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NASA Treats Staff to Cartoon Poking Fun at Tito Flight
By Todd Halvorson
Cape Canaveral Bureau Chief
posted: 06:01 pm ET
24 April 2001
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By Todd Halvorson CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. It turns out that someone at NASA has a sense of humor when it comes to the controversial issue of flying "space tourist" Dennis Tito up to the International Space Station (ISS). Tito, 60, is the American millionaire who is paying the Russian Aviation and Space Agency an estimated $18 million to fly on a 10-day round trip to the station, which now is circling Earth in tandem with the visiting shuttle Endeavour. And a cartoon in a daily flight plan distributed to engineers in NASAs Mission Control Center Tuesday pokes fun at the hotly debated trip. Seven stereotypical sightseers are depicted floating through a station hatch, with cartoon bubbles that include the phrases: "I think Im going to be sick," "I gotta go to the bathroom!" and "What does this button do?" The response from one member of the cartoon station crew: "This tourism thing has really gotten out of control." Theres also a sign on the stations wall that outlines "Visitor Rules." Among them: "Dont Touch Anything." "No Spitting." "If You Break It, You Buy It!" Flight plan humor is nothing new to NASA shuttle flights. The daily "execute packages" always include cartoons and jokes that are both topical and funny -- David Letterman-like `Top Ten Lists are standard -- and Tuesdays edition was no exception. "You know, people sometimes think that we have no sense of humor, but we really do," said Eileen Hawley, a spokeswoman for NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The cartoons and jokes are "usually inside humor. Sometimes if youre not part of the program or part of the team, you wont know what it is theyre fun of -- its not always intuitive," she said. "But its always good-natured and well-intentioned, and its just really a way for teams that are spending an awful lot of time at work to relax and have a little fun at the same time." Too bad the 10 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the joined shuttle-station complex missed out on the fun. Hawley said the cartoon was left out of the flight plan beamed up to them.
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