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Space Station Crew Forced to Cut Calories

Posted by CowboyNeal on Fri Dec 10, 2004 05:26 AM
from the mother-hubbard-named-new-chef dept.
Space
gollum123 writes "CNN and others are reporting that food is running so low aboard the international space station that both the crew members have been asked to cut their calories, at least until a Russian supply ship arrives in a little over two weeks. The situation is so bad that if a Russian cargo vessel scheduled to arrive on Dec. 25 has a mishap or is significantly delayed, the astronauts, one American and one Russian, will have to abandon the station and return home months ahead of schedule. An independent team is looking into how the food inventory ended up being tracked so poorly and how it can be improved in the future."
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  • Space McDonalds? (Score:4, Funny)

    by grazzy (56382) <grazzy@quake.s w e . n et> on Friday December 10 2004, @05:28AM (#11049899) Homepage Journal
    .. where are they when you need them?

    • Re:Space McDonalds? (Score:5, Funny)

      by skaffen42 (579313) on Friday December 10 2004, @07:01AM (#11050196)
      I'm pretty sure midnight snacking is what caused this problem. I mean, the ISS goes around the earth quite a few times every 24 hours, and the station probably experiences night every time. Now astronauts are by definition geeks, and I have never met a true geek who can keep themselves from heading to the snack cupboard at around midnight. Just think about how much snacking they end up doing and it is amazing their food supplies lasted as long as it did.

      As for McDonalds in space... no, no, no. That is how it starts. First the midnight snacking, then you start doing late night runs to McDonalds, then you have to buy the bigger space suit.

      • No...fricking moron.

        Q: Why do they only drink Sprite at NASA?

        A: Because they can't get 7-Up!

        And the Challenger didn't go up, it went down. Fuck dude...get it straight. The Iraqi Information Minister's second cousin was more funny than you.

        • Re:Sick joke... (Score:4, Funny)

          by b0r0din (304712) on Friday December 10 2004, @06:20AM (#11050090)
          Hey I know the Iraqi Information Minister's second cousin. I mean, he's my second cousin. And he's fucking hilarious. Get it straight, man. Stop spreading disinformation on the Internet, the one place everyone can find tons of true, undisputed facts. The one place on earth (aside from Iraq of course) I am truly at home.

          - Iraqi Information Minster

          P.S. Iraq rules, long live Saddam! America will never defeat Iraq! Baghdad will never be taken! Death to the Infidels, and...

          Shit, gotta go.

  • Christmas (Score:5, Funny)

    by pklong (323451) on Friday December 10 2004, @05:33AM (#11049914) Homepage Journal
    "a Russian cargo vessel scheduled to arrive on Dec. 25". So they won't me missing out on the brussel sprouts this year. Poor sods :)
    • You're just not cooking them properly.

      Steamed with a little butter and salt is best. And if you can't take the big ones, buy the frozen baby brussel sprouts. They have less of the flavor compounds that many (particularly those weaned on baby food and sweets) find distasteful.

      This has been another off-topic post.

  • Only 2 astronauts (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nine Tenths of The W (829559) on Friday December 10 2004, @05:38AM (#11049928)
    Is the team usually this small or have most of them buggered off for Christmas?

    • they have already eaten the others (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      posting anonymously due to grossness.

      • Re:Only 2 astronauts (Score:4, Informative)

        by FatAlb3rt (533682) on Friday December 10 2004, @08:12AM (#11050467) Homepage
        the Soyuz can hold 3, which has traditionally been the crew size on the station. until shuttle flights resume, the crew size will be limited to 2, since the Russians can't crank out enough Soyuz and Progress (supply) missions to support a crew of 3.

          • The Chinese didn't lease the Soyuz design: at one point they tried to purchase a Soyuz for reverse-engineering purposes, but the only thing the Russians were willing to supply for the price was a capsule stripped of almost all its systems.

            While obviously Soyuz inspired, the Chinese design is home grown and features a number of design improvements over the Soyuz: it's larger, and most notably, the orbital module is, unlike the Soyuz OM, capable of independant flight.

            There's a good article [ieee.org] by James Oberg ab
  • Before people start mocking Russians, and their food situation, just let me say that I ate more of, and better quality food when I was in Russia than I usually do in the UK. Salo though, is horrible stuff.

  • Open sauce application here? (Score:4, Funny)

    by King_of_Prussia (741355) on Friday December 10 2004, @05:42AM (#11049941)
    IIRC, the database software that tracks the food inventories on board the space station and the space shuttle on longer flights runs on proprietary code. Perhaps if the software were revamped, and open source software used instead the community could help out a little? Many eyes make for few bugs -- and when the bugs are as easy to spot as the "food" entry reading zero I see no reason to put up with badly written, unfree software.

