November?! How hard could it be to supply the station with fresh food once a month?
The Last Egg
11–20 of 204 posts
Re: The Last Egg
#12I thought the link was gonna be this... https://egggame.org/
I was not expecting the last egg to look like that.
Re: The Last Egg
#13Always love when this blog is posted. Seeing the day-to-day in one of the least mundane places humans exist is a special kind of interesting.
The author has the same curiosity I have in how the mundane is provided, in perhaps the least hospitable inhabited place on the planet.
Re: The Last Egg
#14November?! How hard could it be to supply the station with fresh food once a month?
See one of their previous posts: https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out>
Re: The Last Egg
#15Weird they don't stock UHT milk. I buy milk for 6 months and keep it in my pantry. I honestly can't tell the difference between modern UHT milk and mass-produced "fresh" milk (at 2% anyway). They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter. It would be fun to make your own cheese down there as a hobby! Eating by the seasons is also pretty interesting,…
> They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter.
From a prior post [1], the no-flight period for the South pole is ~8 months, which really stretches the shelf life of UHT milk.
Re: The Last Egg
#16And people think we're gonna colonize mars. We can't even colonize the south pole, a much more hospitable environment.
Re: The Last Egg
#17That second greenhouse picture is a nightmare! If it were anywhere else on the planet, I'd say someone needs to trim the tomatoes and give them some breathing room to avoid fungal infections but the low humidity and the carefully cultured environment probably take care of that.
Re: The Last Egg
#18Weird they don't stock UHT milk. I buy milk for 6 months and keep it in my pantry. I honestly can't tell the difference between modern UHT milk and mass-produced "fresh" milk (at 2% anyway). They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter. It would be fun to make your own cheese down there as a hobby! Eating by the seasons is also pretty interesting,…
> They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter. From a prior post [1], the no-flight period for the South pole is ~8 months, which really stretches the shelf life of UHT milk. [1] https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out
If you ignore the "best by" label on UHT milk, it can easily (safely) last 8 months. Especially if you store it at 32/33° F.
But more practically, there are different types of containers for UHT milk hermetically sealed to different extents. The more expensive kinds can last years. The US Military says 10 months for "normal" UHT milk stored under "normal" conditions [0]. The more expensive kinds can go much longer.
[0]: https://www.dla.mil/Troop-Support/Subsistence/Operational-ra...
Re: The Last Egg
#19November?! How hard could it be to supply the station with fresh food once a month?
It's really hard! Reasons include:
- Ambient temperatures too low for most fuels and lubricants, and out of spec for most other parts of the aircraft
- No hope of rescue if the plane goes down or gets lost
- No reliable way to light the runway. In the past they've used gasoline filled drums, but it can get so cold that the gasoline vapor pressure is too low and it won't light.
- Extreme isolation—there's really nowhere a flight can divert to south of New Zealand apart from McMurdo, which has its own problems
Remember that the South Pole station is just a small structure on top of a featureless high plateau. There are no paved runways, navigational aids, no heated hangars, no infrastructure of any kind to support aircraft arriving in the dead of night. The risk has been worth taking for urgent medevac flights, but no one is going to gamble with aircrews' lives over a bunch of eggs.
Re: The Last Egg
#20And people think we're gonna colonize mars. We can't even colonize the south pole, a much more hospitable environment.
The south pole IS colonized. There is literally a colony there since 1956