Space Station Museum

Recently, there was news about how the International Space Station will one day be deorbited.  And this was met with cries of “Can’t it just be boosted into a higher orbit,” or, “Can’t it be turned into a museum?” and other such things.  And my knee-jerk reaction is that it should be preserved as a historic “building.” But then reality kicked in.  The station is getting old and there’s no telling how long some parts of it will stay safe.  Having a controlled reentry after all the crew and science are taken off is infinitely better than a catastrophic break up with crew – or tourists – onboard leaving a huge debris cloud that could damage satellites or other stations. 

While thinking on all of this, I realized that the ISS could live again someday as part of a museum.  This would be in orbit – as part of an even larger space station – and would start with models of everything: from spacecraft like the Vostok capsule of Yuri Gagarin, to the Space Shuttle, to the Chinese Shenzhou, as well as all the space stations from Skylab and Mir and the ISS.  And then there would be the full size versions, so the tourists could try to cram into a Mercury capsule or just float around in Mir.  These wouldn’t be a full recreation, there wouldn’t be any need for solar panels for example, just the interior space.  Any views out windows would just be video screens showing what would have been seen.  And since this would be in zero-g, you could cram things in any orientation they could fit.  Like you could have the Crew Dragon mockup squeezed in between the Tiangong and Salyut 1 mockups.  And this museum wouldn’t be the entirety of the complex.  Like you could be inside the Skylab section, and just on the other side of the bulkhead would be the linen closet for a hotel. 

While it will be a sad day when the ISS is deorbited, hopefully it will be replaced with bigger and better stations.  And while these replacements will primarily be used for science, they will one day be replaced with even bigger, even better stations that will still do science but will also hold tourists.  And as more and more humans live and work in space, hopefully someone will eventually build a space station museum so that future generations can marvel at how “small” the ISS was.

Short story – “The Gift of Vomit”

“The Gift of Vomit”

I turn off my phone and set it back on the dresser.  Just as I snuggle back under the covers, I hear my upstairs neighbor’s alarm going off.  The muffled blare goes on for several seconds before blissfully stopping.  For a minute or so I hear the vague sounds of him moving around before quiet returns.

I take a deep breath, and hope to go back to the dream I was having about my ex-girlfriend’s sister. 

My poor neighbor will be trudging through the rain on his morning commute, while under my warm blankets things are so peaceful.  I’ll have a nice relaxing day, all because I told my boss I threw up breakfast.

***

This was originally published in 2014 on a now defunct website.  Of course, back then if you did call in sick it probably wasn’t that big of a deal.  Now you’d probably get bombarded with an endless stream of “Nobody wants to work anymore” BS. 

***

I started reposting these stories on the third Thursday, and that the day this goes up happens to be St. Patrick’s Day is a complete coincidence.  The story isn’t titled “The Gift of Green Vomit” after all.

Random Story – New computer problems

This is just an odd little story from my life.

My first three or four computers were secondhand.  One that belonged to a friend’s boyfriend worked fine for writing stories, but it didn’t have the set up to get online.  So around 2005 I decided I’d buy a new computer for myself.  There was a kiosk in the local mall where you could pick out what you wanted in a computer and they’d ship it to you.  I should have had them ship it to where I worked, but I didn’t think of that.

At the time, I lived five minutes from work, so I’d go home for lunch.  I went home one day to find a note from UPS that they had three packages for me and that they’d try to deliver again the next day.  The complex where I lived had six or seven apartment buildings and the next day when I went home for lunch, I saw a UPS truck parked in front of the third one from mine, so I pulled in next to it.  I waited for a couple of minutes, and when the guy came back out from delivering something I asked if he had anything for me.  He did, but only one package.  So I took it to my apartment and was really happy to have new … speakers.

I had to go to their pickup center or whatever to get the rest of my computer.  It was drizzling that day, and the one box that I think just had the monitor in it easily fit in my car.  But the other box with everything else didn’t want to go in the passenger seat.  No matter how I turned it, it didn’t want to fit.  I think I had to cut it open, take the keyboard and some other small things out, and crush the top of the box down before it would fit in my car.

Back in my apartment, I got everything set up.  I had my new, fancy computer on the left side of my desk, and my old, clunky computer on the right side.  All I had to do was transfer all of my stories.  For the previous ten or so years, I had used 3.5 inch disks.  When I was picking what I wanted for my new computer, I didn’t even think of adding a 3.5 inch disk drive because I just thought of them as standard.  So how could I transfer all of my stories from a computer not hooked up to the internet with only a 3.5 inch drive, to a computer hooked up to the internet with USB drives?

I took three or four disks and crammed them with as many stories as I could fit.  I then got in my car and drove the ten or so minutes to my local library which had a couple computers with 3.5 inch drives hooked up to the internet.  I emailed my stories to myself.  I then drove back to my apartment, and downloaded them to my new computer.  So it took over half-an-hour to move my files a foot.

I had a lot of individual stories, but for some I kept multiple versions of them as I revised them.  So it took me five or six trips to move everything.  I usually went to the library after work, but on Saturday I made two or three trips just to be done with the damn thing. 

That computer died five or six years ago, but I’ll always remember the pain I had setting it up.

My Putin Prediction

My prediction is that one of these days, a group of Russian oligarchs and maybe some of the Russian military, will go to “arrest” Putin.  There will be a struggle and he will, regretfully, be shot … in the back of the head.  They will declare a ceasefire, and start pulling their troops back from Ukraine.  They will then release all these documents showing that they tried to stop Putin from these criminal acts but HE ACTED ENTIRELY ON HIS OWN.  They will then say, “Since the one responsible for all of this is dead, can you call of the sanctions, return our yachts, and just let bygones be bygones?”