    Hell, with the savings made they could probably upgrade the menus a bit, instead of eating paste three times a day they could afford to buy the astronauts some hot grits or something equally tasty once in a while.

  • I like my toys as much, no possibly MORE then the next guy. And God knows aviation is my thing.
    The Space Station should be a no brainer.

    But there comes a time where you have to say, 'Look we gave it the good old college try. If it was meant to be it would be a success already, but alas it isn't working out.'.

    For Gods sake deorbit it already.

    Could there possibly be a more humiliating end to the space station then being abondend for lack of food?

    • Re:This project needs to be put out of its misery. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by R.Caley (126968) on Friday December 10 2004, @06:04AM (#11050025)
      'Look we gave it the good old college try. If it was meant to be it would be a success already, but alas it isn't working out.'.

      Whether it is a sucess depends on what you consider it's purpose to have been. In so far it has a purpose it is to exist and be manned, nothing more, and at that it has suceeded. The problems, beyond the expeted small technical ones, have all been due to America not having a worthwhile launch system to do their end of the job.

      All of the other supposed purposes which it has not suceeded against were bogus anyway. No one had a real scientific mission for it for instance. These purposes were just made up to get the budget past politicians who had no interest in space projets per-se. So, except for the politics, there is no reason to worry that it hasn't achieved them.

  • And there's no real science going on... (Score:4, Informative)

    by CodeWanker (534624) on Friday December 10 2004, @05:43AM (#11049947) Journal
    This could be the final straw for the ISS boondoggle. You can't do astronomy from the station that's even a tenth of the precision of Hubble. Why? All the vibrations from all the environmental gear. In fact, you can't do decent science experiments [space.com] of any type. Why? Two people can't take time from just holding the place together to do the experiments, and we lack the budget (and now - the food!) to have a big enough crew to make the place something other than a multi-billion-dollar Astronaut Habitrail. [habitrail.com] Right now, it's no better than Mir was in its final days: astronauts spend all their time trying not to die. '"At present, the primary goal of the ISS is unclear," the NRC study observes.' I think it's dangerously close to changing from an investment to a sunk cost.
      • The ISS has no meaning beyond the political. We've snapped together a crummy space station out of poorly constructed pieces. Huzzah. We COULD have built a station that actually embraced a new construction technology, or a self-sustaining biosphere. But we didn't. We built a rickety Habitrail In The Sky.

        And while you're happy trolling on Astronomy, I'm satisfied with: discovering new planets around other stars, determining the source of all the elemental building blocks of our planet, determining that

  • This has got to be one of the few jobs .... (Score:3, Funny)

    by kernelblaha (756819) on Friday December 10 2004, @05:44AM (#11049950)
    ...where finishing ahead of schedule is a bad thing!

    Maybe the astronauts jus ate too much all year so that they can be back home for Christmas turkey.

  • This is really bad (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dancin_Santa (265275) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Friday December 10 2004, @05:46AM (#11049957) Journal
    The problem with living in microgravity is that the lack of acceleration results in the decalcification of bones and the atrophy of muscle tissue. Some exercise (like the much-mocked Soloflex) can help stave off this atrophy, but the real key to the whole solution is to keep calcium and protein levels in the body high.

    Restricting food intake will result in some very serious physical damage to the astronauts. If you've ever seen footage of astronauts who have just returned to Earth after a long mission, they are hardly able to stand. That is with full nutrition. The poor astronauts up there now will have to deal with much lowered calcium and protein reserves in their blood and will likely suffer from advanced osteoporosis as well as general muscular atrophy.

    I'd go ahead and blame Windows programmers for this mistake. But in all seriousness, this is probably a result of the reliance on the cooperation of multiple nations to do the right thing according to the schedule. It's hard enough getting cats into a pen, it's that much harder to get countries known for 'cutting corners' (like Russia) to do their job correctly.

    • Re:This is really bad (Score:4, Informative)

      by Wudbaer (48473) on Friday December 10 2004, @06:03AM (#11050024) Homepage
      It's hard enough getting cats into a pen, it's that much harder to get countries known for 'cutting corners' (like Russia) to do their job correctly.

      Without the corner-cutting Russians they would have to wait for the next Space Shuttle for food... could be a long hungry wait. (yes, I know that they have a Soyus capsule for emergencies, which incidentially also is Russian).

