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Good 'inner' news from outer space

With some luck and food sharing, Bob and Doug will be spaced out for a while
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JET PROPELLED NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, of the Bob and Doug team, "floaty-flew" Superman-style into the International Space Station after gathering all his food and water-bottle garbage before docking. Screenshot by Glenda Bartosh

There it sat on Sunday's New York Times' digital front page. But you had to scroll down three windows, past the updates on the outrage over the murder of George Floyd and the latest pandemic news, to get to it.

Then you spy it—the most upbeat news in a long time, and something of a balm for the psyche: At 10:16 a.m. Eastern time on May 31, the SpaceX Dragon crew capsule successfully docked at the International Space Station along with its crew, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

These two "great-guy" astronauts are casually referred to by commentators from NASA and SpaceX, the private rocket company of billionaire Elon Musk, as "Bob and Doug," which any good Canuck can't help but think of as Bob and Doug McKenzie circa 1980s SCTV. Can't you just hear them koo-koooo koo-koo-koo-koo-koo-koo-kooing away at the excitement of it all? (Don't tell NASA—they wouldn't understand.)

After flying for 19 hours at speeds up to 28,000 km/h, Bob and Doug were warmly welcomed by the three astronauts already stationed there—the current commander, NASA's Chris Cassidy, along with Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner from Roscosmos, the state corporation that runs the Russian Federation's space program.

Now that they're safely ensconced at the space station, roughly 300 to 400 kilometres above the Earth's surface, Bob and Doug are going to be staying a while. Just how long, only time will tell since the space station, like many places on Earth, has been relatively short-staffed lately and there's so much to do. But it will be somewhere between one and four months.

All of which led to one of the head honchos at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston to ask Chris what he could do to get the two new arrivals to "stay a little bit longer."

"Well, we could slow down the rate at which we're eating food and stretch out the comestibles over the next [while]," he kidded.

That little interchange, along with a later reminder from a SpaceX mission controller for Bob and Doug to pick up all their food and water-bottle garbage before they left the spacecraft, got me wondering... What the heck do astronauts eat these days? Like, space food in a toothpaste, as we kids used to think back in the '60s?

First off, it ain't no cold paste in aluminum tubes like it was in the early days. In fact, it's amazingly similar to what we have here on Earth. Automated transfer spacecraft from the European Space Agency or Russia's Roscosmos arrive every few months loaded with everything from peanut butter and jelly to fresh fruit and tortillas along with an assortment of drinks and pre-packaged meals.

The full menu at the space station offers more than 100 different items! The astronauts choose what they want to eat in advance.

Maybe it sounds better than it really is in real life, but the offerings look surprisingly good. There's cashew chicken curry, beef ravioli and wild rice salad; Mexican scrambled eggs and tomato basil soup; and strawberries with candy-coated chocolates or cherry blueberry cobbler for dessert. When it's Thanksgiving, they'll even get the goods to make a traditional turkey dinner.

Some things like brownies come in their regular form, just like what we'd get here on Earth. Others, like the mac and cheese and spaghetti, are dehydrated. There's mustard, mayo and ketchup, and salt and pepper, but the latter items come in liquid form since anything out of a shaker would float away, possibly clogging air vents or getting stuck in somebody's eyes.

There's an oven on board to heat things but no refrigeration, so food has to be handled very carefully to stay safe. And in low-gravity and with space at a premium (ahem), special considerations must be made regarding packaging as well as the act of eating itself.

NASA has a great video highlighting some of the quirkier situations that can arise during lunch at the space station, including tins of what look like tuna fish or salmon floating through the air, and astronauts sipping their juice—or maybe that's the tomato basil soup—in flexible packages that remind me of the pouches that a lot of Whistler-based Love Child's organic baby food comes in.

To make sure they're getting the right level of nutrition and calories, astronauts fill out questionnaires that are transmitted to on-ground experts, who help them with nutritional advice to make sure they get the right amount of calories per day—around 1,900 for a smaller female astronaut to 3,200 calories for a large guy—and all their other nutritional requirements.

I wonder what Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas would think of it all.

"Take off, eh?" pops to mind. But, serendipitously, Rick and Dave as Bob and Doug McKenzie actually did a space skit during their SCTV heydays.

Their sleek white space suits were remarkably prescient of the stylin' ones Bob and Doug wore this week, and when somebody asked them at the time why they went into space, their answer was equally prescient: "Earth has become too violent and scary. Space is our new safe and quiet home!"

Way to go, guys. Beauty.

Thanks to the communications crews at NASA and the European Space Agency for all the interesting info on their websites about what sustains astronauts while they live at the space station.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who loved watching John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, blast off into space in 1962, following the great Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin—the first person in space.