NASA declines to protect the Planet Earth

pete wrote:

[last post in an interesting subthread on breadmaking in space]

Missed this discussion, vacationing. There is a confluence of
issues here to do with the many requirements for space food,
which seem to me to include

[last post completely devoid of critical thinking]

but doesn't appear to include growing fresh vegetables hydroponically
with readily available ambient light, cleansing air in the process.

But what the hell, this is America, we're fat and dumb, on average.

http://cosmic.lifeform.org

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:12:43 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Sorcerer"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:


"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
| On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:38:53 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Sorcerer"
| made the phosphor on my monitor glow
| in such a way as to indicate that:
|
| "Thomas Lee Elifritz" wrote in message
|
| nothing worth reading snipped
|
| *plonk*
|
| What took you so long? He's been in most sensible people's killfiles
| for years.

I was jerking his chain a little, but he got serious.

He "got serious"? Like all rabid ideologues (and assholes), he has no
sense of humor at all.

In article ,
Joe Strout wrote:
The rule of thumb in
*well run* institutional cafeterias -- the ones in high schools generally
do not qualify -- is that you need something like a 28-day cycle of menus.
Five (or seven) menus is definitely not enough...

Remind me never to have you stay with me for a few weeks. We have about
5-10 different meals for dinner, and the same lunch and breakfast every
day (with some variation on weekends).

We're much the same when it comes to breakfast and lunch, actually, but
our supper menu is more varied.

This is by choice, mind you, not because we're living in an institution
with a limited menu.

Exactly. That makes a big difference. And most likely there are breaks
in routine at times, e.g. eating out; certainly there are for us.

...So I think you are vastly overstating your case here.

No, I'm citing a substantial body of professional experience (by others,
not me) and experimental results. As I've said before, it is unnecessary
to speculate about this. It's been a big enough problem that people have
actually studied it, run experiments on it, and explored alternatives.
Much is known, if one actually takes the trouble to *look it up* rather
than guessing based on "common sense" and imperfectly-remembered personal
experience (which are often very unreliable guides, especially to how
things work under very different conditions).

When the diners don't get to plan their own meals, and when there is
little or no opportunity for any break, seven menus just isn't enough.
The shuttle food system has seven, and experiments show that you can only
repeat that cycle about four times before it starts to bother people.
Which isn't a problem for the shuttle, but is for longer flights; quite a
bit of work went into improving the food for space-station operations, and
I gather it's still not entirely satisfactory.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In sci.physics,

wrote
on Thu, 17 Aug 06 10:56:27 GMT
:
In article ,
The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
In sci.physics,

wrote
on Tue, 15 Aug 06 10:27:00 GMT
:
In article ,
The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
In sci.physics, Derek Lyons

wrote
on Mon, 14 Aug 2006 15:45:06 GMT
:
wrote:

In article ,
Alan Anderson wrote:
wrote:

Alan Anderson wrote:
Boiling for cooking is used mostly to provide a consistent
temperature,
not for killing germs. For that, 80 Celsius will do just as well as
100...

Then why does the health advisories say boil your water for
5 minutes?

Because it's easier to bring water to a boil than to monitor its
temperature with a thermometer.

Sigh! I understand that part. I want to know about the 5 minutes.


Because when water starts boiling (to noncooks meaning generally
somewhere around a low rolling boil) generally the entire mass of the
water isn't at boiling, especially if the quantity is above a gallon
or two. Letting it go for five minutes allows the entire mass to mix
and get above 160F.

D.

I suspect it gets complicated at this point. The water at
bottom is the water usually receiving the heat. It will
of course vaporize; the bubbles of vapor will rise as they
are less dense. Depending on water temperature above, the
vapor may simply collapse (and rather noisily), or will
continue to the surface and evolve as steam. Since most
boiling water boils into air (although high-pressure
boilers might let the steam into piping), it will cool and
generate fog/water vapor droplets, unless it's really hot.

As for sterilization, I for one can't say. One form of
pasteurization requires a temperature of only about 160 F,
although there are lifeforms that can live near the very high
temperatures of "smoker vents" at the ocean floor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization

So 5 minutes is quite literally overkill, but there are
issues in heating the rest of the water above the water
that's actually vaporizing on the bottom. I for one could
see cold water boiling

But this is not boiling. Boiling is big bubbles at the top
and through.

It is boiling at the bottom, but not at the top.

Sigh! To a cook that (bubbles at the bottom) is not boiling.

Yes, well, the bottom bubbles are the only point hot enough to even
vaporize, and the rest of it's too cold; it won't kill the pathogens.

Not that boiling would kill all of them anyway, even when done
indefinitely.


snip

/BAH


--
#191,
Windows Vista. Because it's time to refresh your hardware. Trust us.

