Ticket to Mars

Yeah, I enjoy dreaming about space. I once wanted to be an astronaut, though that ship has sailed long ago for me. It was one of the reasons that I found nuclear propulsion and electrical generation so fascinating. At the time of the 1980s, solar arrays and nuclear fission were the best choices for space travel. So, I became a Navy Nuclear Reactor Operator and eventually sat in the RO seat on USS Haddock (SSN-621). When you are on a submarine, engrossed in the details of the gauges, readouts, and chatter around you, you can imagine travelling through space the same way, though I don't recall "field day" on the Enterprise or during any of the space shuttle missions. "Field day" is a Navy term for clean anything that doesn't walk or talk, which we did at least once every three days. The days are altered on a sub - instead of the "normal" 24 hour schedule, subs use 18 hours. The routine goes: watch for six hours, study/recreate/field day for six hours, sleep for six hours. Every block of 72 hours repeated, except during trials and ORSE. Between each six hour block was mess, which is sailor slang for a meal.
Sleeping on the sub was an experience best forgotten. Since I was junior, I wasn't provided a bunk of my own. Instead, I shared a bunk with two other junior souls, each of us waking the next to go on watch when it was our turn to sleep. The term used for this is "hot racking." Since you had to shower, shave, dress, and eat before going on watch, and the field day exercise and mess after that all ate into the time that you had allocated for sleep, leaving me with just over four hours of sleep per 18 hour cycle. If drills were being conducted, the sleep that you got was far less than that. Often, this brought tempers to boil, but there's no place for anger on a sub. You have to count on every person on board to be able to do their job and potentially save your life. So, we saved it for when we were in port.
I recall that we once docked on the pier where the USS Dixon, a sub tender, was docked with its stern to the end of the pier. We had just undergone a week of running on the diesel engine, with all that delicious smell, constant droning, and bobbing like a cork because of some equipment failure and no one on board had any real sleep. A machinist mate friend climbed out to take his walk to barracks, inhaling the freshest air that he had taken in for quite a while, when a junior officer said to him, "we salute officers in my Navy, son." My friend decked him and knocked him out cold with one punch. The machinist mate was later verbally reprimanded and forced to apologize to the officer he assaulted, but the officer was cautioned that he would find himself on a submarine if he demeaned another enlisted man.