Tag: cats in space

cat humor, cat stories, fake news, Feline Ingenuity, Feline Overlords, Hero Cats, jaguars, Tigers January 22, 2023

Catstronauts: Buddy Leads Exploratory Expedition To Epsilon Eridani

STAR COMMANDER BUDDY’S LOG, STARDATE 12142022, Aboard the USS Fowl Play

Lt. Commander Freddie Ferocious has command of the bridge while I’ve retired to my ready room for the important task of answering video messages from kittens in Mrs. Meowmore’s Kittengarden class.

Myles, a three-month-old tuxedo who wants to be a catstronaut when he grows up, has asked me how catstronauts eat and use the litter box in zero gravity.

“Well, Myles,” I tell him, “as you may have guessed, regular litter is no good without gravity! You can’t bury your business, obviously, and you run the risk of free-floating poops and granules of litter escaping into the ship’s habitable areas, so a litter box is out of the question. That is why we have a sealed Litter Chamber and a special suction device. It takes some getting used to, especially since it tends to pull on your fur while you’re doing your business!”

Sophia, a five-month-old Calico, asks us what we eat in space.

“This morning at 0100 hours I was informed that our food replicators are malfunctioning, which means the entire crew has had to make do with freeze-dried kibble and pate MREs. No wonder we’re all so cranky! I have ordered the engineering department to devote all available resources and catpower toward the repair of the replicators. This simply cannot be allowed to go unresolved, for a cranky crew can easily become a mewtinous one, and I don’t want to have to start spacing kitties out of the airlock. Er, I mean throwing ’em in the brig! Chief Engineer Meowdi LaForge tells me the replicators should be back online by breakfast.”

Simba, three and a half months, asks: “Dear Commander Buddy, how far are you from the place you’re traveling to, and what will you do when you get there? Is it true there might be monsters? That would be scary!”

“Thanks for writing, Simba! It’s 10.47 light years to the Epsilon Eridani star system, which is a long ride! Fortunately the USS Fowl Play is a pretty big, comfortable ship, with lots of stuff to do to keep her running, and some pretty cool options for entertainment and R&R when we’re off duty. We’re less than two light years away from our destination now, which means the Fowl Play has already flipped and is engaged in a prolonged deceleration burn. We have to do that, see, so we don’t sail right on past Epsilon Eridani!

“Where did you hear about the thing with the monsters? It’s not true, okay? I don’t know what anyone told you, probably that jealous jerk Commander Calvin, but I totally did not run screaming from a monster during the expedition to Luyten 726-8, okay? That’s fake news!

“What happened was, I saw the monster and issued a blood-curdling battle cry, but then I hit the wrong button on my Planetary CatRover, which caused it to spin around and run in the other direction. I was trying to inspire my team, not abandon them. I would have turned around and battled the monster too, except by the time I realized my mistake I was already more than half way back to the lander and the others had scared the monster away with their laser pointers.”

That’s my rover on the left, and the Scary Monster on the right. As you can see, I’m very brave for facing the Scary Monster:

Buddy’s Planetary Rover

The Evil Monster, whom Buddy was totally not scared of.

Five-month-old Pepper asks: “Star Commander Buddy, do you think smart aliens are out there? What do they look like? Will they be nice when you meet them?”

“Hi, Pepper! Those are good questions. Well we should remember that we cats are not only a super intelligent species, but we are intimidating too! We have sharp teeth and claws, some of us can roar, and we look really strong and tough! So maybe the aliens will be scared of us!

“I think there will be smart aliens even though we haven’t found other intelligent life on Earth. I mean, there’s humans, but they’re simple-minded creatures, aren’t they? That’s why they’re our servants! LOL! Maybe the aliens will only have fur on their heads like humans. Maybe they’ll look like dogs. Gross, I know! Or maybe they’ll look like a cross between elephants, manta rays and aardvarks.

“We just don’t know, which is why we’re trying to find out. Picture it: Star Commander Buddy, fearlessly leading the first expedition to make contact with smart aliens. It’ll be pretty cool to be in the history books. Tell ya what, Pepper. If we find smart aliens, you and the rest of Mrs. Meowmore’s class will be the first to know. After NASA, of course. We’ll send you pictures. Deal?”

cat humor, cat stories, Feline Ingenuity, Hero Cats, pop culture September 25, 2022

Catstronauts!

Why do cats explore space? Will they still need humans in the future? How do they squeeze litter boxes into those space suits? What about litter boxes in zero G on their starships? Is it the USS Enterprise, or the USS Enterpurrize? If aliens are observing Earth from afar, will they correctly identify felines as the superior species on this planet?

These are all pressing questions. Little Buddy and Big Buddy invite you to ponder them as we reveal Catstronauts, a project we’ve been working on. Watch out for new series of Catstronauts in the future as kitties boldly go where no feline has gone before. Click images for full-size versions.

Meow!

cat humor, cat stories, fiction, Hero Cats September 8, 2022

SpaceCat, Baby Bud and Mister Meowster: New from Buddy Comics!

The Buddy Comics empire expands with two new titles and a new installment of The Adventures of Baby Bud.

