First tomato ever grown in space, lost 8 months ago, found by NASA astronauts | Hacker News Reader

First tomato ever grown in space, lost 8 months ago, found by NASA astronauts

cbsnews.com

95 pointskoolba50 comments

No 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/

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.

No, 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.

Oxidation 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.

It might sun-dry pretty well without a pesky atmosphere in the way

i 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

In Germany you can get them nearly everywhere.

I'm surprised so many find it weird

Don'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.

Sun 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. :)

Well, you only need those bacteria to make it rot and I can guarantee you that there are billions (or more likely large numbers of trillions) of various bacteria there, I would expect tens of thousands various subtypes (sorry for incorrect naming, just an average Joe).

Just because they are now in low gravity doesn't mean they will stop eating whatever they can. And without much gravity to hold them down I would expect they can actually spread more easily (imagine one cough or sneeze where droplets just go in straight line till hitting something).

On their skin, behind their nails, in their mouth, in their bowels and so on. Plus on and in everything else. No way getting rid of those

Isn't the ISS a high rate of mutation environment for such creatures as well due to the radiation?

> Do the conditions of being in orbit have any sort of preservation effect?

There's no reason to suspect they would. Even so, it is unlikely we could ever take advantage of this in any meaningful or efficient way.

> Do the microbes that help break it down exist?

Almost certainly. They're in excrement and the astronauts are allowed to bring some personal effects on board. Speaking of excrement, on Apollo, they didn't have an advanced toilet, so they just used bags. Apparently, they were instructed to seal the bag after adding an antibacterial agent, for fear of them eventually inflating from decomposition products and then popping.

Also.. quick search shows that ISS astronauts after 6 months to a year have _more_ bacteria on their skin and _might_ be why astronauts experience higher levels of inflammation in general.

Finally, let me drop my favorite ISS fact here, if you're doing work outside the ISS that requires turning a wrench, you must turn it _very_ slowly, less than 1 full turn per minute, because the low gravity environment means the ISS as a whole weighs next to nothing and vibrational modes from wrenching can setup very easily. This fact is specifically flagged in several spacewalk manuals.

> Finally, let me drop my favorite ISS fact here, if you're doing work outside the ISS that requires turning a wrench, you must turn it _very_ slowly, less than 1 full turn per minute, because the low gravity environment means the ISS as a whole weighs next to nothing and vibrational modes from wrenching can setup very easily. This fact is specifically flagged in several spacewalk manuals

Can you point me to a resource where I can read more about this? The closest thing I could find was an article from 1998 that stresses the importance of being tethered while wrenching so that you rotate the bolt, rather than the bolt rotating you: https://www.csmonitor.com/1998/1204/120498.us.us.3.html

edit: I still can't find anything explaining this, but I did find https://msis.jsc.nasa.gov/sections/section14.htm and https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/143159main_s... which suggest bolt-driving power tools are used during spacewalks (which presumably get more than 1 RPM)

I also am skeptical of this claim. I mean, if you've got solid mechanical connection to the ISS as in you don't spin when you use the wrench, you shouldn't impart momentum. It would be the same thing if you did the wrenching _inside_ the station as well.

I've been looking for it, but NASA apparently likes to fully wipe any historical documentation off their site once every few years. After 20 minutes of this, I'm sorry to say, I'm way to frustrated to continue. I can't believe NASA is still this bad at holding onto history. Would a redirect have killed them?

It was in a single STS missions space walk manual. It was the literal "sequence of events" manual. It had the timeline for the entire mission, the absolute procedure for every single movement, down to where to put your feet, which handrail number you were to grab with your hands, and where exactly your tethers where to be for each movement.

The case I remember reading had to do with unbolting and replacing a piece of equipment. If my memory serves me correctly it had to do with the cooling system and either an upgrade or maintenance replacement.

In that specific section, it had a small note, for the astronaut and for their handler on board, about the maximum rate at which the bolt could be wrenched. It specifically called out vibration throughout the station as a particular factor. this may have been related to the position of the equipment, which should have been on one of the solar and cooling support spars, and not directly on a habitat module.

