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wreathed in clouds, floating above the pockmarked
lunar surface, alone in the pitch-black void. Reflecting
on the image in 2018, he recalled the powerful emo-
tions that led him to ignore his assigned task—doc-
umenting potential landing sites—and turn his lens
toward home. “Once-distant places appeared insep-
arably close,” he wrote. “Borders that once rendered
division vanished. All of humanity appeared joined
together.” His sublime experience, an overwhelming
feeling of oneness coupled with a sudden awareness of
Earth’s beauty and fragility, became so common among
future generations of astronauts that it earned a name:
the overview effect. It offers an escape from the con-
fined, smelly conditions, the mushy, repetitive meals,
and the endless checklists. When Coleman was aboard
the ISS, she played her flute in the Cupola, a windowed
observatory purpose-built for world-watching.
On a journey to Mars, or beyond, that will no longer be
an option. Psychologists have no idea how the so-calledbreak-off phenomenon—the sense of detachment that
can arise when our planet slips from view—will affect
future astronauts’ mental state. What’s more, any com-
munication with the now-invisible Earth will be subject
to as much as a 45-minute lag. Kelley Slack, one of the
experts on NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance
team, recently told NBC, “It will be the first time that
we’ve been totally disconnected from Earth.” Since the
summer of 1975, when NASA convened a group of experts
to discuss permanent settlement in space, researchers
have warned of a psychological condition called “solip-
sism syndrome,” in which reality feels dreamlike and
lonely astronauts become prone to self-destructive mis-
takes. Mars could be the theory’s first real test.“Food assumes added importance under all con-
ditions of isolation and confinement because normal
sources of gratification are denied,” Jack Stuster, an
anthropologist and NASA consultant, wrote in Bold
Endeavors, his 1996 book on the behavioral issues asso-
ciated with extreme environments. “Usually, the longer
the confinement, the more important food becomes.”
Managers of offshore oil rigs, supertankers, and Ant-
arctic research stations all appreciate the importance
of food to maintaining group morale and productivity
in isolated, remote, and confined situations. Stuster
noted that “food has become such an important ele-
ment onboard fleet ballistic missile submarines that, for
years, meals have been served at cloth-covered tables
in pleasant paneled dining rooms.”
Outer space is perhaps the most extreme environ-
ment humans will ever confront. To mitigate the inev-
itable burnout, NASA has developed a range of what
it calls “countermeasures.” During his yearlong mis-
sion aboard the ISS, for instance,
Scott Kelly tested a pair of rub-
ber suction trousers, designed to
combat fluid shift. (Afterward he
reporting feeling, for the first time
in months, “like I wasn’t standing
on my head.”) He and his crew-
mate Kjell Lindgren, the man with
the bagpipes, also grew and ate
some red romaine lettuce—a first
for American astronauts.
Research by Marianna Obrist, a
professor of multisensory experi-
ences at the University of Sussex,
suggests orbital agriculture could
be a promising countermeasure.
“In a way, that appreciation of
what it takes to grow food and
how wonderful and alive fresh
food tastes—that’s something
you don’t often think when you
are eating here on Earth,” she
told me. Perhaps a crunchy leaf
of romaine could serve as the edi-
ble equivalent of the overview effect. For the foresee-
able future, though, onboard farming will never provide
more than a tiny portion of a crew’s dietary require-
ments. The MIT team will have to look elsewhere.
Obrist’s recent work has documented exactly the void
that Coblentz is trying to fill. In anticipation of mass-
market space tourism, she and her colleagues con-
ducted a survey in which they asked ordinary people
about the eating experiences they would want on a flight
to the moon or Mars. The responses were clear: For the
shorter lunar trip, travelers were perfectly happy to pro-
vision themselves like campers, provided there would
be treats. But when it came to the longer Mars journey,
the respondents said they’d require a wide variety of“You have a space station that
cost a gazillion dollars, builtby engineers that can buildthe most amazing things, andthe food warmer is a briefcasethat takes 20 minutes and onlyfits enough food for threepeople at a time.”