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High Altitude Cooking Instructions

|< < Prev #3187 (December 29, 2025)

Title text: 1,300,000-1,400,000 ft: Ask a crew member to show you how to use the ISS food warmer.

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created by a crew member using the ISS food warmer. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

At higher altitudes, cooking experiences extra complications. This was previously mentioned in 2153: Effects of High Altitude. This comic imagines food preparation instructions with additional caveats specifically for high-altitude cooking.

While the first two sections are reasonable accommodations, the instructions - as is typical for xkcd - soon veer into absurdity. At an altitude of 250,000 ft (approximately 76,200 meters), the instructions assume the user is partaking in some kind of controlled spaceflight. The "cooking instructions", therefore, are instead instructions for reentry; basically, telling the user "You can wait until you get home".

The title text goes a step further and assumes that the user is in orbit - specifically, on the International Space Station. Anyone on an orbiting space station is presumably going to be on that space station for an extended period, so they cannot wait until after they return to Earth for a meal, so the "cooking instructions" simply direct the user to someone who can show them how to use the on-board facilities.

In 2022, spaceman extraordinaire Scott Manley uploaded a rigorously scientific presentation titled Can You Cook a Turkey by Dropping It From Space?.

Transcript

This is one of 34 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Two notes are attached to a thin grey board, only the bottom of which is visible and slightly slanted in the frame.]

[The higher note, mostly cut off:]

[...] remove from the [...] for 3 minutes before serving.

[The lower note:]

High altitude cooking instructions

3,500—6,500 ft: Add 1/2 cup water, increase cook time to 12 minutes

6,500—9,500 ft: Add 1 1/4 cups water, increase cook time to 18 minutes

250,000—450,000 ft: Orient reentry vehicle for aerodynamic stability. Deploy parachutes at 10,000 ft. Descend, keeping crew capsule tightly covered, for 3—4 minutes. After splashdown, follow sea level cooking instructions.

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Discussion

Make changes, try things out, or just have fun with the wiki here! Just leave everything above the line alone, please.

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This is a test. PoolloverNathan^{[stalk the blue seas]} 20:48, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

This is not. —While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights | printable version | page information | what links there | related changes | Google search | current time: 06:59) 18:38, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

A foreign student asked me to help fight against his math teacher. That was unusual. He was in that class for just a couple of weeks. The teacher's phone number was sent to me. The student asked me to spam-call the teacher. 172.71.155.55 22:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

here i'm just messing around in html, ignore this

^furhhfghure _{guyrburgryhuyvfr} "rvhru"

interesting way of writing quotations xd

hmmm this one of putting "<p>" in a line break will come in handy for when i want it to start at the same place than the first line

Please beware that <p> on mediawiki also disables automatic paragraph breaks, so you need a closing </p> or you'll break automatic paragraph formatting for the rest of the page. Zmatt (talk) 22:06, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

edit: da hek did that "</div>" come from An user who has no account yet (talk) 14:14, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

hi uh its hard to get here. is this a reference to undocumented feature??? hmm... this is interesting.
108.162.241.216 02:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

	Soup

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yum yum [citation needed]

Hiuiedeixgeyceiyedhcdiedcve {{trout}}

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