Space Kitchen Makes Sure Astronaut Food Is Tasty
By JUAN A. LOZANO
SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) — Vickie Kloeris knows how to prepare a Thanksgiving turkey that’s out of this world. As manager of NASA’s Space Food Systems Laboratory, she and her staff spend their days developing, testing and packaging meals for astronauts. The goal: variety, nutrition and flavor. No more dry meal cubes, especially during the holidays.
So when astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri open their meal packets on Thanksgiving Day, they will find turkey and all the fixings, even as they orbit 240 miles above Earth aboard the international space station.
Will it taste like a home-cooked meal? Almost.
“It’s good. It doesn’t taste a lot like a fresh carved turkey but you can’t do that in a pouch,” Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said Wednesday after sampling some of the food.
At first look, the food – which can be freeze dried or thermostabilized, a process similar to canning – is not the most appetizing sight. The presentation – in clear or silver pouches – is a bit sterile and the food can resemble the brownie cubes and chocolate pudding in a tube that astronauts during the Mercury and Gemini programs of the 1950s and 1960s ate.
But once the meals are rehydrated with water or heated, they taste surprisingly good.
Foods like shrimp cocktail – the most requested item by astronauts – or green beans and mushrooms, or split pea soup have the look, flavor and thickness of items eaten at any restaurant. Better yet, the food remains good in the packages for up to two to three years.
“We want foods with lots of texture and different colors,” said food scientist Donna Nabors, wearing a white coat and plastic gloves as she prepared a large tray of shrimp fried rice in the lab’s kitchen.
The dish, prepared with water chestnuts, peas, carrots and various spices, was placed in a machine resembling a large clothes dryer for a five-day freeze-drying process. Then, it will be vacuum sealed in individual serving pouches.
Lt. Col. Yang Liwei, the first man China sent to space, ate such things as one-bite nuggets of spicy shredded pork, diced chicken and fried rice during his brief flight last month.
Having a variety of meals is important to the astronauts, Kloeris said. Astronauts on the space station have a 10-day meal cycle. Their menu, chosen from a list of more than 250 food items, is split between American and Russian food.
“We don’t want them to suffer from menu fatigue,” she said. “More variety on the menu is something we’ve heard from every station crew that has returned. It helps them psychologically.”
Hadfield said on longer missions, like living aboard the space station for several months, food can become an important part of an astronaut’s daily routine.
“There’s lots of good food. At meal time, you look forward to it,” he said.
Space station crew members, who have three meals a day plus a snack, heat up some of their food in a warmer that looks like a silver suitcase.
Each meal costs an average of $100, mostly due to packaging and testing, Kloeris said. It can take six to eight months for the lab to develop and test a new food item.
In the last three years, the lab has developed 50 new items, but as with any cook and kitchen, there are culinary misfires. A swordfish dish prepared with a tomato sauce proved unpopular with many astronauts.
“One of the complaints that crew members have about fish on orbit is the smell. We thought maybe the tomato sauce would mask the smell,” Kloeris said.
The astronauts said it made it worse, she said.
“We haven’t given up on fish but we have to come up with a different formulation,” she said.
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Space Food Systems Laboratory
The Space Food Systems Laboratory is a multipurpose laboratory responsible for space food and package research and development. This facility designs, develops, and evaluates flight food, menus, packaging, and food-related ancillary hardware for Shuttle, Space Station, and Advanced Life Support food systems.
Capabilities of this facility include: food product development, food preservation technology, sensory evaluation, menu planning, freeze dehydration, blast freezing, package development, fabrication and design of packaging equipment, physical testing of packages and materials, and modified and controlled atmosphere packaging.
Space Mission / Purpose:
Evidence strongly supports the role of nutrition in maintaining the health and optimal performance of astronauts during space flights and return to Earth. The key to providing good nutrition in support of human space flight is to provide high-quality food products that are appetizing, nutritious, and safe and easy to prepare and eat.
The mission of the Food Systems Engineering Facility is to provide high-quality flight food systems that are convenient, compatible with each crew member’s physiological and psychological requirements, meet spacecraft stowage and galley interface requirements, and are easy to prepare and eat in the weightlessness of space.
Technical Specifications of Facility:
The Space Food Systems Laboratory is comprised of four laboratories: a Test Kitchen, fully equipped with sensory testing capabilities; a Food Processing Laboratory (Pilot Plant); a Food Packaging Laboratory; and an Analytical Laboratory.
The Food Systems Engineering Facility has the capability to fabricate custom-molded flight food containers; process foods using a variety of stabilization techniques, including freezing and freeze-drying; package foods in a nitrogen environment for long-term storage; provide long-term controlled environment storage for processed foods; conduct physical and sensory analyses of food; evaluate prototype and flight food preparation hardware; and, develop food preparation and serving techniques for space flight.
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