Pigging out in space on bacon and coffee

QUESTION What was the first meal eaten on the Moon?

TWO hours after the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon in 1969 in the lunar module Eagle, they ate a meal of bacon squares, peaches, sugar cookie cubes, a pineapple and grapefruit drink and coffee.

The pair were then supposed to sleep for seven hours, but decided instead to make history with the first Moon walk.

Putting on spacesuits and checking their life-support packs was a complex task, so it was around six hours after the landing that they were able to depressurise the lunar module and step out on to the Moon.

History has not recorded what the loneliest person in the solar system ate. Michael Collins had to stay in the command module Columbia in orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon.

When the command module was on the far side of the Moon, Collins was more than 3,200km from his fellow astronauts, who, in turn, were 400,00km from Earth.

Space food has improved since. In 2016, British astronaut Major Tim Peake ate a Heston Blumenthal canned bacon sandwich on the International Space Station.

Denis Sharp, Sussex.

QUESTION

Can anyone recall a TV play broadcast in the UK decades ago that featured a bus excursion of Nottingham miners to Blackpool? For various reasons, only one made the return journey home. AN EARLIER answer pointed out that 1969’s Sling Your Hook is one of 76 surviving episodes of BBC One’s The Wednesday Play.

Only a few are available to be bought on DVD.

However, you can see Sling Your Hook at one of the British Film Institute’s seven Mediatheques, at venues such as London’s Southbank and Birmingham Library.

I. G. Watson, Middlesex.