Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Space Lip Balm

You really should have been watching the space walk this morning. It was so fascinating! Two guys aboard the ISS stepped out into space and replaced some doo-dad on the outside and you could watch the live-feed on NASA TV. Which I did, naturally. Well, I mean, I had it on. Because it was 6 hours long. If you saw how cumbersome their gloves are you would not question the length of time it takes to change shape ship doo-dads.

Camille and I were messaging each other periodically with questions. What will they do when they get to the dark side of the earth? They keep working. What is the "booty tether point" or the "burrito" they keep talking about? We never figured it out. Of course, we discussed the obvious thing, what about the bathroom. But we learned from our best friend Col. Chris Hadfield that they wear diapers. For such an exciting job there has to be some indignities, right?

Then Camille posed this very important question, "What about Chapstick?" You can't apply lip balm on a space walk. You guys, 6 hours without lip balm is a total nightmare! Remember, I took 12 tubes of Burt's with me for 3 months in Tunisia. I certainly don't go through a tube a week but you can never be too prepared. I start to panic when I don't have any on me. I know it takes the astronauts years to prepare to go into space. There has to be some sort of chapped-lip survival course for them to take in between spinning in centrifuges and practicing doo-dad replacements underwater.

When I get the call from NASA that they've come across this blog and have realized that I'm the perfect candidate for their moderately-humorous-blogger-in-residence program I'm going to have to have a serious talk with them about their lip balm technology. There are always questions about why we spend money on sending people up into space. And the obvious answer to that is, "Why wouldn't we, dummy? It's space!" But the not so obvious answer is that some of the technology out there today was first developed for or because of space exploration, such as an artificial heart pump that was modeled after the space shuttle's fuel pump, if you can believe it. But I think people would stop asking that question if the bearded space nerds of NASA could come up with a lip balm that lasted 6+ hours. Let's get on this, team!

1 comment:

Laura said...

I'm so glad to see that it's not just me who is in such desparate need of lip balm. I'm pretty sure I'm an addict. My favorite is an Avon one - I just like the texture the most. I order 25 of them at a time and that lasts about 6 months. See...I'm an addict. I have them conveniently stationed throughout the house, my desk at work, my purse, etc. It's an art. Lip balm is essential to my life. Seriously. I almost always answer the "if you could bring 3 things with you to a deserted island, what would you bring" question with lip balm and chocolate and the 3rd thing changes up based on my mood.