We meet Mister Meowster, the most legendary feline investigator of his neighborhood, who’s called upon to use his Sherlockian skills in search of missing mice. In 11-Dimensional Hyperspace, SpaceCat tunnels to the next iteration of reality in her starship. Finally, Baby Buddy contends with a dark chapter from the past, when there was a shortage of the very stuff of life.

All covers created via natural language AI and pixlr.

Mister Meowster is the greatest detective for at least three blocks.

SpaceCat tunnels through 11-dimensional hyperspace to reach the next stack in the braneworld! M-theory enthusiasts and cat lovers won’t be able to put this down!

Before the Great Turkey Shortage of 2021, there was the Great Turkey Shortage of 2015. In Chapter 6, we visit that grim chapter in in Buddy’s life, when he was forced to eat chicken.

Buddy, cat stories, Feline Overlords, pop culture February 9, 2021

Buddy In Space Chapter 2: Earth Predator In An Alien Jungle!

Following the cowardly attack by the Evil Time-Lord on Capt. Buddy’s starship, the USS Delicious, our brave captain escaped by the fur of his teeth and courageously landed his trusty vessel on a mysterious planet in an uncharted star system.

Now our beloved captain must navigate the myriad hidden dangers of a dark, alien jungle as he leads his crew to locate the raw materials they’ll need to repair the USS Delicious and obtain enough reactor fuel to lift the ship into orbit once again.

But not everything is as it seems, and unseen eyes watch our hero from the murky shadows of the alien flora.

To make matters worse, the crew must ration their yums as their supplies of turkey dwindle.

Despite the considerable challenges they face, Capt. Buddy’s loyal cats endeavor to keep their spirits high as they navigate this virgin world bereft of feline scent-marking and tree-clawing. In a rousing speech, Capt. Buddy reminds his cats that all they need to do is spray a few trees and bury some poops to make this alien planet feel like home.

In Chapter 2: Earth Predator In An Alien Jungle, readers will accompany Buddy on a perilous journey that pits cats — Earth’s mightiest creatures — against the unknown horrors of this nameless, mysterious planet.

Will Capt. Buddy save his crew? Will they survive the perils of an unknown world? Will the USS Delicious reach the stars again so Capt. Buddy can replenish his supply of turkey and confront the Evil Time-Lord?

Read Chapter 2 of Buddy In Space: Earth Predator In An Alien Jungle, on newsstands May 1953 for only 5 cents! This title has been approved by the Comics Code Authority!

cat stories, Feline Ingenuity, Feline Overlords April 24, 2020September 13, 2022

NASA: We’re Pretty Sure Cats Can’t Commandeer Our Spacecraft

If you’re a cat servant working from home in the social distancing era, you know cats have given themselves a new job: Supervising their humans’ professional activities.

It comes naturally to curious felines, who normally supervise mundane household chores like cleaning the litter box.

Among those working from home these days are NASA and ESA engineers, physicists and anyone else whose primary work responsibility is dealing with data rather than hands-on technical work. Many of them have cats and, well, cats are naturally helping themselves to the work:

Daniel Lakey was in the middle of an important meeting when an unauthorized participant decided to chime in.

“He appeared at the door, jumped on the table, meowed in my face, walked across the keyboard, put his furry ass in my face, and eventually curled up sweetly on the desk next to the laptop,” Lakey recounted to me recently.

It was Sparkle, Lakey’s fluffy brown-and-white cat. Sparkle stuck around for the rest of the virtual meeting, in fact, mewing every time Lakey stopped petting him.

Like many people in the pandemic era, Lakey is doing his job from home, with a new set of colleagues who might be less cooperative than his usual ones; his new workspace is now wherever his two young kids and two cats aren’t. Lakey is a spacecraft-operations engineer who works on the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, which means that he spends his days managing a spacecraft flying millions of miles away from Earth. The work is complex and precise, and usually doesn’t involve feline input. Sparkle interrupted a teleconference only that one time, but what else could he do?

That thought recently became a point of public discussion when Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA, tweeted:

The Atlantic’s Marina Koren reached out to Straughn, who assured her “commanding spacecraft is a labyrinthian process from start to finish, with all kinds of checks and fail-safes along the way.”

“As absurd as the scenario might seem, it would be nearly impossible for a cat to briefly become a spacecraft-operations engineer, whether at NASA or ESA,” Koren wrote, after speaking to several NASA employees who assured her cats aren’t capable of flying the complex vessels.

catsinspace3 — LOL humans think we can’t fly spaceships.

Most operations require physical access to control rooms and can’t be operated remotely, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesman Andrew Good said

“Some of those commands require a mouse clicking on certain options, so it’s not just an issue of commands being written and sent up with typos,” Good told The Atlantic. “A person has to make conscious choices for spacecraft commands to go up.”

While NASA says it would be “nearly impossible” for cats to hijack spacecraft normally used to service orbital telescopes or make supply runs to the International Space Station, cats love a good challenge. And what is the ISS, really, but a big metal box that would be fun to play in?

With at least one alien race recognizing cats as the supreme rulers of Earth — sorry, Felinia — is it really far fetched to imagine cats commandeering spacecraft to explore the final frontier and the Great Big Litter Box in the Sky?