"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
| On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:12:43 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Sorcerer"
| made the phosphor on my monitor glow
| in such a way as to indicate that:
|
|
| "Rand Simberg" wrote in message
| ...
| | On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:38:53 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Sorcerer"
| | made the phosphor on my monitor glow
| | in such a way as to indicate that:
| |
| | "Thomas Lee Elifritz" wrote in message
| |
| | nothing worth reading snipped
| |
| | *plonk*
| |
| | What took you so long? He's been in most sensible people's killfiles
| | for years.
|
| I was jerking his chain a little, but he got serious.
|
| He "got serious"? Like all rabid ideologues (and assholes), he has no
| sense of humor at all.

Well, I had to try. We all learn by our mistakes, I can't say the experience
was wonderful but maybe the vodka played a part in it too.

Androcles

In article ,
Andy Resnick wrote:
You don't do it while you're floating. You *have* to be anchored. This
was one of the earliest lessons of the first experimental spacewalks --
that you *cannot* work effectively while floating.

Yes, but the platform you are anchored to is floating. As long as
there's a strong enough engine to correct, then everything's groovy.

No engine is required if you and the thing you're working on are anchored
to the same platform. Which is what you need for significant work -- you
simply cannot do maintenance, or indeed much of anything, without first
arranging that. Failure to appreciate this figured heavily in the
problems of the Gemini 9/10/11 spacewalks; the Gemini 12 spacewalks were
successful precisely because much more attention was paid to anchoring.

If you look at video of things like the Hubble repairs, you'll see that
while the spacewalkers float around while (e.g.) moving to the rear of the
cargo bay where Hubble is, before they start trying to do actual work they
anchor themselves, usually with foot restraints. (The foot-restraint rig
for the end of the shuttle arm, in particular, gets a lot of use.)

...the satellite was rotating, and so the crewman
entered a co-rotating frame in order to lock on. When he did, the
moment of inertia of astronaut+satellite changed enough to put both of
them into a tumble. And the tiny jets on his chair were not strong
enough to correct the whole system.

Uh, the problem there was precisely that he *couldn't* lock on, because
the wonderful piece of special lock-on gadgetry didn't work. The
maneuvering jets on the MMU *were* good enough to stabilize the whole
assembly, had they ever been given a chance to try. (When they did get
a chance, on the Palapa/Westar retrieval, they worked fine.)

Point is, common sense is often wrong in zero-g.

Yes and no. Note that the technique for satellite capture progressively
evolved away from special zero-G gizmos and toward creative use of arms
and hands, and the successes got easier as it did. On the Solar Max
repair, the automatic gadget didn't work, and only some last-minute
improvisation (and a fair bit of luck) salvaged the mission. On the
Palapa/Westar retrieval, the gadget had a manual override and there was a
backup plan, and both were in fact needed. On the Syncom repair, they
just reached up and grabbed the thing, taking the spin off *by hand* after
(manually) fitting a handhold to the spinning satellite, and that worked
perfectly the first time.

Same pattern on the Intelsat rescue mission: the grappling gadget failed,
and the fix was for three guys to just reach up and grab the satellite.

...Skylab experience was that when working inside, in a
controlled environment with no spacesuits, good-quality commercial tools
are perfectly adequate. The only special attention needed is to making
things stay put...

Right. Exactly. And the small torques generated by the crew bumping
around and whatnot are easily compensated for by the Skylab engines.

Uh, there *are* no torques generated when both you and the thing you're
working on are anchored to the same structure.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article . net,
Greg D. Moore \(Strider\) wrote:
Right. Exactly. And the small torques generated by the crew bumping
around and whatnot are easily compensated for by the Skylab engines.

Other than the fact that Skylab didn't have engines and used reaction
wheels. :-)

Skylab actually did have nitrogen-gas thrusters, but they weren't needed
for this sort of work, since forces applied between two objects anchored
to the same structure do not generate torques on the structure.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:
In article ,
Andy Resnick wrote:
You don't do it while you're floating. You *have* to be anchored. This
was one of the earliest lessons of the first experimental spacewalks --
that you *cannot* work effectively while floating.

Yes, but the platform you are anchored to is floating. As long as
there's a strong enough engine to correct, then everything's groovy.

No engine is required if you and the thing you're working on are anchored
to the same platform. Which is what you need for significant work -- you
simply cannot do maintenance, or indeed much of anything, without first
arranging that. Failure to appreciate this figured heavily in the
problems of the Gemini 9/10/11 spacewalks; the Gemini 12 spacewalks were
successful precisely because much more attention was paid to anchoring.

If you look at video of things like the Hubble repairs, you'll see that
while the spacewalkers float around while (e.g.) moving to the rear of the
cargo bay where Hubble is, before they start trying to do actual work they
anchor themselves, usually with foot restraints. (The foot-restraint rig
for the end of the shuttle arm, in particular, gets a lot of use.)

