The Son of an Andamooka Opal Miner: Terry Knox

Recently, I traveled to Clearwater Memorial Hospital in Sydney, Australia. I traveled to the seventeenth floor to speak with Terry Knox in his luxurious hospital room. His body is very withered and his face lacks color. He is the only Australian that has every commanded the International Space Station or ISS. We begin talking about the ISS and how it is a marvel of human engineering. We talk about how he never expected to be rescued and the things on board that the crew had to live off while they were in space. He and his crew's job was to keep the satellites that were vital to the war effort in orbit and functional. We talked about the equipment he and his crew were given and how sophisticated it was. It was so sophisticated that they had hours of leisure time every day. We then start to talk about the things they could see on Earth while they were up there. He said they could go into great detail and view battles from all the way up there. He talks about some disasters that he witnessed while he was up in the space station. One of those he felt very strongly about, the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam. He thought it was the Chinese government's fault for the collapse and the death of all of the people it killed. He then talks about how he received a message on his ham radio from a Chinese space station, Yang Liwei. He goes to space station and finds one of the people dead and the other missing somewhere. The one dead was in a spacesuit but had a bullet crack the eyepiece making the suit depressurize, which is how the man died. He took the supplies from the vessel and brought them back to the ISS for he and his crew. He says that they remained up there for three more years until they were rescued. He talks about how he is asked about why he strayed on the ISS rather than leaving earlier with the escape shuttle on the Chinese space station. He says he would do it all over again even though it put him in this withered state. I am fortunate that I spoke with him because he died three days after our interview. Terry Knox was very interesting and I am glad that I learned of his account during the Zombie War.