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First tomato ever grown in space, lost 8 months ago, found by NASA astronauts
- JCharante 3y agoIt'll be pretty cool once they start growing more produce up on the ISS. I hope it shifts from experiment to mass production, although I guess there's plenty of optimizations (experiments) to be made.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoIf the camera pans to George Clooney making a pizza, run.
- otikik 3y agoLove is the strongest force in the Universe anyway.
- rodent_rodeo 3y agoNo joy in this article, zero mention of state of tomato when it was found. Also, they blamed a guy for a while for having eaten the tomato, his name is now cleared. I was blaming him too thinking that ISS food was dehydrated or space paste. However, looks like they get some decent stuff like taco kits and pizzas at least time to time: https://www.nasa.gov/history/space-station-20th-food-on-iss/ https://www.nasa.gov/history/space-station-20th-food-on-iss/
- resolutebat 3y agoIt's been sitting for eight months at room temperature in a plastic bag, I think we can pretty safely assume it was in bad shape.
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoNo, we can't. We have some idea how it would look on earth. Pretty bad, if recognizable at all. But I have no clue how deterioration and rot happen in space. Do the microbes that help break it down exist? Do fruit flies hitch rides to space? How does gravity affect decomposition? Do the conditions of being in orbit have any sort of preservation effect? Yeah. I'd imagine it wasn't fresh, but it just isn't a given.
- theonlybutlet 3y agoOxidation resulting in Lycopene degradation and isomerization. It probably is a shrivelled up dehydrated tomato. But most probably edible. Wouldn't get much pleasure out of eating it though. Don't see bags of dehydrated tomatoes on the shop-shelf.
- pcthrowaway 3y agoIt might sun-dry pretty well without a pesky atmosphere in the way
- em-bee 3y agoi don't know if sun dried tomatoes are top shelf articles, but they are sold as delicacies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-dried_tomato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-dried_tomato
- tomatotomato31 3y agoIn Germany you can get them nearly everywhere. I'm surprised so many find it weird
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoDon't see bags of dehydrated tomatoes on the shop-shelf I do. I have a bag in the cabinet. I use it most often on pizzas and pasta. Dehydrated tomatoes are delicious and are generally labeled "sun dried" even when there is no sun involved in the drying. Plus, I can order tomato powder and use it for things. Admittedly, I don't care for eating the dried tomatoes plain as it concentrates the flavor more (or differently?) than tomato paste does.
- justinclift 3y agoSun dried tomatoes seem to work well in pizza dough too. As in throw in a few chunks while making the base, and the flavour seems to transfer well without screwing things up. :)
- 3y ago
- voytec 3y ago> It's been sitting for eight months at room temperature in a plastic bag, I think we can pretty safely assume it was in bad shape. At some point there were no bacteria which could decompose big fallen trees. More and more fallen trees increased pressure on the ones beneath and some time later we've got coal and diamonds. Tomato in a clean-ish room in a space lab may have deteriorated the same way that McDonald's burgers do in a kitchen environment full of nasty bacteria and mold spores - not much.
- pvaldes 3y agogood time to seed it again, seeds could be viable
- koolba 3y ago> Because of the weightless nature of space, any object that is unsecured or not tied down is likely to float off. And in the ISS, which is larger than a six-bedroom house, there's bound to be a plethora of good hiding spots for a lone-ranger tomato. The part about the ISS being the size of a six bedroom house really stuck with me. I always imagine it being a single cramped room. But now it’s a floating McMansion!
- dieselgate 3y agoMade me think of the Mitch Hedberg bit about "I just bought a 2 bedroom house but it's up to me how many bedrooms there are though, isn't it? This bedroom has an oven in it... this bedroom is over in that guy's house" The ISS is larger (has more bedrooms) than I imagined too but using the "bedroom" descriptor is funny
- mkesper 3y agoEven mansion doesn't seem quite fitting to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#/media/File:The_station_pictured_from_the_SpaceX_Crew_Dragon_5_(cropped).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_the_ISS_taken_during_Crew-2_flyaround_(ISS066-E-081311).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:View_of_the_ISS_taken_dur... And all that was transferred part by part to space, having to be usable right from the start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_the_International_Space_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_the_International_...
- sneak 3y agoIt has an absolute fuckton of gear inside of it, however. The camera equipment alone is quite a volume, to say nothing of all of the racks of stuff for experiments, exercise stuff, life support and water recycling, power storage, etc.
- looping8 3y agoYes, the photo in the article looks very cramped. Probably the same tightness in all other areas of the station, with a few exceptions. I wonder if they make any changes to free space from time to time?
- accrual 3y agoI wish there was more details. tl;dr: - Astronaut grew tomatoes, picked the first one, then lost it - Spent a bunch of time looking for it, never found it - Returned to Earth, blamed for eating it - Other astronauts found it, but failed to provide photos or further details - Original astronaut exonerated - The end
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoIf you want juicy space gossip there's a great report[1], with lots of complaints from space station residents, from food to schedule to cross-cultural friction. I always thought it would make a good Friends-meets-For All Mankind TV series. [1]: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=28451.0;attach=386989;sess=0 https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...
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- greenie_beans 3y agoi feel the opposite. i enjoyed reading this article. amazing details.
- squarefoot 3y ago- take seeds from tomato - plant them on Earth - start a business selling space tomatoes - ... - Fund mission to colonize Mars in 5 years
- barefootcoder 3y agoAlready been done, I was one of the recipients of the 1984 tomato seeds and we planted, grew, and ate them... https://parkseed.com/seeds-in-space/a/13/#:~:text=In%201984%2C%20millions%20of%20tomato,experiments%20from%20many%20different%20disciplines https://parkseed.com/seeds-in-space/a/13/#:~:text=In%201984%....
- popol12 3y agoThat's journalism ? Sounds like they asked chatGPT to turn a pair of tweets into an article.
- charlieyu1 3y agoNow let’s grow more
- phendrenad2 3y ago"While the President's press secretary Jim Richardson tries to convince the public that no credible threat exists, the President puts together a team of specialists to stop the tomatoes, led by a man named Mason Dixon" Wow that took a turn
- inamberclad 3y agoPlenty of things get lost on the ISS. There is an entire team dedicated to trying to keep track of all the tools and equipment as they move around the station. One of the big selling points of the Astrobee robots on the ISS is that they may be able to search for lost tools without consuming astronaut time.