Training day for astronaut-mom Cady Coleman

Training day for astronaut-mom Cady Coleman

By Kim Segal and John Zarrella, CNN

Editor's note: This is the latest in a yearlong CNN series, "Counting Down Cady," that follows NASA astronaut and mother Catherine "Cady" Coleman as she prepares for a November 2010 trip to the international space station. Watch the "Counting Down Cady" TV segments on CNN's "American Morning." Follow her story on the AMFix blog.

Houston, Texas (CNN) -- It takes two people to help dress Cady Coleman for work.

The spacesuit she must wear for training at the Johnson Space Center here weighs more than twice the body weight of the petite astronaut.

"Some people think you might have a custom spacesuit, and you don't," she says. "They're in a generic size."

Pads are added and adjustments are made to ensure a custom, comfortable fit for each astronaut. The suit Coleman is training in is similar to the one she will wear if she must do a spacewalk next year while aboard the international space station.

In November, if everything goes according to plan, Coleman will blast off on a Russian Soyuz rocket for the station, where she will live for the next six months.

Preparing for that trip has been a tricky balancing act for Coleman, who can spend one evening cooking dinner and picking up toys and the next preparing to orbit the Earth at 17,000 mph. Coleman splits her time between Houston, Texas and western Massachusetts, where she lives with her her husband and their 9-year-old son.

On Earth, gravity is not as kind to Coleman as it will be in space. Her spacesuit weighs 300 pounds.

- more at www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/25/cady.astronaut.mom/index.html