6/23/2023 0 Comments Freeze dried astronaut food![]() ![]() (Not including that time Stephen Colbert sent it up in a balloon.) If you're willing to set aside the winning properties of ice cream classic and hang all your hopes on heat resistance, that is.Īnyway, in honor of the impending astronautical achievement, we remember: Freeze-dried ice cream, the space dessert that maybe never even went to space. ![]() The Apollo missions, you see, gave us freeze-dried ice cream, an unmelting space food that turns out to be absolutely unsuitable for space travel but maybe pretty okay for scorching summer days. So sure, you can have a taste of Russian astronaut food if you want-but you're not really getting the good stuff.Īnd we hate to tell you, but astronauts never really ate much of that freeze-dried ice cream- it was discontinued after a single mission.I scream, you scream, we all scream for reconstituted dairy dust-I think that's what they say? Certainly it would be an appropriate thing to say now, as we prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing (July 20th, 1969) and simultaneously weather a harrowing heat wave. Famously, a corned-beef sandwich was smuggled aboard Gemini 3 by pilot John W. Smithsonian notes that "in the highly flammable, oxygen-rich environment of a, no packaging or utensils can run the risk of creating a spark. The key is reducing the need for utensils-or the risk of setting the spacecraft on fire. Japan sends sushi, ramen, yokan, and rice with ume for its astronauts." According to the Space Foundation, other nations have similarly adapted their domestic cuisine for in-flight enjoyment: "When China launched into orbit in 2003 for the first time, Yang Liwei brought yuxiang pork, Kung Pao chicken, rice and Chinese herbal tea. Russians, however, prefer goulash, fish, borscht (which, naturally, does still come in a tube) and other homeland dishes. Spaghetti, teriyaki beef, cashew chicken, meatloaf, scrambled eggs, and even coconut cream pie are just a few of the options for the Americans floating around up there. And astronauts are eating more than just glorified baby food. Squeeze tubes have been popular food-delivery choices since the first NASA space missions, but they're merely one option among many other types of packages and pouches. Yep, it turns out that astronauts are not only eating Neapolitan ice cream for every single meal during the months or years that they're suspended in orbit.Īnd, thankfully, astronauts aren't restricted solely to tube-food. Should you decide to forgo your standard spoon-and-fork fare in favor of the food that people eat when they have no choice in zero-gravity environments, you can feast on 11 different pasty combinations, including marinated meat and vegetables, a cottage cheese dessert with "sea buckthorn" fruit, and a purée of apricot, apple, and blackcurrant. Available for 300 rubles apiece (roughly US$4.50), each tube contains the same sustenance "enjoyed" (maybe?) by Russian cosmonauts who live on the International Space Station. Starting this month, Moscow's All-Russian Exhibition Center has begun selling the cuisine of cosmonauts to the public, which is apparently hungry for what essentially amounts to savory toothpaste. Or maybe we just love a good old-fashioned novelty food. They are a very brave, very privileged, and very resilient group of elite men and women there's a sense that they will face things unimaginable to the average person, on entirely other planes of scariness, beauty, and existential curiosity. Though astronauts today are hardly the celebrities that they were in the 60s and 70s, their strange and somewhat high-tech lifestyle, suspended miles and miles and miles above the Earth's surface, continues to be a source of intrigue. Regardless of its quirks and faults, space-friendly ice cream is still popular-and readily available-to this day. ![]()
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