Spaceflight jokes

jedidia

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I was wondering...

every speceliced branch has it's own jokes, which only people familiar with the matter are able to understand. I'm rather sure there must be insider jokes about spaceflight too, but I never came across any. If anybody knows some, or would like to make up some, this is the place. :)
 
We could make our own?
I reckon we could make some nerdy variations on the phrase, what goes up, must come down. If you get enough height and horizontal velocity, what goes up won't come down...at least for a few orbits. Maybe a bad example...unless you achieved escape velocity.
 
NASA. Need another seven astronauts.
 
A TV news report in the USSR:

"... the entire world stays mind-blown by a sudden and inexplicable disappearance of the US Navy 7th Fleet in Pacific Ocean."
"Now, to other news. Cosmonauts Lyakhov and Ryumin continued to perform scientific experiments on board of the Salyut-6 space station..."
 
Sir Isaac Newton had a theory of how to get the best outcomes in a courtroom. He suggested to lawyers that they should drag their arguments into the late afternoon hours. The English judges of his day would never abandon their 4 o'clock tea time, and therefore would always bring down their hammer and enter a hasty, positive decision so they could retire to their chambers for a cup of Earl Grey. This tactic used by the British lawyers is still recalled as Newton's Law of Gavel Tea.
 
Not a spaceflight joke, but a flight joke.

From http://www.eddh.de/unterhaltung/humor.html.
Flying blondes...
A plane is on its way to London when a blonde in Economy Class gets up and moves to the First Class section and sits down. The flight attendant watches her do this and asks to see her ticket. She then tells the blonde that she paid for Economy and that she will have to sit in the back. The blonde replies, "I'm blonde, I'm beautiful, I'm going to London and I'm staying right here!"

The flight attendant goes into the cockpit and tells the pilot and co-pilot that there is some blonde bimbo sitting in First Class that belongs in Economy and won't move back to her seat. The co-pilot goes back to the blonde and tries to explain that because she only paid for Economy, she will have to leave and return to her seat. The blonde replies, "I'm blonde, I'm beautiful, I'm going to London and I'm staying right here!"
The co-pilot tells the pilot that he probably should have the police waiting when they land to arrest this blonde woman that won't listen to reason. The pilot says, "I'll handle this. I'm married to a blonde. I have learned to speak ,blonde'!"
He goes back to the blonde, whispers in her ear, and without one question, she gets up and moves back to her seat in the Economy section. The flight attendant and co-pilot are amazed and asked him what he said to make her move without any fuss.
"I told her, First Class wasn't going to London."
Gemailt von Timmy Salama
 
The last words of Dick Scobee (Challenger Commander):

"Christa, don't touch that but..."



The unfortunate part of spaceflight jokes is that they seemed to disappear after the Challenger incident. The ones that did appear are, in general, sick.

Now if we return to Apollo 13 (according to the movie) and Fred Haise complaining to Lovell about his inability to urinate, claiming that perhaps Swigert had used his waste disposal tube (Swigert was one of the few batchelor astronauts) and probably gave him "the clap", with Lovell rejoining that it would be just another first for the American space program ...
 
Well, a famous insider for Apollo times was still "I wonder where Gunter went?". ;)
 
Well, a famous insider for Apollo times was still "I wonder where Gunter went?". ;)

Which, considering the "backlooking" into the Von Braun et al activities into the circumstances surrounding the building of the V1 and V2, also comes under the classification of "sick joke".

That being said, Apollo would never have happened without "Gunter".
 
To Quote the Schlock Mercenary Webcomic:
"Hard Vacuum - Nature's way of reminding you to wear a pressure suit"

Right, nnow i need to make one up.... um..... :censored:!!!!! This is hard.

Not mine, but:

"Remember, a landing is just a controlled mid-air collision with a planet"
 
I was working on the Inertial Upper Stage part of the Ulysses mission and saw a nifty "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon frame where Calvin had a cute wild grin on, and put it on my desk with the words whitened out and "e > 3" written in. :speakcool:

It never occurred to me that people looking at it would think "e" stood for the base of the natural logarithms (e = 2.71828182845). Finally, someone asked me whether it should be e < 3?

Since Ulysses was the only one of the three planetary missions we were working on at the time that was being sent out at an eccentricity of greater than 3, that is what I was bragging about. :lol:
 
Okay, here is a rather old joke...
A Chinese inter-continental ballistic missile has been shot down over Siberia. The pilot has been captured; however two coal-heavers still have been sought for.
 
Once in late 70's, a Soviet delegation arrives in West Germany for peace talks. The meeting is to be very official, the Kanzler himself is there, staning in the airfield when the plane arrives. The plane's door opens and the General Secretary of the Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev steps out. After going down the airstairs, when the orchestra already prepared to play the anthem, he passes by Kanzler without looking or saying a word, reaches a flowerbed, grabs a handful of German soil with his palm and puts it into his pocket. Aftet that, surrounded by the atmosphere of general shock, he turns back and climbs into the plane, which takes off.

The scandal which arisen is colossal. Nobody could understand what that demarch was intended to show, until a note from Soviet Academy of Sciences arrived: "We apologize for accidental replacement of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's brain program with that of a Lunar sample return rover..."
 
An example of practical joke which happened in space:

In 1996, during EO-21 expedition on board of the Mir, Yuri Usachev wanted to make a joke to French Astronaut Claudie Andre-Deshays and hid behind a stand, then suddenly appeared in front of her, wearing a rubber mask of Quasimodo. He wrote in his book that we was very sorry about the effect of his joke immediately afterwards.
 
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