of a certain height and build to go on spacewalks says marsha who sadly being petite didnt qualify for spacewalks which are the spacesuit walks that astronauts undertake when they step outside the spacecraft to undertake responsibilities like repairs on the flip side because i was smallbuilt i could go into the smallest sections of the craft that were too tiny for others to enter for retrieving items she says on board the spacecraft there are many things to do and an astronauts work is never over while working anywhere is hard enough activity in a zerogravity environment is that much harder feels ivins who to perform the most basic tasks like eating lunch taking a bath and going to sleep had to strap her feet into a pair of belts so that she wouldnt float away in the process we learnt that if you start coordinating your body movements you could perform a series of fun acrobatics like midair cartwheels and surfing without a board says ivins on a lighter note between making repairs on the spaceshuttle and on the international space station astronauts had to regularly make observations about their own bodily changes which included testing blood samples to carefully study the effects of zerogravity on the human body whenever there was time though her favourite hobby was looking out the window we were orbiting fairly close to the earths surface and were stationed just above the earths atmosphere as we were continuously revolving around the earth we saw 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day in the night we would see great pools of light over the big cities like new york and london and paris we could see threefourths of the earth at a time with the sun behind it says marsha the only thing we couldnt see though were the boundaries between countries from that distance none of the manmade boundaries were visible geographically all the countries of the world looked the same says marsha who admits to having gone comfortably numb with the experience