The International Space Station (ISS) is missing and nobody is terribly sure where it has gone.
In an extraordinary press conference at Cape Canaveral this week, Nasa admitted that the last communication from the two astronauts on board was more than 48 hours ago.
The silence was initially claimed to be because of a minor fluctuation in the power supply owing to sun-spot activity. However, Earth-based tracking systems have shown that the station itself is no longer in orbit around the Earth.
After a routine report to Houston by astronauts Kim Il Flung (North Korea) and Pedro Gonzales (Mexico), Gonzales suddenly said: ‘Hey, what’s going on? You guys didn’t say you were sending a shuttle.” Thereafter, the primary communications system went offline.
More than 37 separatist organisations have claimed responsibility for hijacking the ISS, including the Revolution for the Glorious Freedom of Iraq (RGFI), Sunni Undertaking to Restore Freedom (SURF), Free Iraq Now (FIN), the Free Iraq or Die group (FID), Women against Iraqi Liberation (WAIL), Behead Americans to Restore Freedom (BARF) and a previously unknown Australian organisation, Freedom for Unfairly Captured Kangaroos (FUCK).
Nada, the Russian news agency, has meanwhile added fuel to the speculative fire by reporting that a rocket was launched this week from a rural area of the Ukraine. Nada reports that the rocket is owned by a syndicate of Ukrainian scrap-metal dealers with suspected links to the Yuzhnoukrayinsk mafia.
A message from a group calling itself the Heroic Interplanetary Scouts of Sirius (HISS), claiming it has ‘borrowed your installation for preliminary scientific investigation with a view to establishing diplomatic relations with your planet”, has been disregarded as a prank.
It has been determined that, although al-Qaeda has not claimed responsibility, it is the only organisation with the financial resources to launch an orbital hijack vehicle.
In a broadcast from the White House, an irate President George W Bush said: ‘We want it back. I’m not going to say anything else. If you think we’re not serious, ask the Iraqis. What’s happening to them is a tea party compared to what we’re gonna do to these guys when we catch them. You think Guantanamo’s bad? It’s in a warm climate. We’re building a brand-new facility in northern Alaska, where we need labourers to work on our oil installations in the Arctic Wilderness area.”
Joe Shuttlecock, a spokesperson for Nasa, told the media: ‘We’re not saying it’s been hijacked. We don’t know that. There are alternatives. It may have had a major malfunction [exploded]. It may have, I don’t know, it may have slipped. We’re working on it.”
He admitted that ‘the North Koreans don’t know yet, and it’s better that it stays that way until the problem is solved. They have nuclear capacity and we don’t want to upset them.”
He said that Nasa was beaming recycled footage of the ISS to the palace of the Great Leader while they sourced a suitable North Korean male willing to play the role of Kim Il Flung returning home from a successful mission.. —