Astronauts Like to Play with Their Food

We're blessed with a good friend at church who's a science teacher. He knows we homeschool, and he's always sharing interesting learning opportunities with us. On the Fourth of July he came over and did Diet Coke and Menthos experiments with the kids, and another time he brought over all the ingredients for making homemade icecream with the "kick-the-can" method. Once he even went on a walk with us around our property and shared his extensive knowledge of the local flora and fauna. I'm so grateful he's taken on this casual mentor role with our family.

Last week he called to let us know that the International Space Station would be visible in our evening sky. It passes this way often, but conditions have to be just right for it to be viewable. If its full daylight its brightness gets swallowed up by the brightness of the sky. But it has no light of its own, so if it's completely dark you can't see it either. It has to be dusk, dark enough to spot it in the sky, but the sun still near enough to reflect off it. It looks like a bright star shooting across the sky:

To find out when you can view it in your area go to this page on the Family Education website.

If you want to follow up afterwards by learning a little more about the space station here are some good places to start:

-The European Space Agency's website has a page just for kids. There's a lot of good stuff here. We learned which countries are involved with the space station. That prompted a little talk about international co-operation (that's an oxymoron right?) We also learned that parts of it were launched in 1998, the year one of my children was born, so that gave us an immediate reference point for its age. When it's completed it will be about the size of a football field, hard to grasp when it was such a tiny dot in the sky.

-NASA has some info about what my kids were most interested in- how and what the astronauts eat This page had a little info. The kids thought it was freaky that salt and pepper have to be in liquid form. Can you imagine the misery that would ensue in zero gravity if someone shook some pepper all over their food? (Maybe not, if you've never accidentally pepper sprayed yourself, not that I HAVE, of course) This page also had some cool videos and pictures. Here's a picture of their dinner trays, everything has to be velcroed down:


-Also from NASA, on this page, is a really detailed and interesting account of what they eat at "Cafe ISS" by American astronaut Ed Lu. The kids favorite part of his story was where he talked about eating trail-mix goldfish style, floating through the air and gobbling it up piece by piece.