Here’s the story, reposted from a thread in P&R, for whatever reason:
OK, story time.
First Spacewalk. Alexey Leonov was the first man to walk in space. The Soviet engineers - like their US counterparts - tested the suits in big water tanks. Leonov practiced the space-walk for months before the mission, spending many hours in the tanks, and he thought he had the whole thing down to a science.
The problem was that although the suit was perfectly air-tight, the Soviet engineers didn’t ever test the thing in a vacuum. When Leonov left the tight confines of his Voskhod capsule, his suit was able to totally inflate to its full size. His arms and legs basically became rigid balloons, and he was barely able to move. He spent a few minutes outside the capsule, but he quickly found that he could not compress his arms or legs enough to get back inside the airlock.
After trying a few interesting maneuvers for a couple minutes, he determined that his only choice was to reduce the pressure in his suit. He restricted the flow of air and let some 20% of the air out. It wasn’t enough. Though he could bend the suit some more, it was still too “puffy” and he couldn’t squeeze into the hatch.
So he had to let some more air out. Maybe another 20% or so. Now, obviously he’s reducing the air he has to breathe, but he can increase the relative oxygen percentage, so he’s not in a huge amount of danger of asphyxiation, but it’s a lot of work to breathe. Additionally, one of the major problems he’s facing is cooling. It’s damned hot in the suit and since there is less air-flow, there is less heat exhaust. Worse, he’s sweating bullets and the sweat is evaporating immediately in the thin air, drying him out. He’s hot but shivering, and he’s dehydrating rapidly.
Finally, he lets out air for the third time and can weakly squeeze into the hatch and barely close it after him.
I wish I could remember the statistics, but he lost a HUGE amount of weight (mostly water, but he was also space-sick) on the mission. I want to say he came back like six pounds lighter than he was when he took off the day before.
Space Onions. I tried to Google this story but came up empty. It’s been a good 18 years since I read it, so I can’t vouch for all the details.
The Russians had a LOT of space stations over the years. Most of these were actually military reconnaissance platforms with big honking cameras and telescopes, but they did scientific research as well. I’m pretty sure this story happened on a Salyut station, maybe Salyut 6.
Anyway, the cosmonauts were up there for months at a time and they were resupplied by robotic versions of the Soyuz capsules. What would happen is that the cosmonauts would get into their Soyuz reentry capsule on one end of the station and seal themselves up while the robot ship (Progress) would dock. After the all-clear, they would come out, open the resupply pod, pull out all the supplies, load in the garbage, and then the robot would undock and de-orbit.
One of the details that is not too widely publicized about space flight is that you effectively lose your sense of taste. One reason for this is that in a micro-gravity environment your sinuses can’t drain and you basically feel like you have a never-ending head-cold – no smell, less taste, just like on Earth. But also, you get more blood to your head than on Earth (where it’s normally pooling in your legs a bit), and they think that the extra blood in your mouth’s tissue and tongue reduces the sensitivity of your taste buds. Regardless, the space programs have learned to send up stronger-tasting food for astronauts and cosmonauts, because otherwise everything tastes like cardboard.
So back to the Salyut station: you’ve got these two guys, they’ve been up there for a few months, and it’s been many many weeks since the last Progress resupply flight, which means that their fresh fruit and other perishables are long gone. The new Progress docks, and they start unloading their supplies, and they are rooting through the stuff checking to see what the Kosmodrome has sent them.
One of the two finds a bag of little onions. Now, onions, having a very strong taste, are a favorite space veggie, and the 'nauts are thrilled. They open the bag and divide the onions, and scarf them down more-or-less on the spot. Fresh, tasty onions!
Now I mentioned above, that between their military missions and trying to keep the Salyut mold-free (a losing proposition), they also ran science experiments. The Soviet Academy of Science, like American Academia, fought bitter battles to get one of their experiments included on the space station. It was a major honor, and it could make or break a career.
As you have no doubt guessed, the onions were not food, they were specially-bred onions that someone hoped would be suitable as a zero-G crop for an eventual space colony somewhere. The cosmonauts quickly realized that too as they RTFM and got down to the business of setting up the various experiments.
Now, being both military and Russian, the solution to this problem was obvious: they would lie. They would lie like Laika the Soviet Space Dog. They reported that the cargo had all arrived safely, and all the experiments were set up properly. Over the next few weeks, they would report back what they thought the scientists wanted to hear about the onions, based on what little the knew about space-onion farming.
How big are the sprouts? Oh, 1.4 cm, 1.6 cm, 1.5 cm, and no sprout.
How big are they today? Hmm… 3.4cm, 2.1 cm…
And on and on.
After a few weeks the scientists started asking if there were any blooms on the onion plants. After a couple days, the two cosmonauts decided that yes, sure, two of the plants did have small flower buds. One, in fact was blooming.
Well, as soon as they said this, there was a huge riot of noise from the ground station. See, unbeknownst to the cosmonauts, up until that point, no plant had ever bloomed in space. The new breed of onion had somehow broken that curse! The scientists were sure to win the Nobel Prize for botany! Vodka for everyone!
At this point the cosmonauts knew they were doomed. They had hoped that they would dispose of the standard plant experiment on the next Progress garbage burn, but now they were instructed to keep it and bring the precious veggies back with them when their relief showed up.
They had to come clean, and of course did. The story did not go into a great deal of detail as to punishment or death-threats from the scientific staff, but I like to believe they were many and varied.
I must have told the story better at that party, and the girl had been drinking, but I swear that tale got me laid. It was the 90s, you could get laid for good space-onion story, believe me. I’ve got a good second-hand story about Soviet space robotics too, but it’s bed time.