DailyDirt: Space Food

Bleeding Edge

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Most people’s idea of astronaut food is freeze-dried ice cream — which astronauts don’t actually eat anymore. But with all the commercial space ventures that are trying to create a space tourism industry, maybe there should be more culinary options for zero gravity meals. Here are just a few examples of space food that might be better than a packet of salted peanuts.

• Making bread in space isn’t too easy, especially if you want it to have the same consistency as normal Earth-bound bread. A teenager has proposed a bread recipe for astronauts that involves low pressure aeration of flour dough and low temperature cooking. [url]
• NASA created specially-prepared food for Apollo astronauts in the 1960s. An example meal is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and it looks just as unappetizing as it did several decades ago. [url]
• University of Colorado Boulder students are working on a robotic farming system for growing food for astronauts in space. This project is meant to support long-term missions such as a journey to Mars, and the automated system will attempt to seed plants, monitor plant growth, harvest and process crop residues. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: apollo, astronaut, bread, food, freeze-dried meals, mars, robotic farming, space