A little bit of Astronaut

Yesterday on CNN's front page, the top story in the Science & Space section was on a NASA document (draft, I assume) on crew health for long-distance voyages. Since this is 2007, and nobody cares about the ISS and its feeble experiments, there aren't a lot of "science and space" stories. The story is still the lead item for that section today.

Big questions need to be addressed when planning months-long missions millions of miles from home, but it looks like the answers are going to take a while to work out.

• "How do you get rid of the body of a dead astronaut on a three-year mission to Mars and back?"
• "When should the plug be pulled on a critically ill astronaut who is using up precious oxygen and endangering the rest of the crew?"
• What about space booty?!?

NASA is addressing the first two, and similar topics, in this document but the doctors and bioethicists are going to punt sex chat to somebody else. Seems like that's the easiest of these three sample questions - just don't get pregnant - but they're calling it a "behavioral issue".

Anyway, I know I'm a cold-hearted bastard, but the first two seem painfully simple to answer: airlock it; and immediately. Actually, my gut reaction on the first topic was to go all Donner party on the corpse (cause of death taken into consideration), but that's unnecessary. The rations for N crew-members are now to be split for N-1, so it's not that important to save the body. Then again, eating all those pre-packaged rations will get tiring and a little Lt. Cmdr. Tommy Tartare might be a welcome break. And just think of the songs!