that NASA transports to and from space costs thousands
of dollars, which means food must be lightweight and
compact. It also has to last a long time. Like Nespoli’s
mashed potatoes, many of the dishes on offer—shrimp
cocktail, chicken teriyaki, or one of a couple hundred
other options—come dehydrated. And they tend to share
another property too, Coleman said: “Everything is kind
of mushy.” This is a side effect of NASA’s all-out war on
crumbs. On Earth, crumbs fall; in microgravity, they
can end up anywhere, including inside critical equip-
ment or astronauts’ lungs. On the earliest space mis-
sions, food came in the form of squeezable purées and
“intermediate moisture bites” such as bacon squares
and brownies, which were coated in a crumb-proof
layer of gelatin. Today’s menu is more expansive, but
certain foods, like bread, remain off limits. In its place
is the all-purpose flour tortilla, to which rehydrated
sauces and stews adhere thanks to surface tension.
Although it’s possible to eat, say, Fig Newtons or Dor-
itos in space, Coleman said such friable indulgences
require careful planning. “You really need to open
them near a vent so that any crumbs go on the vent,”
she explained. “Then you take the vacuum cleaner and
you vacuum the vent, like a good space station citi-
zen.” (Identical rules apply to clipping one’s fingernails.)
Even so, astronauts often notice little edible-looking
things drifting by. In Kelly’s 2017 memoir, Endurance,
he relates a stomach-turning anecdote in which the
Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti confesses to
having eaten an unidentified floating object she thought
was candy but turned out to be garbage.
Nespoli’s longed-for spaghetti is not crumbly, but
even if he did find a way to cook it, there would be no
appropriate way to eat it. For the most part, space cut-
lery has been reduced to a pair of scissors, for opening
packages, and a spoon, for scooping out their contents.
(As it happens, Nespoli’s ancestral compatriots were
the first Europeans to adopt the modern fork. It was
a multi-tined improvement on their previous tool—a
combination ravioli spear and spaghetti twirling rod.)
The process of cooking is similarly simplified. On the
ISS, the astronauts typically rehydrate their food by
adding hot water from a nozzle mounted on the ceil-
ing, then kneading the package. Dinner is ready to eat
at this point, but most dishes are apparently greatly
improved by also being warmed inside a slim alumi-
num briefcase with a heating element in the middle.
“This is where it gets crazy,” Nespoli said. “You have
a space station that cost a gazillion dollars, built by
engineers that can build the most amazing things, and
the food warmer is a briefcase that takes 20 minutes
and only fits enough food for three people at a time.”
As a result, finding something to eat in the storage
containers, rehydrating and kneading it, then warm-
ing it can easily take 30 or 40 minutes. Astronauts are
always short on time; their days are tightly programmed
by mission control, and overruns on repairs or science
experiments frequently cut into their already limited
window for meals. During the Media Lab focus group,
Coleman described a favorite dinner that involved
molding rice into sticky balls and then mixing it with
Trader Joe’s Thai curry, which she’d brought up as part
of her personal allowance. “I really loved it,” she said.
“But it took me probably twice as long to eat dinner
when I did that.” Especially toward the end of her mis-
sion, she was more likely to eat a food bar instead,
“because it was just efficient.”
By this point in the meeting, Coleman and Nespoli
had rattled off an extraordinarily long list of challenges
and constraints. Finally, though, they made the admis-
sion that Coblentz had been chasing all along: Food
was an important part of daily life in orbit—and the
subject of many of their fondest memories. Coleman
said their entire crew, even the cosmonauts, made a
point of eating together on Friday evenings. “It’s how
you become a team,” she explained, to Coblentz’s evi-
dent delight. Coleman opened her laptop and flipped
through her favorite photographs from her time aboard
the ISS. One showed the kitchen table, which juts out
into the corridor between the Russian and American
segments of the station. “Everybody had bruises on each
hip—one for the way there, one for the way back,” she
said. “It was exactly in the way.” Of course, there’s no
real reason for a table to be horizontal in space; pack-
ets of food and drink have to be secured using Velcro
either way, so it could just as easily lie parallel to the
wall. But Coleman said there was an unspoken resis-
tance to such an arrangement. The crew needed a place
to “hang around,” she explained, and to ask that most
human of questions: “How was your day?”
Nespoli’s favorite ISS snapshots involved food too,
in a way. He pulled up an image he captured of clouds
over Lake Garda, Italy. “That looks like a margherita
pizza,” he said. “And then the next picture—that looks
like a quattro stagioni pizza.” Earth was pizza, pizza was
Earth, and both were entirely out of reach. This was the
obstacle Coblentz was determined to surmount.THE FIRST PEOPLE ever to leave Earth orbit and strike
out into space were the three crew members of Apollo8.
They were surprised to find that the most compelling
thing they saw on the quarter-of-a-million-mile-long
journey lay in the rearview mirror. “We set out to explore
the moon and instead discovered the Earth,” astronaut
Bill Anders wrote 50 years after the mission’s end.
It was Anders who captured the iconic “Earthrise”
photo on Christmas Eve of 1968: a shiny blue jewelNICOLA TWILLEY is the cohost of Gastropod, a pod-
cast that looks at food through the lens of science and
history. She is at work on two books, one about refrig-
eration and the other about quarantine.