Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
21.08.2023 - 11:51 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty / Tim Peake
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.
Books and spaceflight seem to be made for each other, and a good wodge of space books have been published this year, for those of us who will be on Earth for Christmas.
I have added Tim Peake’s memoir Limitless to my Christmas list, alongside the new English translation of Samantha Cristoforetti’s Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut.
Humans have been a continuous presence on the International Space Station for 20 years now. Or, to put it another way – it’s been 20 years since we were all on Earth at the same time. An engineering triumph and a truly unique orbiting laboratory, the space station has also been home to more than 240 astronauts, and they’ve all left their mark. This concept is explored in Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station. The book arose from a collaboration between Earth-bound photographer Roland Miller and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli. It looks like a remarkable book, and you can see some of the images on the New York Times website: Home Sweet Home in Orbit.
They say we’re in a second space race at the moment, but I’ll say one thing for the first
Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
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.
It has been a month since we set up the AeroGarden and started our journey into space gardening. It came with three herbs – basil, dill and parsley. The basil was the first to burst into life and has been the fastest growing. I trimmed the top of one of the young plants at the end of July, and it’s probably ready for another trim now. The parsley was the slowest to germinate and isn’t remotely close to catching up, but it is growing well now.
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.
Ever since we watched Away, Ryan and I have a new toast: “To Mars”. Unlike that fictional crew, we have no hope of ever reaching the red planet. But there are an increasing number of days when I think it would be nice to leave humanity’s mess behind and start afresh on a new world. But the prospect of forming a colony elsewhere in the solar system is a long way off, and when people talk about life on Mars they’re usually referring to alien life.
With my bookshelf groaning under the weight of unread review books, I have declared an emergency Reading Week. Reading Week at university is a bit like half term – the lecturers get a week off teaching, and the students are supposed to use it to catch up on their reading list. When I went back to uni to do my Masters I dreamed of spending a lot of time reading, with the wealth of the university library on hand. The reality was there was never any time to ready anything that wasn’t immediately essay-related, which was a shame.
If there is one thing I am truly grateful for during this extraordinary time, it’s my garden. Not only is it producing harvests for us and reducing our reliance on our over-stressed food system, but it’s somewhere we can step outside and be surrounded by nature, without having to worry about social distancing.
I imagine the Apollo 11 astronauts had plenty to do while they were hurtling towards the Moon, but from a bystander’s perspective it was probably pretty dull stuff. Still, it’s Day 3 of the mission, so let’s have a look at what they’ve got stashed away in their space age picnic basket.
Last weekend, as the temperatures soared, I found a certain amount of solace in learning more about how plants are being grown in Antarctica – the coldest place on Earth.
Earlier this month, the Met Office announced that its weather radar was picking up something other than rain clouds – swarms of flying ants.
World Bee Day seems like a good day to have a bee-related edition of The Hive, my round-up of positive (solarpunk) eco news stories. The UN designated 20 May as World Bee Day in 2017, to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face and their contribution to sustainable development.