One of my bucket list items is to try astronaut food. Not that freeze-dried astronaut ice cream (which I still absolutely love), but real food designed for astronauts to eat in spaceI specifically hope to get some shrimp cocktail, but beggars cannot be voters, as they say. I’ll take everything.
But how is astronaut food designed? In space, astronauts face vastly different environmental, physical, and mental situations that we don’t have to worry about on Earth. Astronomy shares how food is chosen and which aspects of it are key to becoming space food.
“We have crews who have to perform and be healthy at these extremely high levels for extremely high stress situations,” said Grace Douglas, lead scientist for NASA’s Advanced Food Technology research group at the Johnson Space Center. “Food affects every aspect of physiology, and food can make you very healthy or very sick.” So it sounds like they take astronauts’ diet very, very seriously. Probably not Lunchables in orbit.
Proper nutrition is essential to keep astronauts’ bodies healthy and to prevent bone and muscle loss during deployment. In order not to lose body weight, astronauts must eat between 2,700 and 3,700 calories a day. If the nutrition plan does not cover all bases, the astronauts will take nutritional supplements to support their life needs such as B12, omega 3 fatty acids and iron. Basically, if the food down here is healthy for you, it’s still healthy for you up there.
After decades of refining their knowledge of nutrition and food technology, NASA dietitians have begun to move away from supplements and nutrient planning and more towards a diet in which the astronauts get those nutrients directly from fruits and vegetables. Food supplements cannot contain phytochemicals, these are biologically active compounds that you get from fresh products. But then there is the matter of cargo space. All those fruits and vegetables take up space.
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The solution? Freeze drying and thermal sterilization retort, a process used in the canning industry to produce sterilize food after it has been packaged by heating it. Not only does it reduce the volume, it also keeps the food shelf stable for a longer period of time. The packaging is similar to those small packages of tuna that you can get from the canned fish section in the supermarket. Some of this food must last up to five years for long-range missions in orbit.
Then, of course, there is the matter of taste. At the very least, the food should taste decent. Astronauts can not eat weird monotonous food day after day. Textures are very important: no one wants to eat pasta all day long. A new freeze-dried product that is a big hit is a freeze-dried mango salad with a crunchy note.
Sending products on resupply flights is good and all, but the ultimate goal is to try to create a self-sufficient source of food. So NASA has been experimenting with it growing leafy vegetables in space, which appears to be the natural progression. There is success with vegetables and even flowers, so adding fresh stuff to complement their already nutritious diet can be not only healthy for our favorite space travelers, but delicious too. And it is one smart strategy to fight homesickness through fresh food you can get way down.