Ad Astra Cum Astacoidea -Or- Crawdads In Space!

Garçons et chéris of le press corps, welcome aboard the Étoufée spacestation. Laissez les bon temps roulet! I am the chief crawdadstronaut on board, Beau Sheux, and it is my pleasure to be your tour guide for today. We (myself and chief science crawfficer Po' Boy Merceau) have been stationed aboard this spacestation for several months now to research the effects of weightlessness on crawdads. We have gathered a fair amount of data on this matter, which we are eager to share with the world.

The most noticeable effect of weightlessness on crawdads is that it is fun! Myself and Po' Boy have amused ourselves for hours, drifting about the confines of our spacestation, playing Marco Polo and doing somersaults. Watch, I will do one for you now! And... Voilà! A somersault extraordinaire! Sometimes, we are worried that we are spending too much time floating and not enough time doing the research we were sent out here to do. C'est la vie, say we- perhaps it is the case that weightlessness makes crawdads less focused! If that is true, then we are doing plenty of research. If it is not, we are wasting precious time and valuable resources. But, hey- we are crawdads!

We have also discovered that weightlessness makes crawdads hungry. Mon dieu, such hunger we have known aboard this spacestation! We have already eaten nearly all of the vegetables and dehydrated detritus we were allotted for our entire trip, and we still have three months to go! I suppose it does not help that Po' Boy and I have been burning so many more calories with our extensive cavorting about, but we crawdads do not like to live in the past.

Our final discovery of note has been that weightlessness makes crawdads moult at an accelerated rate. Po' Boy has been moulting nearly twice a week since we got here, and we have just been throwing them out of the airlock. Ça ne fait rien- it is more of a nuisance than anything else. Also, it is gross. Have you ever spent an extended period of time in close quarters with une homme who sheds his skin every four and a half days? It is awful. It smells worse than you would expect, and one would expect it to smell bad.

Well, mon amis, c'est tout! I know that you reporter types are busy, so I will not make you stay aboard the Étoufée spacestation any longer- but if you wish to, myself and Po' Boy are going to set up a volleyball tournament! These gigantic motor neurons we have running down our backsides are no good for escape these days (where would we go?), so we are playing volleyball to keep in shape. What could be more fun? Laissez les bon temps roulet!