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What You Don't Know About Living in Space
Ant writes "There are spectacular moments, as well as the mundane, in space. Over the years, living in space has forced astronauts to make a few concessions to things you would not give a second thought about when staying at a hotel/motel. The article lists a few things that people may not have known about living in space." Your iPod needs to be modified to use Alkaline batteries. And also, did you know... that in space... you only get one spooooon. And some people, are spoon millionaires...
Funnily enough a friend and I were recently discussing the interesting geometric possibilities which would be possible when cooking in zero g, one of the recipies we came up with was the sperical pizza, where the dough gets inflated into a sphere (you need the air because the pizza dough would want to shrink) and the topping get layered around the outside, all of course being stick to the dough using the sticky marinara sauce.
This could then be cooked in an oven with the 'inflation pipe' blowing hot air into the middle to cook the dough, and also acting to keep the 'space pizza' in the middle of the oven.
The result, pizza with no crusts!
According to the article, "There is also no ice cream in space. No freezer." But besides freeze-dried ice cream, according to this blog, they actually did have frozen ice cream on the ISS.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
When I was posted in Antarctica for a year they gave us all a questionnaire about what foods we liked/disliked, to determine what to put in my food parcel. When I got over there I found they had packed all the foods I didn't like ! It's supposed to stop you scoffing all your food quickly. I was thinking of killing and eating penguin within a week.
Bastards.
I imagine space expeditions such as a manned Mars mission will use a similar methodology - fussy eaters beware when you fill in the form !
Given the huge success of unmanned missions to the planets, it really is very tempting to ask, why don't we just stop doing this stuff. Either we are going to have a planetary energy crisis, and will have to stop wasting vast amounts of fuel on sending people to orbit, or we will find a clever fix, and so be able to do this much more cheaply at some future date. It seems pointless to do something not very useful at the limit of human capability when there are so many more interesting engineering problems to solve - energy efficient housing and vehicles, efficient and cheap solar power, all need the technologies used in manned spaceflight, but on a different scale and in different ways. A ten year moratorium on manned spaceflight with the effort entirely going into solving energy supply and global warming problems could have a huge payback.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
On earth, gravity striates your stomach contents so the heavier stuff is on the bottom and the gas is on the top. So when you burp it's mostly gas which comes up. In space, this doesn't happen, and burping is a lot like throwing up. So foods that make you burp, like carbonated beverages, are a no-no.
Spherical pizza would be difficult to cook properly, though. Frankly I think you'd be much better off to cook a cylindrical pizza in a centerfuge, with the toppings on the inside.
In fact... I think I need to file a patent on this method...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
As the Endeavor approached the space station this week, crew members on board the station snapped this shot.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
The way I heard it, in microgravity, fluids accumulate in your respiratory tract. Being in space is like having a head cold, not exactly the best condition for getting good work done.
What i'd like to know is, if one of the astronauts really likes lasagna and doesn't like creamed spinach, then why doesn't NASA give them more lasagna and less creamed spinach?? These flights cost millions(?) of dollars and require the planning of thousands(?) of people. Is giving the astronauts a choice of which freeze dried tv dinner trays they take with them somehow too difficult or expensive?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Reading the article, it seemed obvious to me what the solution is likely to be. Cook them, let them cool to room temperature, cut into slices, package them airtight, and then use existing technology for food irradiation to render them shelf-stable at room temperature. Packaging them as separate slices would likely make them easier to handle, albeit at the expense of extra packaging material (although I think that there would be an interesting publicity shot in a group of astronauts around a pizza floating in the middle of the cabin). There might be some issues with arranging how they sit in the launch vehicle to ensure that they're not placed sideways to acceleration -- 3G across the surface of the pizza would rip the toppings right off.
They make this sort of stuff for backpackers, deployed soldiers, and the like.
However, I believe that only the "government contract developed" versions contain precious metals.
This does also beg the question of how the russians, who would frequently stay on Mir for months on end managed to do things. I can't see a tiny washing machine being all that ridiculous of a thing to have on board.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
You are correct, sir. Instead of freezing, the water would actually vaporize. The near-instantaneous drop in pressure trumps the comparatively slow radiative cooling process. If you remember your phase chart for water (you know, the one with the regions for solid, liquid, and gas and a triple point joining all three), the state would fall from the liquid region into the gas region before moving left into the solid region.
Then again, there is the sliver of possibility of freezing if the water is initially at 0C, but again, that's because the pressure drop brings it through the solid phase (then back into the gaseous phase). Radiative cooling doesn't cause the freeze.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Beards do grow in space, why they wouldn't... A common misconception is that astronauts are 'beyond earth' gravity', but that is not the case (the moon is pretty much attracted by earth)... A very simplistic explanation is that at a given altitude, astronauts are flying so fast that they are 'flying - just barely - over the horizon and missing earth', so they seem to be 'falling forever', in consequence they don't feel the effect of earth's gravity upon them. Anyway, astronauts do shave (using razor and foam to prevent facial hair from getting all over the place)