Space may be the final frontier, but it is also one hell of a restaurant. Over the the past half-century, scientists and space engineers have not only been racing to get their rockets safely outside the Earth’s atmosphere, they’ve been working to ensure the menu keeps their astronauts coming back for more. While there have been all sorts of innovations and improvements, it seems now the options are better than ever, to where we might consider studying rocket science just to gain access to NASA’s kitchen. While these days it seems there is little hope in revisiting space any time soon, here are ten facts about space food, to give us food for thought as we wait until we can become weightless once more.
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Early Space Food
Fact: Early Space Food Was Weird.
When Yuri Gagarin become the first human being to go into outer space, he also become the first to eat and do whatever else a human must as a necessary condition of survival. What he ate was stored in toothpaste-like tubes – for instance, his lunch consisted of a liquid paste and chocolate sauce. The first Americans in space – after effectively losing the first phase of the Space Race against the Russians – ate food in cubed, powder, and liquid form (which they really didn’t enjoy at all) and found re-hydrating the freeze-dried foods to be an unpleasant task.
