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Eating in Space
Roland Piquepaille writes "What do you think astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) ate for Thanksgiving? Roasted turkey? Wrong answer. In "Orbital Thanksgiving," NASA tells us they had tortillas and gives details about food in space. If the dining view, 200 miles over the Earth, is great, preparing meals is quite a challenge. For example, there is no refrigerator or freezer aboard the Station, so food must remain good for long periods at room temperature. And you need to avoid crumbs which could float around. This is why tortillas are favored over bread. This overview contains additional references and includes a picture of a cosmonaut preparing food in the ISS galley."
It's great to know that our space program is finally get properley underway, and that astronauts can now eat well. Next project could be getting TV for them?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
"And you need to avoid crumbs which could float around."
No Homer!
They'll CLOG THE INSTRUMENTS!
face the sun, it's an oven
face away, it's a freezer
what's the problem?
AC
Actually I always believed that astronauts sucked pastes of different colors out of plastic sachets, brown-orange was "beef with carrots", and brown-yellow was "turkey breast with potatoes".
If the often-nauseous smells coming from the gally aboard a plane are any indicator, the odour of heating food could be really nasty in space.
And what's this about "no freezer"? What exactly is outer space, if not cold? No airlocks aboard the ISS?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
A what about drinks ? Have the effects of alcohol in space been studied ? I volunteer ! Emm
It seems to me as though just about everyone reading slashdot knew this already and has been eating space ice cream since they were old enough to walk...
I wouldn't have thought keeping things cold was that big a challenge in space.
Oh no... it's the future.
Too many computers, electronics, etc. on the ISS to have food fights. If you want to have one, you have to go outside.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Just make sure they aren't Ruffles!
Quoth the article:
Space and zero gravity offer challenges for food preparation.
On the other hand, zero gravity offers unique advantages for food preparation: If you're careful, you never need to run out of counter space.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
How could they write this article and not mention Tang ?
umm.... orange powdery goodness....
How could they not have refrigeration!? Don't you get that for free by being in space!?
"Dude, where's the Dews I just brought up here?"
"Ugh! They were all warm, so I hung them out over the dark side of the station for a bit."
--
I, for one, was amazed at the clarity and crispness of the scenes filmed inside the ISS. I have seen other 3D IMAX movies too: Ghosts of the Abyss,etc...but this one beats them all by a huge factor.
I know for sure it is (or was) running in Atlanta (Mall of GA), DC (Smithsonian Air and Space Museum) and Boston (Aquarium IMAX) last year. Google for it...definetly worth the effort. A few reviews and clips here.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I guess they didn't want to mention the Enhanced Gaseous Nitrogen Dewar system, which keeps samples frozen at -321 degrees Fahrenheit...
Or perhaps the ARCTIC freezer system, with 38 liters of -20C degree cold stowage...
ISS Fact Sheets
/sig
I guess we're still a long way from astronauts eating locally grown food... :)
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
"Station crews have more than 250 food and beverage items they can select from the U.S. and Russian food systems, but they have to make their selections as early as a year before their flight," Kloeris said. "The choices range from barbecued beef to baked tofu, with probably the most popular item being shrimp cocktail," she said.
They even have a wider range of available food than I do, and I live at a 5 minutes walk from the local supermarket...
Maybe we deserve this world ?
How does one reach the conclusion that as the view gets better, preparation becomes more difficult?
I doubt that was their main course. I mean, I live in Mexico, and I like tortillas as much as the Mexicans, especially when they're warm and fresh from the tortillaria. But they hardly qualify as a meal in themselves. I mean, they're made from cornmeal (or flour, if you go for those kind). Surely they had something with their tortillas, like freeze-dried ice cream maybe.
I'm surprised that none of the astronauts has snuck a small herb garden on board. Some fresh basil, chives, or parsley would surely enliven the food. You could probably grow these plants in a dirt-free medium by stuffing damp cloth fragments into a sock and keeping it damp. You could then velcro the planter near a window and let it grow.
The plants might grow strangely in zero-G, but I'm sure the leaves would still taste OK.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The lack of refrigeration does seem kind of odd, given that we always hear that space is "cold"
However, thinking about it some more, I guess it's because of the relative vacuum of space that makes it more like a gigantic insulator - if you have heat on the ISS, it'd be difficult to dissipate it because there is no medium to carry the heat away. At least, I think that's what might be the case.
Microgravity is the technical term for the gravity in space. There isnt actually zero gravity, there is always something exerting force on you. The weightlessness comes from being in orbit, not from the lack of any gravity.
