flavors, textures, and temperatures. They also felt it
would be important to re-create some of the rituals
and environments that accompany eating on Earth.
In short, Coblentz said, making better space food
means thinking bigger than countermeasures. “If
humans are going to thrive in space, we need to design
embodied experiences,” she told me. She has even
looked to zoos for inspiration. “For predatory animals
like tigers, instead of just throwing a carcass into their
cage, they might have a hunting contraption that drags
and twitches the meat,” she explained. “They’re man-
ufacturing this more challenging experience to make
eating more engaging for the animals, and I wondered
what the space food analogy might be.” Hiding food
around a spacecraft to encourage foraging behavior
might not be feasible, she concluded, but what about
meal preparation? What kinds of culinary transforma-
tions are possible in space—and what kinds of rituals
could be built out of them?
Like generations of chefs before her, Coblentz began
by taking advantage of the local environment. Liq-
uids are known to behave peculiarly in microgravity,
forming wobbly blobs rather than streams or droplets.
This made her think of molecular gastronomy, in par-
ticular the technique of using calcium chloride and
sodium alginate to turn liquids into squishy, caviar-like
spheres that burst delightfully on the tongue. Coblentz
got to work on a special spherification station to test
in zero g—basically a plexiglass glove box equipped
with preloaded syringes. She would inject a bead of
ginger extract into a lemon-flavored bubble, or blood
orange into a beet juice globule, creating spheres within
spheres that would deliver a unique multipop sensa-
tion unattainable on Earth. And unlike their terrestrial
counterparts, Coblentz’s spheres would float rather
than sit on a plate, meaning they could be appreciated
in 360 degrees, rather than 180, and garnished accord-
ingly. The entire process, as whimsical as it might seem,
could offer future space travelers a welcome chance
to express their culinary creativity and enjoy eating as
a sensory experience, even if “space face” means the
flavors themselves are subdued.
Coblentz also had weightier weightless recipes
in mind. Many of Earth’s most deeply comforting
foods rely on the byproducts of microbial digestion.
Because metabolism works differently in micrograv-
ity, for microbes as well as humans, the resulting flavors
might differ too. What would a wheel of space-aged
Parmigiano-Reggiano, a loaf of space-risen sourdough
bread, or a tube of space-fermented salami taste like?
Coblentz is planning to send a batch of miso paste to the
ISS later this year, to learn how its flavor profile changes.
She has also developed a new way of consuming it. Pon-
dering the station’s lack of cutlery, she struck upon the
idea of creating silicone “bones”—solid, ivory-colored
crescents that resemble oversize macaroni more than
the ribs that inspired them. Nibbling and sucking foods
directly off a silicone bone might reduce spoon fatigue,
she explained, and perhaps even put spacefarers in
touch with humanity’s most ancient foodways.
Coblentz has also considered sending brine into orbit,
to evaporate into salt. As Phil Williams, who recently
launched the world’s first astropharmacy research pro-
gram at the University of Nottingham, told me recently,
“One of the problems of making crystals on Earth is that
you have convective currents.” Driven by gravity, these
currents affect the quality of crystal growth. “You can
get far bigger crystals with fewer defects in micrograv-
ity,” he said. Chefs and foodies already pay a premium
for the large, hollow pyramids of Maldon sea salt, a
shape preferred for its crunch, its intermittent bursts of
saltiness, and its superior adhesion to baked goods. No
one yet knows what culinary properties the crystalline
perfection of space salt might possess. Many pharma-
ceuticals rely on crystallization too, and any alteration
in those structures can change the drug’s therapeutic
effects. “There may one day be compounds that we can
only make off-planet and bring back,” Williams said,
conjuring up a dazzling vision of the future in which
drug factories and gourmet brine ponds orbit Earth.
In the weeks leading up to the parabolic flight, as
Coblentz surveyed her prototypes, she decided she’d
like to spend her precious moments in zero g actually
eating stuff, not just fiddling with the spherification
station. She would set aside time to inject a few test
spheres, but for now she was more interested in replac-
ing some of the ambiance, texture, and flavor that astro-
nauts complain is missing aboard the ISS.
“I’ve designed a special space food helmet and a tast-
ing menu,” she told me on our last call before we flew.
“Have a light breakfast.”AS ASTRONAUTS AND entrepreneurs alike are fond of say-
ing whenever something goes horribly wrong, “space
is hard.” The same rule seemingly applied to MIT’s
zero-gravity flight. Initially slated for March, it was
delayed for months, owing to a government shutdown,
scheduling conflicts, and then at the last minute—with
all the passengers, including the silkworms, ready to
go—the FAA’s refusal to recertify the plane until a single
part was replaced. Finally, the morning dawned. I ate a
quarter of a bagel, applied a motion-sickness patch, and
boarded the team bus to ride up to an airstrip at Pease
Air Force Base in New Hampshire.
We gathered in a hangarlike space haphazardly
furnished with plastic tables, folding chairs, a metal
detector, and an x-ray machine. Staff from Zero-G Cor-
poration, the company operating the flight, issued us