SOLAR SYSTEM

Out Of This World Cuisine

Red Planet Connection, March 1999

Imagine coming home to a dinner of soybean tofu Sloppy Joes, tofu bread, with tofu cheesecake for dessert. To drink? How about a big tube filled with chocolate soymilk? Sound strange? The menu might be what astronauts traveling to Mars will be eating during future space missions.

The scientists who plan the first human mission to Mars will have many challenges. Food preparation and storage is just one. On current missions aboard the Space Shuttle, astronauts are limited to about four pounds of food per person per day. An additional pound is allotted for packaging.

Space Shuttle astronauts can eat food from the Earth because their missions are relatively short. However, this will not be the case for the long space voyage to Mars and back. The trip to Mars will take about six months each way.

Getting there is just the first step. Once there, astronauts will have to stay on the Red Planet for an additional year to conduct studies. That means the astronauts would be gone for a total of two years.

Can you imagine how much food an average six-person crew would eat in two years? It adds up to a whopping total of 21,900 pounds of food! That is almost 11 tons. Spacecraft would need too much fuel to carry that much weight in food alone.

If astronauts cannot bring food from the Earth to eat, where will they get it?

Scientists at Cornell University in New York, with help from NASA, are studying ways to solve this problem.

Since astronauts cannot carry enough food on board to last them for a multi-year mission, the obvious answer is to grow their own food during the mission. The Cornell research team includes a chef, a nutritionist, a food and biological engineer, and a vegetarian cooking teacher. Their job is to develop recipes that astronauts can prepare from space-grown crops.

The main crops are sweet potatoes, wheat, rice, soybeans, peanuts, salad vegetables, and fresh herbs. However, these crops will not be grown like crops on Earth. The space-grown crops will be grown hydroponically. This means they will be grown in a mixture of water and nutrients, not in soil.

The plants also will be grown in lighted, temperature-controlled space farms. The research goal is to make space crops the main staple of the astronauts' diet on multi-year missions. Only about 10 percent of the calories in the astronauts' food will come from Earth-grown food supplies. The supplies from Earth will mainly consist of fats, flavor concentrates, and condiments such as mustard and pepper.

Scientists hope new techniques will allow them to move away from the dehydrated and freeze-dried food currently used on space missions. They want to provide astronauts with fresh food that is Earth-like in taste and texture.

The research team already has developed about 100 recipes. They hope to develop 100 more. NASA wants recipes that taste good, look appealing, have flavor, and are simple to prepare.

The job is difficult, but very important. Food will play a very important role toward the well-being of astronauts during long-term space missions. The goal is to make their space cuisine as appealing and similar to Earthly foods as possible. If the researchers succeed, astronauts of the future will have some tasty meals that are truly "out of this world."