'Hello Space Station, This is Barack Obama'

It is easy to forget that the International Space Station is orbiting 240 miles above our heads, so we should thank President Obama for reminding us. This week, Obama, several schoolchildren and a few excited senators made a 28-minute phone call to the astronauts on board - it can be seen on the Nasa website - seven from the crew of the space shuttle Discovery, which docked last week to deliver supplies; three who had already been living on the space station.

One schoolgirl asked: "What do you eat?" "Dehydrated food and ready meals." A boy asked: "Have you found any life forms?" "We haven't found anything here," said flight engineer and scientist Sandra Magnus, the one female astronaut who has been on the space station for four months and is due to return home with Discovery on Saturday. "I think we'll have much more success finding new types of life when we go to the moon and Mars." "Do you love doing your job," asked another child. "Ever since I saw the lunar landing when I was five," said Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese astronaut to live and work on the station.

The space station is a working research laboratory. "[We are] understanding combustion and materials. We're understanding how people's bodies change in space, and this is in preparation for long-duration missions to the moon and Mars," said Magnus, whose hair, when weightless, creates a large halo around her head. Obama asked why she keeps it long. "I think ideally a short hair cut would be the way to go, but on me it wouldn't be so nice." Magnus's cookery skills are also noted on the Nasa website. Apparently, when it comes to women, these things matter. Even in space.