If STS-133 had stayed on schedule to launch on November 30, the crew would’ve been stuck in the standard pre-mission quarantine on Thanksgiving — not exactly the most fun place to be on a holiday that’s all about spending time with family and friends. To ease the pain, the STS-133 flight control team put together a “Quarantine Cookbook” full of various tasty recipes. The challenge? Put the recipe into the same format as all the crew procedures!
I went with the recipe for the pumpkin pie that Jose made back in October and remade it in the format of the shuttle rendezvous timeline. (To see the real thing, follow that link and then look at either Section 2 or Section 4 of the Rendezvous Flight Data File (FDF). I chose the rendezvous timeline for two reasons: I’m a Rendezvous Officer (duh) and it’s a unique section of the FDF. I don’t know of any other procedures that are formatted in quite the same way, so I knew the crew would immediately recognize the “Pumpkin Pie Timeline” as mine.
You can see the full PDF if you want.
I have to admit that this really isn’t going to make a lot of sense unless you’re familiar with shuttle crew procedures and/or the rendezvous timeline specifically — but I had to post it anyway because creating it had me literally laughing out loud in my office. Translating a pie recipe into NASA-ese was one of the more entertaining things I’ve done in quite a while. All alone. In my office. Audibly giggling.
I’m such a dork.
Haha that is awesome!
This is one of the most awesome pieces of nerdery I have seen in quite some time. I love it!
I understand this perfectly. Having spent years writing highly technical documents, I was a bit concerned about the vague terminology “not quite right,” however. 😛