Astro-Dentistry
Here are a couple of brainteasers for you: How do you brush your teeth while you're traveling around the earth at 7,000 miles an hour? How do you spit out the toothpaste when there's no gravity? And what happens if you fracture a tooth. . . and the nearest dentist is hundreds-or even hundreds of thousands-of miles away? Unless you're an astronaut, you'll probably never need an answer to those questions. But for the NASA crews on the USA/Russian Mir space station missions, the space shuttle flights, and the proposed Global Space Station, they're very important indeed.
All NASA crews are equipped with toothbrushes, dental floss and a special, non-foaming toothpaste called NASA-dent, which they can swallow. For the longer missions-like the 84-day Skylab-all crew members received two days of intensive dental training, including administration of anesthesia and tooth extraction. And, since accidents can happen to anyone, anywhere, the intensive dental training-and a complete dental emergency kit with instructions-will be especially important to the crews who are spending the multi-month tours of duty on the Space Station.
Now, do you suppose they cranked up that nitrous oxide "laughing gas" in their spaceship the last time we saw them floating around for the TV cameras inside the Space Shuttle?