Porterhouse Experiment

ROCKET CITY BLUES

SPACE NEWS!

 “You could do something Joey. You could die.”     
 --Richie to his brother Joey in A History of Violence

Our Rocket City Blues Science Team once again gets the scoop and dumps it right in your lap, fresh from SPACE!

NASA acknowledged today after about a month and a half of dicking around that the Porterhouse Deep Space Mars Expedition has returned to earth from its eleven-year journey. The capsule was rushed to Rocket City’s Marshall Space Flight Center where it was cracked open to the murmurs and then to the uneasy silence of hundreds of engineers in lab coats. You have to wear a lab coat if you are doing this sort of thing, watching scrolling data for like 100 months with just hour-and-a-half piss breaks and some Mr. Coffee and maybe takeout.

Initially NASA spokespersons had little to say about the implications of the mission, which was to see what effects protracted deep-space travel will have on human spacepersons like you and me. After some pressure and even some provocative goading, a reticent Marshall Space Flight Chief Col. David ‘Dutch’ Stewart said,

“The team are at this point somewhat less than elated, in fact they are a little troubled, some of them totally bummed, by the implications of what we found in the capsule vis-a-vis a manned or rather personed expedition to Mars at least maybe for now.”

Following his remarks, Col. Stewart presented a slide show that included a shot of the mission capsule being rocketed into space in 2001, and two ‘before and after’ shots of the capsule payload.

Exhibit A below shows the 1.9 kilogram Porterhouse steak sent speeding toward Mars at the outset of the expedition. Exhibit B on the bottom shows the Porterhouse or what might be the Porterhouse after its eleven-year journey to the Red Planet and back.

Asked about the transformation of the robust Porterhouse into a kind of carbonized shit smudge Col. Stewart said that,

“For now we’re thinking cosmic rays. For a human crewperson we now think a voyage to Mars and back would be the radiation equivalent of maybe standing four blocks from ground zero in Hiroshima on a sort of Lazy Susan and spinning around for roughly, say, five or maybe six hundred consecutive thermonuclear explosions.” Or “for the ladies,” he added, “this trip to Mars will be like passing out in a tanning bed for 17,000 years.”

Sexy long missions like the Porterhouse Deep Space Mars Expedition always end with a touch of dismay. A couple of guys drop dead at the consoles, the monkey comes back a total asshole, a crewperson or two they move to Taos and start taking hallucinogens, another one she grows a beard.

This mission is no different.

Col. Stewart ended his remarks on a personal note:

“The cosmic rays. We were thinking last year maybe one of those lead aprons they put over your nuts when you get your chest x-rayed. But fuck it I’m not going. Are you going? I’m not going. We could probably scratch up some psycho around here to go but I’m not going. Not a chance.”

This is outer space. It is very very big but a great deal less than almost everything.