You're stuck for months inside a cramped tin can with a bunch of total strangers, with no gravity, fresh food or World of Warcraft. And yeah, you're forced to drink the recycled sweat of your fellow astronauts (or your own urine). But that doesn't mean you can't have your own stylin' bachelor (or bachelorette) pad in space. Check out the new digs being delivered to the ISS. Let's be honest for a minute - living on the ISS pretty much sucks. It's like the college dorm from hell (after some frat boys broke in and stole all the gravity for the weekend). Terrible food. Noisy. Some random people you barely know constantly breathing down your neck. And absolutely zero privacy. If it wasn't for the sheer awesomeness of being in space, no one would go.
NASA spent $30 million developing new private rooms for the orbital platform in an effort to make things more bearable, and it looks like they succeeded admirably. Four of the new rooms will be installed (two were delivered by Endeavor, with two more soon to come). Each one is tiny, like more of a closet than a room, but it's remarkably soundproof and has a door. There are hooks for a sleeping bag, a foldout laptop table (with foot anchors, so astronauts can sit comfortably), and velcro on the walls for attaching family photos and girly calendars.
Even though these new ISS cabins are roughly the size of a bathroom stall, I think they will represent a huge improvement in quality of life for the astronauts. After all, they've got 250 lbs. of insulating polyethlene to protect them from dangerous solar flare radiation. What bachelor pad can boast that?
Sadly, the ISS cabin doors don't lock, and I don't think NASA has developed a zero-G version of the sock-on-the-doorknob. Image by: NASA.
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