on one another on the earth. From space you don't see borders but you do see natural phenomena, you see storms and you see floods, you see hurricanes, and you realize all of this affects all of us the same ways and not only are we dependent on one another but we're all in this together.

That perspective has really touched me to my core, and going forward in my life I really want to share that with as many people as possible.

There are no average days or normal days in outer space. We do something different every day. And that's one of the things that I love about this job. It's like having my dream job and my dream location.

Every day we wake up we do something a little different. Sometimes it's maintaining the space station. Our space station is about the size of a football field — takes maintenance both inside day to day and then outside via spacewalks. And so just the typical things that you'd have in a home — electricity and plumbing and air filters and vacuuming. We do all those typical maintenance tasks up here on board. But we have to be the master plumber and the master electrician, all at once.

The International Space Station is also a national laboratory. We have over 200 experiments every single day on board and some of those we come in contact with.

We might be changing a dish in a microscope for ground investigators to take a look at, or maybe we're setting up new experiments or taking down ones that were completed.

Then sometimes we ourselves become the experiment, where you're studying how the human body reacts in microgravity, and so a lot of times we're doing experiments on ourselves: our mental reactions to things how we're functioning, and how our blood is flowing, how our fluids are shifting inside of our body. So every day is something different.

I was fortunate enough to have a family that was very supportive of me from a young age, who said I can do whatever I wanted to as long as I was willing to put the work in. They didn't tell me how much work it was going to be. But if you follow what you're passionate about, then all of that work is really worth it.

It was something magical when I looked up at the stars and when I looked at astronauts doing their jobs. It was something just deep inside of me that I felt like that's where I belonged. It was this combination of sheer excitement of this dream combined with this kind of inner peace with thinking that's where I belonged.

When I talk to kids or even adults, I say, "You know that thing inside of you you can't quite describe but you feel like there's something magical there, you're drawn to it? Don't ignore that. That can really take you places."

This story has been edited for length and clarity.