You just made me google that and I learned something. Stop it!
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Sure, cookies per se aren’t useful - but learning how to cook in space certainly will be. Cookies are a fairly straightforward baking process on earth, so presumably provide a sensible early experiment to understand how baking reactions differ in space - and presumably what might tech might be needed to counter act some of the effects of micro-gravity.
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Cookies aren’t useful? I think many wouod disagre. WhenI made chocolate chip cookies for the volunteers (and others) at our Fringe Festival from 1997 to 2012, every night of each Festival, I think they’d argue that cookis were useful.
But, the first cooking I did was probably cookies, or maybe cake, so chances are good that if anyone has cooking experience, it’s with cookies.
I think I read the book a long, long time ago. The details have been lost to me.
I do think that it is important to remember that it is quite fictional. Honestly, I think astronauts would do a lot better than that, given constant communication with earth and it’s non-destruction during the mission. Psychological factors would be a huge problem with such a mission profile but I don’t think that it is impossible.
There was a planned manned Venus flyby with Apollo hardware; with a just over a year mission profile. There would have been a year mission with a year in geosynchronous orbit. The design was to use the top stage of the rocket as a wet workshop- build the crew quarters into the fuel tank, empty the fuel tank on the way to orbit, then empty it out completely and use it. It got canceled in favor of Skylab and the Space Shuttle. (It was kind of a PR thing, while it would have been a great adventure the astronauts would have had about 4 hours in the vicinity of Venus. We sent unmanned probes without return requirements instead, to increase the time available.)
While crews normally rotate our of the ISS on a 6 month basis, there was a crew that stayed on for a year. There was one astronaut on the Mir space station, Valero Polyakov, who spent 437 days in space. (This was intentional, no one was left on Mir stranded when the Soviet Union collapsed.)
I think foreseeable missions have to start looking at rotational pseudo-gravity. In the book, they have a hacked up centrifuge, but have to re-purpose it to keep their farm working. Then they get clobbered by radiation, and a meteor.
So in designing a future cruise stage for seven year missions, how do we handle attitude control? My guess would be some form of barbecue mode, with the same axis of rotation as the centrifuge. Couldn’t work on the ISS.
I am glad nobody tried Gemini applications before Apollo 13 taught us a lesson. If I am flying to Titan I would want at least four vehicles coupled to each other and ready for use. Two was barely enough to get to the moon in relative safety.
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