That’s bearable for a week or even a couple of months. But the space missions of the next millennium will last much longer. It takes eight months just to get to Mars–not to mention how long it will take to build a colony on the moon. Restocking your groceries isn’t an option. Bringing livestock aboard for fresh meat won’t work, either: the animals would use up valuable air and water, and you’d face the messy problem of slaughtering them. So the longer astronauts live in space, the more sense it makes for them to grow at least some of their own food. The rewards will not only be nutritional, says Jean Hunter, director of a Cornell University study for NASA on food for long-term space missions. Astronauts will benefit psychologically from cultivating their own gardens, while breathing the fresh oxygen that the plants will generate.
Astronauts will probably raise only simple salad crops on their spacecraft itself, since it’s so difficult to farm in microgravity, and the weight and volume of the required equipment would be substantial. And even after they’ve got settled on Mars or the moon, the challenges are daunting. Outer space is no Iowa. On Mars, giant dust storms often block already limited light. And on the moon, it’s sunny for 14 days, then dark for 14 days. Astronauts would raise their crops hydroponically–that is, without soil–in enclosed, artificially lit and temperature-controlled microclimates. They wouldn’t, of course, need pesticides, but they would have to guard against mold spores that could hitch a ride aboard the seeds they bring from Earth. A single pathogen could do enormous damage, warns plant physiologist Ray Wheeler, a researcher at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
But it’s a risk worth taking, especially since eating is one of the only available pleasures on long, isolated trips. ““Under conditions where people are denied access to normal sources of gratification like friends, hobbies and families, food takes on added importance,’’ says anthropologist Jack Stuster, author of ““Bold Endeavors: Lessons From Polar and Space Expeditions.’’ It’s no accident that Antarctic research stations and submarines serve first-class meals. ““Food can make the difference between having an expedition with high morale and one that’s no fun at all,’’ says Cornell’s Hunter. And so she and her team are concocting more than 100 recipes using wheat, potatoes, rice, soy, peanuts, sweet potatoes, Boston lettuce, kidney beans, radishes and chard. The future, as they see it, includes astronauts who can whip up tofu cheesecake, basil-and-soy-nut pesto and bell-pepper-filled fajitas topped with tofu sour cream.
These Julia Childs in spacesuits will still get to eat some prepackaged food, including the ever-popular M&M’s. The variety of earthly and celestial delicacies, planners hope, will prevent what’s known as the ““monotony effect’’–weight loss caused by the boredom of a limited diet. During his four-month mission aboard the Mir space station, David Wolf dropped 20 pounds. With all the fine cuisine that’s being cooked up, maybe future astronauts will be glad to be weightless. And if nothing else, space flight may do for tofu in 2015 what it did for Tang a half century before.
THE Y2K WATCH U.S. companies are making steady progress toward beating the Bug. Though some have missed Y2K deadlines, nearly all have a detailed strategy in place.
