Thread: I feel like a Tooheys-- or, Ya gotta laugh!

First ****-drinking astronauts to go on live TV

Golden new dawn for spacefaring
NASA has announced that the first astronauts to survive in orbit by drinking their own recycled urine will meet their public on live TV next Wednesday.
Four of the six members of the planned Expedition 20 crew for the International Space Station (ISS) will give a media briefing, according to the space agency. Expedition 20 will, says NASA "usher in an era of six-person crews" for the orbiting outpost. The briefing will be shown live on NASA TV.
Previously the ISS has had permanent crews of only three, occasionally supplemented by visiting Shuttle or Soyuz crew, multimillionaire space tourists and so on. The limited numbers, according to NASA, were imposed primarily by the need to ship drinking water up to the station on supply flights.
But now the ISS has been equipped with a high-tech bank of machinery able not only to harvest and recycle drifting sweat from the station's atmosphere, but also the astronauts' urine.
The four international orbital adventurers who will meet press and public on Wednesday to introduce the glorious new era of recycled-**** beverage spacefaring are:
Roman Romanenko, Soyuz spacecraft commander, Expedition 20 flight engineer and Russian cosmonaut.
Frank DeWinne of Belgium, Expedition 20 flight engineer and Expedition 21 commander (the first European Space Agency astronaut to command the station).
Robert Thirsk, Expedition 20 and 21 flight engineer and Canadian Space Agency astronaut.
Nicole Stott, Expedition 20 and 21 flight engineer and NASA astronaut.
The machine which will permit the brave new golden dawn of six-astronaut crewing is the Urine Processor Assembly, a specially-designed keg-shaped affair combining the functions of lavatory, centrifuge and distillery. It was initially a trifle (cough) can-tankerous when sent into orbit aboard the shuttle Endeavour last November. First it triggered a fire alarm, then it repeatedly shut itself down - defying the efforts of thirsty astronauts, working on their break in some cases, to get it running.
At one point, the cup of victory was as it were rudely dashed from the lips of space station commander Michael Fincke, who had wrestled with the recalcitrant astro-plumbing for hours only to have it pack up after just three hours and a measly half a gallon of ****.
Fincke, showing the pluck which has given the US Air Force the reputation it deservedly enjoys today (he is a USAF colonel and test flight-engineer) took a glass-is-half-full view of the matter.
"That's a third of a tank right there," said the colonel, no doubt smacking parched lips at the thought.
The problem in essence was that the spinning golden barrel would wobble excessively on its, ah, dampeners, causing excessive sloshing of its potentially life-nourishing contents.
In the end though, American spunk and "can-do" spirit won through. The hard-grafting space aces, following instructions from a team of top NASA ****-extraction experts on the ground, managed to sort out the golden barrel wobble/slosh issue by rigidly bolting the whole affair to its frame.
Following detailed analysis of the UPA's product, NASA and the Russian space agency are planning to send up double crews to the ISS, happy that they will be able to survive on a steady diet of self-sourced beverages.
As the space shuttle fleet nears retirement, NASA looks likely to be dependent for some years on Russian Soyuz ships for access to the space station, a situation which has caused concern to some in America. But the politically embattled space agency is happy to announce that in one field of space technology at least, the USA remains supreme.

Although Russia’s space station Mir recycled cosmonaut’s sweat, the NASA recycler is the first to be flown in space that intends to cleanse and reuse almost all the water a crew member produces.

Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift

It was initially a trifle (cough) can-tankerous when sent into orbit aboard the shuttle Endeavour last November.

Surprisingly, it isn't "Endeavor" even though it's American. It's named after Captain Cook's ship.

Shuttle's Name Misspelled On NASA Launch Pad Sign

Someone Called Kennedy Space Center NASA To Fix Typo

POSTED: Friday, July 13, 2007
UPDATED: 9:25 am EDT July 13, 2007
The first NASA sign at launch pad 39A encouraging the next launch of space shuttle Endeavour at Kennedy Space Center was misspelled and noticed by someone looking at the craft. When the shuttle rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building Wednesday, a giant "Go Endeavour" sign was put on a fence in front of the craft.However, one item was missing from the sign: the "u" in Endeavour.Someone spotted the mistake and called KSC to fix it, WKMG-TV reported.NASA scrambled someone out to pad 39A with a new sign that has orbiter Endeavour's name spelled correctly.A photo with the correct spelling was also posted on the Kennedy Space Center's Web site.The orbiter is named after HM Bark Endeavour, the ship commanded by 18th century explorer James Cook; the name also honored Endeavour, the Command Module of Apollo 15. This is why the name is spelled in the British English manner, according to Answers.com.