Cosmonaut Pavel V. Vinogradov, Expedition 13 commander, conducts repairs and maintenance on the space station during a June spacewalk.

STARDATE: What is a typical day like on the station?

JEFF WILLIAMS: Well, typical and routine are not words that I normally use to describe a day on the space station. But I will say that we work a normal duty day. We’re scheduled about eight hours of sleep each night. We work on Greenwich Mean Time.

We get up, typically, at six o’clock in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time. And we have, in that day, three meals scheduled, which we normally are able to eat. We also have several hours of exercise, as a matter of the countermeasures to weightlessness scheduled sometime during that day.

And the other tasks during the day may be research that we talked about, or experiments that are ongoing, maintenance in different portions of the space station, inventory of supplies, up-bagging cargo, managing trash and getting it ready to pack, preparing for future operations, doing conferences like we’re doing right here, a whole variety of things. And every day is different, every day is interesting, and none are typical or routine.