Cover Image for SSGL #0045: How to have fun on the International Space Station

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SSGL #0045: How to have fun on the International Space Station

Name: SSGL #0045: How to have fun on the International Space Station
Start: 2026-08-05T19:00:00.000-07:00
End: 2026-08-05T23:00:00.000-07:00
Location: San Francisco, CA

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About Event

We spend most of our events on the hard problems: propulsion, life support, radiation, funding. This month as we come back from a busy summer, we're taking a night off to celebrate the fact that space is also gloriously absurd.

Because here's the thing about sending humans off the planet: they bring their sense of humor with them.

In 2016, Scott Kelly's twin brother arranged to have a full gorilla suit delivered to the ISS, and Scott used it to burst out of a bag and chase fellow astronaut Tim Peake through the station. The kicker: the first gorilla suit never made it- it was lost in 2015 when a SpaceX Falcon 9 was destroyed in a launch failure.

Then there's space baseball. During the 2019 World Series, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Christina Koch, and Drew Morgan played a game aboard the ISS: Meir pitched a 17,500-mph fastball, Morgan swung a flashlight for a bat, and Koch called it behind the plate.

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata took it further and played all the positions himself, proving microgravity means you don't need a whole team.

And most recently, the space cookout. Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong station used a newly delivered hot-air oven to cook chicken wings and steak. This was the first food actually cooked in orbit. It sounds simple until you realize why it's hard: with no gravity there's no convection, and any oily smoke in a sealed station can clog life-support filters and poison the air, so the whole thing had to be engineered around containing every bit of exhaust and residue. Twenty-eight minutes later, humans had barbecue in space.

Come swap your favorite stories, meet the community, and appreciate the lighter side of the mission over drinks. The hard problems will still be here next month.