Commonplace Book

One of the wildest little-known things I've learned about the ISS is that most of the occupants take advantage of the “bring a pet” policy, and it's actually quite the menagerie. Of course, they have to take care that the animals don't appear on-camera, because it would violate one of the older global space treaties.

(Incidentally, the treaty prohibiting sending animals to space was only ratified by Russia because it was immediately following the notorious Kruschev/Pepsi interaction, which resulted in Pepsi momentarily owning the sixth-largest military body on the planet).

Anyways, the all-out most popular pet is definitely Gus, an elderly boa constrictor who was left up in orbit by his Canadian crewmate when it became clear Gus's physiology was now too delicate to return to gravity. So he floats about pretty amicably, gripping on different hatch handles for support, and usually sticking pretty close to the walls. He certainly likes the heat from the scrubber units, so he lurks there most of the time. He also now knows to avoid opening any of the outer hatches on the station, which all the crew was heartened to see him learn pretty quickly.

In the course of his long tenure on-station, with one thing leading to another Gus has unfortunately consumed most of the other pets of all but the most considerable stature. Only the unruly or unwieldy-to-swallow pets remain. Right now, for example, there's Sonar the parrot (a Kiwi crewmate was warned about feather-dementia beforehand; alas) and a very friendly goldfish named Splash, who has an uncanny knack for always facing North America, no matter what the station's orientation.

It's a pretty charismatic sight, though, when a new crewmate first transits the airlock and meets Gus alongside the rest of the crew. It is often the first opportunity for the new crewmate to disclose his/her sense of humor, in the form of a joke about the very large snake with whom they are now confined.

Gus is pretty slow-moving, but he's about 3.5m long, so he can feel “everywhere” sometimes when you're just looking around the station for the lights. (Another little-known fact: the lighting system frequently fails for 3-5 minutes at a time due to a micrometeorite impact on an external cooling loop, leaving Gus and the human crew to float in the darkness, what they now call “creeper time.”) It takes crewmembers about two months on-task to feel in any measure at ease with Gus over multiple creepertimes, because he tends to move most actively in the dark.

Most of the data collected on ISS gets shared out to a bunch of different research and government agencies, so it's all scrubbed beforehand to remove any obvious clues that would give away the ongoing treaty violation w/r/t animals-on-station. However, since there's a lot to learn from some of the animals' interactions (ask any astronaut about the morose dwarf pony who was, to hear it told, an impeccable mimic in zero-g), it's possible to request an encrypted sidechannel to the ISS downloads that lets you access Space Animal Content.

The Earthbound SAC community is equal parts former astronauts checking in on their friends, government agencies doing behavioral research, and black-hat ethnography firms like Experian and DeepMind (it's unclear what they are pursuing, but they generate the strangest Astronaut Interaction Requests). This community is particularly engaged and helpful, which is why it is all the more concerning to read this weekend's Community Report, in which Gus was observed during creepertime unfurling himself at length alongside Xi, the newly-arrived cosmonaut who is, notably, the shortest stationmember Gus has yet encountered.