[foobarbecue]

Oh 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.

[darknavi]

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.

[netsharc]

Juice boxes are cardboard, plastic and alumunium glued together and a hassle to recylce. But heck, their inventors (Tetrapak) are billionaires!

[dotancohen]

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.

[hermitcrab]

I remember going to a talk on Antarctica where someone said that other nationalities would go and salvage stuff from the trash heap outside the US base at McMurdo. This was some years ago. I assume things have improved since then?

[dotancohen]

I have no idea, never been there. I was referencing Maverick from Top Gun being threatened with flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit.

[hermitcrab]

Sorry, posted to the wrong child thread.