    • Re:This is really bad (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bsartist (550317) on Friday December 10 2004, @07:18AM (#11050255) Homepage
      It's hard enough getting cats into a pen, it's that much harder to get countries known for 'cutting corners' (like Russia) to do their job correctly.

      Um, you do realize, don't you, that the effects you're talking about here were documented by Soviet cosmonauts after long-term missions aboard Mir? Sounds to me like they did their jobs pretty damn well.

      Oh, and in case you missed it, the Russians aren't coming up short when it comes to ISS flights - NASA is. The Russians are stepping up to the plate and getting both US and Russian crew into orbit.
        • The Russians are the only reason the ISS is up there (current supply missions, critical modules, etc) but don't forget who funded those critical modules.

          The Russians did, with decades of research on space stations and on MIR that reduced the cost of the life support systems down to something the Americans could actually afford for the ISS.

          And then along comes NASA; boo-hoo we need a lifesupport and we can't afford to develop it...

    • it's that much harder to get countries known for 'cutting corners' (like Russia) to do their job correctly..

      And the only reason that it's the Russians who are supplying the station is because of the Columbia disaster:

      But he said it is no more critical than previous supply runs, which have been conducted exclusively by the Russians ever since last year's Columbia disaster.

      Before moaning about other countries, perhaps you should look to the problems in your own...
    • It's hard enough getting cats into a pen, it's that much harder to get countries known for 'cutting corners' (like Russia) to do their job correctly.

      Of course, it's a shame that the Russians are almost two years behind with their planned space shuttle flights to ISS. Oh, wait ...

  • Survivor! (Score:5, Funny)

    by nacturation (646836) <nacturation@BALD ... com minus author> on Friday December 10 2004, @05:48AM (#11049963) Journal
    Why not turn it into a new reality TV show, a la Survivor? This could easily provide a smidgen of the funding to keep the space station going. And instead of voting people off the space station, the person who loses a challenge gets eaten, so the food situation practically solves itself.

  • Interesting and worrying too! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bogaboga (793279) on Friday December 10 2004, @05:49AM (#11049969)
    It's interesting to note that as Americans, who believe we have the best and greatest technology on the globe (though we depend a lot on other countires), cannot get [back] to the Space Station unless we utilize "out-dated" Russian technology!

    This hurts me because in a few decades, when the majority of our manufacturing base has been outsourced, we'll have to depend on outside help for the very basics of our way of life. This is already happening if one considers the flu vaccine.

    The Russians, though poor, seem to make better technical decisions. I remember a slashdotter mentioning here sometime ago that Russian helicopters can be fixed with the simplest of everyday materials and still deliver (read reliably fly)! Contrast that with American ones that require hours of maintenance for a few hours of flight. The Sea Kings (of Canada) require 30 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight, and they are unavailable for operations 40 per cent of the time. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/cdnmilitary/seak ing.html [www.cbc.ca].

    Imagine...........!

      • This [snopes.com] has got to be the urban legend that pisses me off the most, just because so many people try to make a point out of it. Long story short, originally both the USA and the USSR used pencils, but they would cause problems in microgravity due to the leads breaking and floating around in the air. The Fisher pen company developed the pen with their own money and sold each pen to nasa for only 2.95.
      • While the Fisher space pen did require a large sum of money to develop, NASA had nothing to do with the development. In fact, NASA also used pencils before the space pen was available.

        This is just like the story of one of the very first modal imapact hammers. A modal impact hammer is used for vibration testing. It contains a force transducer in the head of the hammer so you can measure the excitation force applied to the structure you are hitting with it. Anyway, it one of these efforts to trim the fat

  • Tell me this isn't serious... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RAMMS+EIN (578166) on Friday December 10 2004, @06:01AM (#11050014) Homepage Journal
    I know April is still quite far off, but just look at it:

    ``NASA and the Russian Space Agency were stunned to learn last week that the astronauts had begun digging into the 45-day food reserve -- which exists to protect against a delayed supply shipment -- in mid-November.''

    Do they seriously mean that:

    1. The astronauts weren't supplied with enough food
    2. The situation was so bad they had to dig into the reserves
    3. They didn't tell Earth about this?

    If this is how seriously the people involved take their mission, I say we cut the funding right here, right now.

    I've never been able to see space flight as anything but a waste of time, energy and money, but I've been okay with it; other people have lives and opinions too. But time and time again it turns out they don't do it properly. Exploding rockets and space shuttles, confusing metric and imperial units, failed Mars missions, and now this.

