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Dining in zero gravity: How space food is better than it's ever been

As NASA develops the capabilities needed to send humans to Mars for its upcoming InSight Mission, it will also need to create an entirely new food menu

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On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to visit outer space when he blasted through the earth’s atmosphere in the Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft. On the flight, which lasted 108 minutes, Gagarin enjoyed a meal of two toothpaste-type tubes filled with 160 grams of puréed meat, followed by one tube of chocolate sauce. At the time of the voyage, scientists were unsure if it was possible to ingest and absorb nutrients in a state of zero gravity, but Gagarin found the motions of chewing and swallowing in space to be just as easy as they were on earth. Nonetheless, he said, the tubes of puréed meat were hardly delicious.

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Astronaut cuisine has changed a lot since Gagarin’s orbit 57 years ago. Tubes were eventually replaced with dehydrated, freeze-dried and bite-sized food squares, which were coated with gelatin or oil to prevent crumbs from spreading into the spacecraft. In 1973, NASA’s Skylab program introduced refrigeration, allowing astronauts to prepare earth-like meals from the 72 food items inside the spacecraft’s full galley kitchen.

Today, refrigeration aboard spacecrafts is limited, and menus continue to rely heavily on freeze-dried foods. Despite the limitations of dining in zero gravity (salt must be dissolved in water and pepper steeped in oil), space food is better than it has ever been. For breakfast, NASA astronauts are given warm oatmeal, extended shelf-life waffles and freeze-dried eggs. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) sends its astronauts into space with sushi, ramen and rice with umeboshi (pickled ume plums). In 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield shared maple syrup cookies, duck rillettes and candied wild smoked salmon with astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

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“The food is very similar to what you might eat here on earth,” says Dr. Grace Douglas, NASA’s Advanced Food Technology Lead Scientist. “Of course, there are very strict nutritional requirements, and everything comes in pre-packaged and individually packaged portions, but the astronauts get a standard menu filled with regular, everyday foods.”

But as NASA develops the capabilities needed to send humans to Mars for its upcoming mission, it will also need to create an entirely new food menu. “Most of our current foods have about a one-and-a-half to three-year shelf-life,” explains Dr. Douglas. “But for the Mars mission, we need to create foods with a five-year shelf-life. It’s tricky because we see nutritional loss and quality loss in food over time, so we’re looking at new technologies that can stabilize these losses.”

Because spacecrafts can only carry so much cargo, most of the food needed for the upcoming mission will be sent to Mars in advance of the astronauts. Once the food arrives safely, a team of astronauts will follow its journey, taking six months to make the arduous trip from Earth to Mars. After the astronauts arrive on Mars, they will rendezvous with the supplies needed to survive on the Martian planet for a year and a half, and to return on the six-month journey back to Earth.

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Beyond inventing meals with a record-breaking five-year shelf-life, NASA’s food scientists are also tasked with creating lunch and dinner options that negate boredom and monotony. On Mars, the astronauts will be subject to an unchanging rocky landscape draped in dull red dust. Aboard the spacecraft, they will endure physical isolation and limited living space. On top of this, real-time conversations with friends, family and mission control will be impossible, as the average 225 million km distance from Mars to Earth creates a communication delay of up to 20 minutes.

“I know NASA is very concerned about the psychological well-being of astronauts on a Mars trip just because the potential for boredom is so great,” says Dr. Jeff Hoffman, former NASA astronaut and current professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “On the journey to Mars, you’re going to be in the same small shuttle, looking out the window with the same view of stars and the sun for months on end. At the very least, having a variety of food in your diet is going to do a lot to help with psychological health.”

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In an effort to better understand what astronauts might crave on the prolonged mission, NASA has invested in the HI-SEAS project, a simulated Mars-like environment where test subjects are sent to live atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. The agency found that hot sauce, spices, herbs – along with anything else that provides variety – are essential to astronauts forced to live in a repetitive environment while eating a mainly processed and packaged diet.

“We already provide condiments as a countermeasure to crew members in outer space,” says Dr. Grace Douglas. “But we’re also looking at new technologies like microwave-assisted thermo sterilization, which heats food to a high temperature really quickly. The idea is that we can achieve better tasting, higher quality food while preserving nutritional content and giving foods a longer shelf-life.”

NASA’s curiosity rover, sent to Mars in 2011, has already found chemical evidence of ancient lakes that could have supported life on Mars. The planet, it turns out, is not so different from Earth. Now, thanks to innovations from the space agency’s lead scientists, the food won’t be either.

Dr. Jeff Hoffman stars in the new space series One Strange Rock, premiering on National Geographic in March.

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