Tortillas taste great in zero gravity
By Raja Murthy
"How can you prepare food when you cannot put anything down? And I mean,
anything, no mixing bowl (things would float out), no cutting things on the
table (they would float away), and no setting tools down easily in between
steps. Also water likes to stick to everything."
- American astronaut Sandra Magnus, Expedition 2 flight engineer, on her
pioneering culinary adventures aboard Zvezda Service Module of the
International Space Station.
MUMBAI - While India's Chandrayaan-1 finding water traces on the moon [1] keeps
afloat space travel hopes, food to feed travelers outside Earth speedily heads
towards Space Family Robinson comfort zones, thanks to space food scientists in
the
United States, Russia, Europe, China, Japan and India.
Furthering this evolution towards home-keepers beyond Earth, American astronaut
Sandra Magnus has unofficially become the world's first space chef, with her
zero-gravity cooking innovations aboard the International Space Station (ISS)
this year.
The "Sandra Magnus Journal of Cooking and Dining in Space", which the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has made publicly available, has
become the only first-hand report of challenges and trials astronauts face in
having a routine daily meal 350 kilometers above Earth.
NASA officials add that what astronauts eat is one of the most frequently asked
questions from the curious public. Food, astronaut Magnus also admits,
continues to be a popular talking point during life in orbit.
What exactly do Magnus and company eat in space? And is it true that tortillas
are a big hit aboard the International Space Station? These are some of the
questions Asia Times Online asked Dr Michele Perchonok, manager of the Shuttle
Food System and the Advanced Food Technology project at NASA.
Perchonok confirmed that tortillas are a favorite outer-space food, followed by
coffee, shrimp cocktail, beef brisket and chocolate pudding cake.
The humble tortilla defeats one of the greatest eating threats in space
stations: food crumbs floating around and effecting sensitive instruments. Due
to crumbs, hamburgers and pizzas are taboo outside Earth.
"Pizza is difficult," says space food scientist Perchonok, dashing the hopes of
classic Margherita lovers. "Foods in space have to be stored at room
temperature. It's difficult when you have too many components, like a pizza -
where you have the crust and sauce and the cheese. Each component requires
different processing conditions."
As the NASA space food system manager since year 2000, Perchonok's mission is
to ensure tasty and healthy meals for crews that float in orbit anywhere from
11 days to many months. Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, for example,
spent six months in the International Space Station in 2006, the longest any
woman has lived outside Earth.
The six astronauts currently living aboard the ISS eat in relatively greater
comfort and variety than space travel pioneers in Mercury and Gemini spacecraft
four decades ago.
John Glenn, aboard the Mercury-Atlas 6 Mission in 1962, crunched freeze-dried
snacks and endured stew and applesauce squeezed out of toothpaste tube-like
aluminum containers. Squeeze too hard and the food floats away.
American, Russian, Japanese and Chinese astronauts, particularly aboard the ISS
and NASA space shuttles, have about 200 different food types from which to
choose, including treats like plum-cherry cobbler, honey cake, berry medley and
chocolate breakfast drink.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) added to this mix last year,
certifying 29 Japanese food products from 12 manufacturers as official Japanese
space food.
Japanese astronauts dine on a variety that includes the "Onishi" category food
of white rice, rice with red azuki beans and wild greens; the "Kagome" type,
including tomato ketchup, vegetable sauce, vegetable jelly drink of tomato or
carrot, and "Kewpie" of mayonnaise or rice porridge.
Japanese noodles, salmon and steamed rice with chopsticks were a big hit aboard
the space shuttle Endeavour last year, as station commander Peggy Whitson told
the then-Japanese prime minister Yasuo Fukuda in March 2008, after veteran
Japanese astronaut Takao Doi joined them in space.
China has created its own space food, including moon cakes, chocolates and
desserts that have also been sold in Chinese supermarkets since 2008. The
Scientific Research and Training Center for Chinese Astronauts has developed 60
space dishes since 2006 for taikonauts, as China calls its space travelers.
India's 47-year-old Defense Food Research Laboratory (DFRL) is an old hand. It
won an Indian governmental "Titanium Trophy" in 1983 as the "best science
laboratory for development of foods particularly for service forces, Antarctica
expeditions and for outer space missions".
The Mysore-based DFRL currently has food scientists, biochemists and
microbiologists working for India's first manned space mission scheduled for
2015. The extra-terrestrial menu would include curries and upma, a
popular south Indian breakfast dish made of lightly spiced semolina.
