alt Hacker NewsOh man if you had any idea how much work goes into waste sorting & disposal there. In McMurdo every trash station has trash cans for ~10 different categories. I was always calling up the waste department to ask about classification. We would get bored and argue about the classification of juice boxes for "fun". I worked on Erebus and all of our pee & poop got helicoptered out in buckets. Food waste was shipped all the way back to CA and had to be kept frozen the whole way.
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Juice boxes are cardboard, plastic and alumunium glued together and a hassle to recylce. But heck, their inventors (Tetrapak) are billionaires!
I bet that helicopter pilot was some ex-Navy F-14 pilot who liked to buzz the tower and risked his taxpayer-owned jet to save his wingman after an encounter with MiG 28s.
Very fun insight, thanks for sharing your story!
I assume things like Starlink have made the station a lot less "boring", which might depreciate some of the "off-grid" novelty of being there.