Anyways, it stuck in my mind because as I started reading the document, it just kept getting into deeper and more specific detail about every single aspect of the mission, when I finally arrived at the bolt movement section, I was completely taken aback. I wish I would have had the good sense to archive it for myself.

If you've got the time and better skills that my outdated google fu, you should be able to track it down. I want to say STS130 or STS135. Good luck. Let me know if you find it please.

It's like being a gyroscope for an instant... which the space station also has?

Wouldn't those vibrational modes be damped by the mass rather than the weight of the ISS? Because the same goes for any other interaction between the ISS and its occupants, torquing down a bolt is no different from anything else. The biggest worry would be to upset the orientation of the entire ISS but I'm assuming that you are going to be tethered and/or connected to the ISS, if you didn't it would be you that spins rather than the ISS due to the difference in relative mass.

> There's no reason to suspect they would. Even so, it is unlikely we could ever take advantage of this in any meaningful or efficient way.

What about the higher levels of radiation impacting mold growth?

For all we know, there could be effects from radiation passing by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation

> 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.

> 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!

Made 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

Even mansion doesn't seem quite fitting to me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#/m...

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_...

It 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.

Yes, 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?

Is't it about 1000 m3 of pressurised space - presumably a lot of stores and equipment. I imagine in zero gravity the same size room would have a lot more 'space' too due to the lack of everything tending to concentrate on the 'floor' - so lots of places to hide.

how many football pitch is a six bedroom house?

7 millilibraries of Congress.

It is so tiring to see these kind of 'measure' systems over and over again. Is that because the general public is unable to understand rational measures? Shouldn't be better to start using them so maybe the readers get the urge to understand them?

I am not sure about this but I think something can be done, moreso from the people writing these articles. Maybe they can put a link to some website that explains rational measures.

The actual measurements aren't important to the story being told, at all. The story isn't about the ISS and how big it is, it's just a detail to add colour to the article.

Writing a "six bedroom house" gets the idea across more easily than 388 cubic metres of habitable volume. I have no idea how big 388 cubic metres is but I have a rough idea of what sizes houses are.

Communication is all about tailoring your message to your audience. On the NASA page linked to in the article, they use the house analogy in addition to the cubic metres - because they understand that rough approximations can sometimes be more useful information than hard figures.

I've been in one bedroom houses with 370m^2 floor space, and 4 bedroom houses with 175m^2. Those are outliers but I still have no mental idea of how big a six bedroom house is, at all. And the fact this is a usable volume makes the whole comparison useless.

Zillo new ads: "Half the size of the iss, open day Thursday"

“Very secluded neighborhood”

> now it’s a floating McMansion!

In reality it would be larger since it's used in 3D.

You have 6 accessible surfaces. Most people only use their house in ~ 2 - 2.5 dimensions.

Lots of other savings. Like stacking anvils on top of eggs in the cupboard and you can push things through space more optimized without the constraints of gravity. ie doors and hallways only have to be tight circles, you'll gain a lot there.

Anvils on eggs until you have an orbit boosting burn.

The even more mind-blowing fact is that if SpaceX starship succeeds, it will be possible to launch a space station with half that volume in a single launch

The ISS cost $150 billion. One Starship launch may well cost under $75 million, once they have a cadence going.

Three orders of magnitude reduction in cost in thirty years is pretty good going for something that insanely complicated.

"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

I 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

If 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;...

i feel the opposite. i enjoyed reading this article. amazing details.

Plenty 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.

good time to seed it again, seeds could be viable

It'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.

- take seeds from tomato

- plant them on Earth

- start a business selling space tomatoes

- ...

- Fund mission to colonize Mars in 5 years

Already 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%....

If the camera pans to George Clooney making a pizza, run.

Love is the strongest force in the Universe anyway.

Now let’s grow more

That's journalism ? Sounds like they asked chatGPT to turn a pair of tweets into an article.

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