The star witness before the U.S. House Science Space Subcommittee was just getting warmed up on Tuesday when one question made him float to the ceiling.
U.S. astronaut John Phillips, testifying live on video from the International Space Station, slowly turned heels-over-head, showing his sock-clad feet to the assembled lawmakers when Rep. Charlie Melancon asked, "Are your feet strapped down so you're not floating?"
"Yes, sir, we're not strapped down," Phillips said, though he appeared to be standing at attention in the station's U.S. Destiny laboratory module, even though the gravity probably hovered somewhere around zero.
"Right now I'm not wearing any shoes, we only wear shoes pretty much for exercise," Phillips said. "But I've got my stocking-clad feet stuck under a railing on the floor because if I didn't do that I'd kind of just float around."
Suiting the action to the word, Phillips freed his feet and drifted up to the ceiling of the station, drawing a laugh from the Louisiana Democrat and the rest of the panel. He then drifted back down and tucked his feet under the rail again.
Phillips' testimony was the first from the space station to a House hearing, though space shuttle and space station astronauts have done interviews and other broadcasts while in flight.
Two other station astronauts also testified, but they were in the hearing room. They faced tougher questions about the station's utility as an orbiting laboratory, while Phillips answered such queries as "What's the view like?"
Perhaps predictably, he said the view was "incredible."
The hearing aimed to give lawmakers an idea of what life is like aboard the half-built space station, where construction has been stalled for the last two years with the grounding of the U.S. space shuttle fleet after the 2003 Columbia accident.