Yet the 21st-century variety of space menus does not ease difficulties of
eating in zero gravity. "No matter what the food, you still have the same
problem eating it. You do not want it flying away from you and making a mess
when you open it up [aboard the spacecraft]," says Magnus.
"When you open the food package, you open only a small sliver, enough to get
your spoon in," she warns in her space diary. "If you open too much, and there
is not enough liquid in the package, out flies the food and you spend the rest
of your mealtime chasing your meal around the cabin and making a mess. Bad
space etiquette."
From less etiquette-mindful sailors chomping salted food in ancient voyages
across uncharted seas, food preservation has been the subject of study for
centuries. But the evolving work of food scientists like Perchonok assumes more
significance as leading space agencies aim at journeys lasting three to five
years outside Earth.
Perchonok, with a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Brown University and a
PhD in food science from Cornell, starts work on a space flight eight months
before blast-off. She sits with the NASA crew to finalize personalized food
menus at the Space Food Systems Laboratory, at Building 17 of the Johnson Space
Center in Houston, Texas.
The multi-purpose Space Food Systems Laboratory comprises four units: a test
kitchen fully equipped with sensory testing capabilities, a food processing
laboratory, a food packaging laboratory and an analytical laboratory.
Space food from such high-technology labs is shipped outside Earth packaged in
different ways: dehydrated foods to which astronauts add water; in pouches that
need warming; in cans, or eaten straight like fruit, biscuits and no-crumb
crackers.
Menus are similar for the ISS and space shuttle crews. "On the ISS, NASA only
provides half the food. The Russians also provide the other half," Perchonok
told Asia Times Online. "However, space shuttle crews pick their menus."
The ISS has a standard menu, she said, but its longer-stay crew can request
more of some items in their "preference" containers. These goodies hampers
periodically reach the space station through space shuttles and more usually
from a robot supply vessel launched from Kazakhstan that ferries food, water,
fuel and other necessities to the ISS.
Through a NASA source, Perchonok made available for Asia Times Online a
standard daily menu at the International Space Station:
Breakfast: Space shuttle commander Steve Lindsey's breakfast on Flight Day 2 on Mission STS
104:
Granola with raisins (rehydratable)
Breakfast roll (fresh food)
Pears (thermostabilized)
Vanilla breakfast drink (beverage)
Kona coffee with cream (beverage)
Earl Grey tea with sugar (fresh food)
Lunch: Space shuttle pilot Pamela Melroy's lunch during her 10th
day in space on Mission STS-92:
Chicken strips in salsa
Macaroni and cheese
Rice with butter
Macadamia nuts, apple cider
Dinner:Expedition Three commander Frank Culbertson's dinner on
Day 1, while on a eight-day rotation system for meals aboard the ISS:
Shrimp cocktail (rehydratable)
Beef steak (irradiated)
Macaroni and cheese (rehydratable)
Fruit cocktail (thermostabilized)
Strawberry drink (beverage)
Tea with lemon (beverage)
Estimates of transporting these
foodstuffs to space hovers around US$20,000 per meal per astronaut. Yet the
extra-terrestrial foods research spins off multiple benefits on Earth. In the
past three decades, major developments in preserved food packaging found on
supermarket shelves to heat-and-eat nutritional food for the elderly, are
direct results of space food research. Quality control to prevent food
poisoning in space produced the widely used Hazard Analysis and Critical
Control Point (HACCP) system. HACCP involves testing not only the final
product, but also raw materials and the entire process in the food chain. "The
HACCP process was developed by NASA, US Department of Defense and the Pillsbury
company," says Perchonok, who had earlier worked at Quaker Oats and Lockheed.
"This is now a standard in the food industry. The pouch retort product [NASA's
thermostabilized items] are now used in the commercial market for rice, pasta,
tuna, and salmon products, as examples." Space food evolution is further
example that technological research rarely goes to waste and has - literally -
down-to-earth uses. In the case of dining in the stars, the returns are assured
even before the first human colonies outside Earth start cooking Sunday lunch.
Note
1. Indian and American scientists discovered water molecules in the polar
regions of the moon, after NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, instrument
reported the observations. M3 was carried into space on October 22, 2008,
aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Other
NASA instruments, the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer or VIMS, and the
High Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on NASA's Epoxi spacecraft,
confirmed the finding of water molecules Hydroxyl in small amounts. Hydroxyl
consists of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom. The findings were published
in the journal Science in September 2009.
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