Word: iss
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Today, the most elaborate outer-space meals are consumed in the International Space Station (ISS), where astronauts enjoy everything from steak to chocolate cake. They even have a small beverage chiller that can serve cold drinks. The ISS is a joint venture between the U.S. and Russia, and diplomatic guidelines dictate the percentage of food an astronaut must eat from each country. NASA's food laboratory has 185 different menu items, Russia offers around 100, and when Japan sent up its first crew member in 2008, about 30 dishes came with him. Kloeris says that the freeze-dried shrimp cocktail...
...Gemini 3 astronaut John Young surprised his crew members when he pulled out a corned-beef-on-rye sandwich purchased from a Florida deli. Pizza Hut "delivered" a vacuum-sealed pizza to the Mir space station in 2001, and ISS member Peggy Whitson requested a pecan pie in 2002. Tortillas have been on every mission since 1985, when Mexican scientist Rodolfo Neri Vela brought them onboard a space-shuttle mission. In fact, NASA now provides astronauts with their own partially dehydrated tortillas made by the same company that supplies Taco Bell...
...NASA astronaut and ISS crew member Sandra Magnus became the first person to try to cook a meal in space. It took her over an hour to cook onions and garlic in the space station's food warmer, but she managed to create a truly delicious entrée: mesquite grilled tuna in a lemon-garlic-ginger marinade - eaten from a bag, of course...
...does turn out that the damage is more serious than that, it will be occurring on a particularly bad mission. Most of the shuttles' trips to orbit these days are for visits with the ISS. The station is a roomy place - by spacecraft standards at least - and if a shuttle's underside is found to be too badly damaged to allow a safe re-entry, the astronauts could simply bunk down in the ISS until another shuttle or Russian Soyuz ships could bring them home...
...that's not an option on this mission. The Hubble orbits at an altitude of about 350 miles and an inclination of 28.5 degrees. The ISS orbits lower - roughly 220 miles above the earth - and at a much sharper 51.6-degree angle. It's not hard for a spacecraft to change its altitude, but shifting its orbital plane is monstrously hard and energy-consuming, and the shuttle would never be able to pull off such a maneuver. So, the fallback for this crew is another whole orbiter, the shuttle Endeavour, which has been poised on Pad B at Cape Canaveral...