Cracked by Ryan Menezes June 30, 2023
Every spacesuit comes with two tools: a lightsaber (in case you run into enemies) and a bottle opener (in case you run into friends). The spaceship, meanwhile, includes a thick troubleshooting manual to prepare for every eventuality, so that if you get struck by lightning twice you can just try
SCE to AUX and get back in good shape. Despite all their preparations, however, many astronauts never expected they’d have to contend with...
5 Deer DiscriminationSwedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang has been in space a bunch of times. He’s possibly the most prolific space traveler ever who’s not from the U.S. or Russia. His first trip came in 2006, and it began on the ground, with an event in which he got to sample different dishes and decide which foods he wanted to bring with him during his spaceflight.
Fuglesang was a big fan of beans and mushrooms (space farts are a problem, but a manageable one), as well as shrimp cocktail. Astronauts eat yogurt, and as Sweden’s contribution, Fuglesang introduced a variety flavored with both blueberries and raspberries. He also requested something not on the menu: reindeer meat. A little reindeer jerky would be delicious, he said, but NASA said no. He could bring moose jerky, but not reindeer jerky.
The issue was he’d be traveling just before Christmas. NASA was going to release the shuttle menu publicly, and if Americans learned astronauts were eating reindeer during the holiday season, they would find this distasteful. Fuglesang accepted the decision, as ridiculous as it sounded. Americans do know Rudolph isn’t real, he wondered. NASA killed Santa and all his nine reindeer in 1971, and all appearances of Santa and Rudolph since then have been performed by imposters.
4 Hair TheftRight before they went to the Moon, Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts famously signed their autographs to a bunch of envelopes. These items were sure to become very valuable if the mission failed and the men died. No life-insurance companies were willing to issue them policies, so these “insurance covers” (which look like postcards) ensured their families would have some other means of getting a payout if they did indeed perish.
Later in life, however, Armstrong soured on the idea of leaving behind valuable autographs. Some smiling parent would request one for their kid, who supposedly idolized him, and then they’d immediately put that autograph up for auction. During his last few decades, he therefore stopped signing autographs altogether. Those around him now turned to other means for obtaining souvenirs. In 2005, for instance, he’d learned that his barber had saved some of his hair and sold it for $3,000.
Armstrong demanded it back. He claimed to have a right to all memorabilia related to him, including stuff pulled off his body, citing a 1998 Ohio law on the matter. This law existed not thanks to some Hollywood celebrity but thanks to fellow astronaut John Glenn, who’d been having his own issues with people exploiting his persona.
More:
https://www.cracked.com/article_38511_5-problems-astronauts-never-expected-theyd-run-into.html
