Crew 271 Sol 7 Journalist Report 25-12-2022
Sol: 7
Author’s name: Helen Eifert, Crew Geologist
Title: Gingerbread Hab
Mars-y Christmas from Crew 271! After four straight days of two EVAs a day, we had a mandated day of rest today. While we all got a little bit of work done indoors today, we spent most of the holiday celebrating together. We played games, finished more puzzles, enjoyed many sweet treats, and exchanged wrapped gifts left under the inflatable baby Yoda tree. Cesare wined and dined us (minus the wine) with breakfast crepes, baked ziti for dinner, and traditional Italian panettone for dessert. It was a restful day indeed.
The feat of the day came from our crew engineer, Sergii Iakymov. To celebrate the holidays, I brought a pre constructed gingerbread house for the crew to decorate. To our martian readers, Earth houses are typically cubical or rectangular, with distinct corners. These standards don’t exclude houses of the gingerbread variety. Sergii took on the task of deconstructing and then reconstructing the gingerbread house to properly represent our living quarters. It only took a few hours, but a gingerbread hab was erected on this day. I suspect it would not withstand the inhospitable space environment, but it’s quite likely any breaches were the result of hungry crew members and not engineering deficiencies.
The rest of the day remained relatively uneventful – always a good sign in space. We nearly had an unplanned launch of space tourists, but our on-the-ground mission support, Shannon, managed to scrub the launch before they made it out of lower Earth orbit. Although we dodged one bullet, we were informed we would have to fill out two psych surveys tonight for Kaosaar’s research project. We had been betrayed by his time estimates before, so we will likely be pulling out the scissors tonight. Sleep with one eye open, Andres, it won’t be Santa coming down the chimney tonight.