Newton’s Space Apples with Jeremy Curtis (GotG40)

Chaz Dykes | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.

While we’re waiting for Tim Peake to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin his Principia mission, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the first Briton in space – Helen Sharman, who was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Home Front, the enlistment of every man, woman and child in the British Isles in an effort to beat Hitler through food rationing, making do and mending, salvage, growing your own and basically making the most of scarce resources with elbow grease and endless ingenuity. I’ve just read Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell, a biography of Lord Woolton who was the Minister of Food for much of the Second World War. He was in charge of ensuring everyone got fed, and improving nutritional standards was one of his aims. It’s unusual to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ view, and the political situation wasn’t as united as may appear from our rose-tinted histories.

At 11 pm on Friday (BST, 18:01 EDT), SpaceX launched an uncrewed Dragon cargo spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). This Dragon capsule has been to the ISS twice before, making it the first to fly in space for a third time. This is the 18th SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract mission for NASA: CRS-18.

An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.

Ryan’s dad likes mint sauce on pretty much anything. I grew up in a “mint sauce with roast lamb” household, so I found this slightly odd. In truth I have never cottoned on to the delights of mint sauce, so we don’t keep a jar in the house. It wasn’t until very recently that I discovered that Ryan really likes mint sauce, too. 

Earlier this month, the Met Office announced that its weather radar was picking up something other than rain clouds – swarms of flying ants.

In December 2015, as we were waiting for Tim Peake to launch to the ISS and start his Principia mission, I talked about Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. In that blog post, I quoted David M. Harland, from his book The Mir Space Station: A Precursor to Space Colonization:

It’s two months (nine weeks, actually) since our space garden landed, and Ryan and I became pseudonauts. For the first seven weeks, it grew the selection of herbs it came with – Genovese basil, dill and curly parsley. The basil was the quickest to grow, and the most vigorous. The dill was second and grew tallest. The parsley… well, at the end of seven weeks it was just about getting going.

What kind of traveller are you? Do you prefer to lie in a hammock slung between two palm trees, reading the latest blockbuster novel? Or would I find you soaking up the local culture along with the sun? I’m more of the latter, and it helps to know a smattering of the local language if you go off the beaten track!