Space vs. Sports

What we have here is a choice of blankets. You can get either:

• 1 NASA blanket,

OR…

• 3 Women’s soccer blankets (a Lindsey Horan blanket, a Megan Rapinoe blanket, and a Kristie Mewis blanket, all of which feature the player’s last name and number; taken as a whole, they’ve amassed three World Cup victories, a gold Olympic medal, and a bronze Olympic medal).

And yes, before you raise issue, offering a single or a three-pack makes perfect sense if you really think about it.

Because what do things like The Martian or Project Hail Mary teach us about space? That it’s isolating. It’s just you up there, fighting for survival against a void-like expanse of lifelessness as far as the eye can see.

Soccer, meanwhile, is a team sport. And what’s more, three feels like the absolute minimum number of teammates one can have. After all, if it were just two players, that would barely feel like a team at all, because one player would be running around while the other would be sequestered to goal-keeping duty.

See? We definitely thought this through!

Although…

A bit of cursory research shows that none of these women are goalies. So, as a team, they’d be at a major disadvantage. In fact, they all appear to play the same position: midfielder. Which might be fine for a full soccer team, but as a three-woman squad seems limiting? (I think; I don’t really know much about soccer.)

(That same cursory research also shows that Lindsey Horan goes by Lindsey Heaps now, following her marriage in 2024, which doesn’t impact this analysis at all, but seems worth pointing out.)

And, actually…

Both The Martian and Project Hail Mary are works of fiction based on novels by the same author. In reality, it seems unlikely that a person would end up in space without any crewmates, and outright impossible that they’d be able to launch without a vast network of support on the ground. In fact, infinitely more one-on-one soccer games have occurred in backyards than one-man space missions.

Right?

So maybe it actually doesn’t make sense. Maybe this is all because we got a weird deal.

Either way, the choice is yours: one space blanket or three soccer blankets.

Get cozy, folks!