Add this to the dangers of microgravity in space: wasabi spill!
The spicy greenish condiment was squirted out of a tube while astronaut Sunita Williams was trying to make a pretend sushi meal with bag-packaged salmon. The three space station crewmembers are given a certain number of bonus packs of their favorite foods to help endure their months in space where most meals are the equivalent of military MREs.
Since everything is weightless, spilled food is no ordinary clean-up challenge.
"We finally got the wasabi smell out after it was flying around everywhere," Williams told her mother this week in a conversation arranged by Boston radio station WBZ. "We cleaned it up off the walls a little bit."
Wasabi? That's nothing compared with South Korea's plan to put kimchi on the space station. Between its own natural pressurization from fermenting cabbage (an explosion risk in the low atmospheric pressure within the station), the terrible-yet-strangely-appealing smell of the food itself, and the extended flatulence that follows eating it, kimchi aboard the station should be considered an act of terrorism!
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