  • They blame the previous crew (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ceeam (39911) on Friday December 10 2004, @06:16AM (#11050076)
    The previous crew has apparently eaten all the meat and tasties. All is left in abundance now is some confectionery and some juices if I recall correctly what I read yesterday. Now you see - when your mom was telling you to eat it all and not to pick your food she, in fact, was preparing you to be a spaceman one day.

  • new mother's saying... (Score:3, Funny)

    by nigham (792777) on Friday December 10 2004, @06:55AM (#11050178) Homepage
    finish your food kiddo... there are hungry astronauts in space.

  • Why Base it on Calories? (Score:3, Funny)

    by syntap (242090) on Friday December 10 2004, @07:08AM (#11050225)
    Don't we all know by now it's the CARBS that count and not calories?

    My best sig is this one.

  • Obligatory José Jimenez joke (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dammital (220641) on Friday December 10 2004, @08:29AM (#11050546)
    Live at the Hungry i, circa 1961 --
    Q: I would imagine that food is a major problem on a trip into outer space...

    A: ... it is, you know! They only allow you to have the ten ounces of food.

    Q: Only ten ounces?

    A: Yah.

    Q: Well, how will you manage?

    A: I'll eat out...

  • Hunger Strike (Score:3, Funny)

    by thewiz (24994) * on Friday December 10 2004, @08:34AM (#11050577)
    If the astronauts are upset that NASA screwed up the food supply, they could always rebel and go on a hunger strike.
    Uh, wait..That's what NASA wants them to do...

  • I've seen and heard this story... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by constantnormal (512494) on Friday December 10 2004, @10:01AM (#11051256)
    ... from many "news" outlets.

    It is uniformly described as a "diet" or "cutback".

    Will someone please explain to me why no one is willing to use the term "forced rationing"? As that certainly seems to be the most accurate description from the high peak of reason and sensibility where I reside...

    Or maybe the "news" is not about presenting "accurate description"s.

  • Spliff's in Space? (Score:3, Funny)

    by El_Smack (267329) on Friday December 10 2004, @11:01AM (#11051862)
    Upside: No drug laws in space.
    Downside: You still get the munchies.
  • motherly order a the dining table:
    "Now Johnny, finish your vegetables. Don't you know the astronauts on the space station don't have enought to eat?"
    • You could also lose that weight by stopping the caffeinated drinks and getting some excercise. As a side benefit, you might get some sunlight as well.
      • What on earth [sic!] are they doing up there?

        Exercising like mad. They have to - if they don't they lose muscle mass because of the lack of gravity. The Soviets learned this the hard way. When the cosmonauts who went on the first long-term missions returned to earth, they were practically crippled and had to go through months of rehab.

          • Re:Weightless Weight Loss (Score:3, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            having extra muscle requires a lot more calories to support than fat (or than nothing) even when it's doing nothing. for most of our evolution food was scare and getting rid of that metabolic cost when it wasn't being used was beneficial and a good thing.
          • Well, when there is zero gravity, there is no need to maintain muscle to fight gravity.

            So if no need to maintain the muscle, muscle mass will decrease.
      • Actually, 3000 calories sounds pretty normal for very fit people in somewhat difficult conditions. Remember, the average male(on a global scale, not just the industrialized, lazy parts of the world) requires around 2300 kcal just to get by without the body deteriorating. Taking only myself into comparison, when I'm fully active with my normal training and stuff, I burn around 4000 kcal/day, just to keep up with the energy need, and I can go higher when pushing myself. Worst off are elite cyclists, elite sol

    • Re:Eat poop (Score:4, Funny)

      by ajs318 (655362) <sd_resp2@earthsI ... inus threevowels> on Friday December 10 2004, @06:19AM (#11050088)
      That's like the British astronaut who was visiting the Mir space station and asked the resident Russian cosmonauts what they did for entertainment. "Oh, we have a bottle of vodka," said one of the Russkies. "Would you like a shot?" The Brit took a swig from the bottle. "It tastes a bit weak," he remarked, "I expected real Russian vodka to have a bit more kick!" "Well," said one of the Russians, "It's been through each of us six times already!"

      • Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)

        by thhamm (764787) on Friday December 10 2004, @06:21AM (#11050097)

        just change the gravitational constant of the universe!
              • Wrong. The energy from food is made by breaking chemical bonds - those bonds have potential energy in them. That energy has a mass equal to the energy divided by the speed of light squared - that's very small, but it certainly isn't 0. In a nuclear reaction you have exactly the same thing, but with bonds between nucleons breaking instead - it's just the strong force rather than the EM force. The energy priciples are the same.

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