This sounds like the mechanical advantage known as levers. Taking
this a ahemstep further, that implies that we use our feet and
gravity as levers when moving around, carrying stuff, moving stuff
and turning. Please turn the last sentence into a question. If the
answer is affirmative, then each bone in the foot is a complex lever
system? I know I figured how to move heavy house furniture and
appliances just my using my toes, heels and butt on the floor and
my knees had to be bent just so..I would estimate that the knees
were bent at a 45 degree angle.

I never thought of feet as levers.
snip

/BAH

In article ,
(pete) wrote:
In sci.space.policy, on Mon, 14 Aug 06 09:58:53 GMT, sez:

[last post in an interesting subthread on breadmaking in space]

Yea. I forgot to remember the thread when I made some Tuesday.
My method is to "watch" how I do stuff while trying to put it
into the context of the thought experiment. I should have
been paying attention when I was wrestling with the dough.
And mixing would be interesting.


Missed this discussion, vacationing.

Yea. That's why we didn't care to go on vacation from work;
we might miss something.

There is a confluence of
issues here to do with the many requirements for space food,
which seem to me to include

- compact storage
- ease of preparation

But do you want it "easy"? Remember this is a boring trip. I
would think that cooking would be one of the few useful tasks
that would allieviate boredom.

- minimum mass (I don't think much can be done here with the food
itself, as there is a minimum requirement, and when you include
the water content, that's hard to reduce, but you can potentially
do things to reduce the mass of the preparation equipment)
- palatability
- variety
- nutritional content - this includes the well known obvious items
like protein, fat, carbs, fibre, vitamins, minerals, and EFAs,
but also less obvious things like enzymes and similar beneficial
chemicals present in fresh foods

And the unknowns. How do you provide the unknowns in the recipes
if you don't know they are needed?


What occurs to me as being a great food resource for meeting many
of these requirements is seed used for sprouting. Sprouts have
_much_ higher food value than the originating seeds, but are far
simpler to generate than full blown hydroponic farmed plants -
just add water and wait a couple of days. For extra benefit,
expose to sunlight for a day before consumption. Sprouted grains can
be blended and used for making bread. I don't know if this is now
common in every market, but locally here, if you read the ingredients
on about a third of the "healthier" (ie I'm not talking about
wonderbread) loaves on the store shelves, you will find "contains
no flour, made from 100% sprouted grains", and these loaves look
and taste pretty much similar to regular wholegrain breads, except
perhaps more flavourful. Seeds are obviously compact, dehydrated,
well suited for cargo - they are more resistant to spoilage than
prepared flour, unless the flour has been depleted of valuable
nutrients.

A wide variety of seeds - grains, legumes, pulses - and a wide
variety of seed and sprout preparation techniques, from bread to
chow mein to salad to soups and stews, provides a potential for
great variety in meals, all with relatively simple preparation
requirements. Sure it's more involved than putting the pack of
frozen entree in the microwave, but it's not something requiring
exotic hardware, either. Nor would I try to suggest that it would
be the sole food source; a major component, though.

An example that testing and refining over billions of years
should produce more efficiency.

YOu can't have any bugs or rats on the ship. How difficult
would that be? If you irradiate the seed to kill any future
meat residing in the seed, will it sprout?

/BAH

On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:04:01 -0600, Joe Strout wrote:

In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:

The two are not unconnected; even an excellent meal will start to pall if
you eat the same thing enough times in succession. The rule of thumb in
*well run* institutional cafeterias -- the ones in high schools generally
do not qualify -- is that you need something like a 28-day cycle of menus.
Five (or seven) menus is definitely not enough to make people forget about
the repetition.

Remind me never to have you stay with me for a few weeks. We have about
5-10 different meals for dinner, and the same lunch and breakfast every
day (with some variation on weekends).

Which is to say, *not* the same lunch and breakfast every day.


This is by choice, mind you, not because we're living in an institution
with a limited menu. We just lack the time and incentive to put more
effort into our own meal planning. So I think you are vastly
overstating your case here.

No; you're not understanding his case. His case is, you can get by with
eating just about anything, if you only have to do it for a week, but the
requirements get harder to meet in the longer term.

Are you really going to claim that your "5-10 different meals", make up
your entire dinner repertoire, *without exception*, for months or years
at a time? Because I'm betting they don't. And that matters. There's a
whole lot of empirical evidence that it matters.

Rice and beans, rice and beans, rice and beans, rice and beans, and
something special for Sunday dinner, works. Rice and beans, period,
does not, and saying, "but we mostly only eat rice and beans and we
get by just fine", misses something that turns out to be very important.

Same deal with hardtack & salt pork, C-rations, MREs, freeze-dried
backpacking food, or the present variety of NASA astronaut food. Fine
for a week. Tolerable for a month. Disastrous within a year.


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