ISS Vaccine
ISS Vaccine
[Megan and Cueball are standing talking to each other.] Megan: I just realized— Megan: The astronauts on the ISS probably can't get the vaccine until they land. Cueball: Sure they can. Cueball: NASA's good at orbital injections.

This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic , specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine .
Megan has just realized that the astronauts on the ISS (the International Space Station ) probably can't get a vaccine against COVID-19 before they land. That is, it will not get shipped up to them.
This can be a concern because their immune system is impacted by extended stays in space. So when they come down again they may need to stay in quarantine longer, as the vaccine is not fully effective the first few weeks after administration. There could of course also be concern about getting COVID-19 while in space, but this is very unlikely due to the quarantine measures and other security measures taken by NASA and their Russian counterpart, Roscosmos . See this article with more details on these facts: What NASA is doing to keep COVID-19 off the space station .
Cueball 's reply, "NASA's good at orbital injections", is a pun on "orbital injection", also called orbital insertion , which is the adjustment of a spacecraft’s momentum that puts it into a stable orbit around a planet, moon, or other celestial body. Space agencies like NASA do this routinely on spaceflight missions. Getting an injection of a COVID-19 vaccine while in orbit aboard the ISS could also be called orbital injection, hence the pun.
The title text refers to the fact that, because the ISS orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, the people aboard it experience a day in that time, seeing a sunrise and sunset and crossing the International Date Line on the ground. One interpretation of this might be that 90 minutes on the ISS are equivalent to a day on the ground, making the people on board due for the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine (normally 21 days) or the Moderna vaccine (normally 28 days) after 31.5 or 42 hours, respectively, which Randall rounds to 30 or 40 hours. In reality, rather than tracking the local time of the territories it passes above, the ISS follows Coordinated Universal Time .
[Megan and Cueball are standing talking to each other.] Megan: I just realized— Megan: The astronauts on the ISS probably can't get the vaccine until they land. Cueball: Sure they can. Cueball: NASA's good at orbital injections.