If there's one thing that isn't scarce up there it's sunlight, and consequently nor is electric power. Why then is heat control a problem?
With peltier heat pumps in all walls, all you need in principle is good computer control of heat pump direction throughout the craft.
How do people have sex in space?
IT's worth it just for the footage of earth from orbit. Brought tears to my eyes, I swear.
The imax shots of the ISS are fantastic too.. you just can't appreciate the size and scale of this thing from a TV.
I think "free fall" is an acceptable term as well, and describes more accurately the situation. After all, gravity isn't reduced that much in LEO, but staying in orbit really means falling down the horizon.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Space is not cold. Space is not warm. Space is a vacuum.
Space is a great insulator.
I wonder if they would complain about the Turkey being dry up there too..
If you're near the south of the UK, it's also being shown at the Science Museum in London on a regular basis. With all of the other material there, it's a fantastic place to take a day trip to.
What do you think astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) ate for Thanksgiving?
Uh... That question hasn't really kept me sleepless. Considering that you're talking about the International Space Station...
Well, now that the Spanish astronaut has left the station, Americans count for a whopping 50% of the astronauts aboard the station.
I.e. one guy.
Thanksgiving?
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
I don't want to be up there when either the water or the ammonia cooling circuits break. It's designed to kill people, either directly or through loss of environment control.
Using fluid heat exchange in space implies either blind trust in technology or, less generously, that it is acceptable to increase the risk to your astronauts even beyond the risk inherent to being in space.
It's simply nuts.
A MacYoda menu?
Diego
diegoT
diegoT
After all, even with months-long space station stays, today's space stations are the equivalent of summer camp compared to what future astronauts will go through. Even if warp drives prove possible -- an enormous if -- astronauts will have to spend years aboard spacecraft to even reach relatively nearby parts of interstellar space.
That being the case, the growing of food in space becomes practically a necessity. As space voyages lengthen, it becomes laughably inefficient to produce on earth the tons of food neccessary for the trip , and blast it into space.
Growing food in space poses all kinds of challenges that make today's pre-packaged problems look trivial. Right from the start, it appears that producing meat, milk, and eggs in space is going to be prohibitively inexpensive. So instead, NASA is funding investigations into growing plants hydroponically--probably extracting minerals from astronaut's crap and urine. Doing this gets around the problem of having to send tons of food into space.
The challenges of having animal agriculture in space are so extreme that it appears that virtually all serious research on space-borne food production is confined to vegan foods. This is purely a practical thing -- it's not as though the scientists at NASA have developed a sudden interest in animal rights. In fact, current studies involving vegan food production in space involve using rats to assess nutritional adequacies of what's being grown.
But vegans can take heart. Even if they don't bring down animal agriculture on earth by 2525, it's a fair bet that Major Tom, blasting towards the Dog Star, will be eating a vegan diet -- whether he likes it or not.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
The plants might grow strangely in zero-G
There was no need for zero-G if the thing had been designed properly. The fact that the ISS is not structured as two or three nested rings all spinning together for various levels of gravity just shows how primitive the whole thing is.
I'm surprised that none of the astronauts has snuck a small herb garden on board.
You know--
No, no. This is too easy.
The coolest voice ever.
Have the effects of alcohol in space been studied ? I volunteer !
They probably stopped after the first volunteer mistook the Sun for the Earth and attempted re-entry.
The coolest voice ever.
I have solved the problem.
People on the ISS should order nothing but pizza, it solves the storage problem;hot or cold, the quality problem, the crumb problem...it's gold baby!
And as a bonus since most pizza chains don't have their own rocket program it'll take more than 30 minutes to deliver it, so the food is free!
PS Maybe the ISS crew member from the US should have had that
Turkey and Gravy flavoured pop
from Seattle. Un-carbonated though.
The ISS is cooled down by emmitting infrared radiation through gigantic heat sinks that use two closed loops: one with water - to take the heat out of the stations interior and to the heat sinks and the oher with ammonia - to take the heat out of the water and into the heat sink tubing (ammonia freezes at a much lower temperature than water. Water would just become ice and would clog the tubes.) Now THIS is some heat sink that could solve heating problems of a huge super-computer.
I wonder what did MIR use for cooling down?
I like this chronology - a very exciting reading.
You can't handle the truth.
I work for a local grocery chain in Houston and the store I worked at 2 months ago provides alot stuff to the ISS program. For instance, they order 110 lbs. of asparagus each time. What's interesting (but not suprising) is they called me to get the LOT number and other information pertaining to the origin of the asparagus. I had to direct them to our supplier but I thought it was cool in any case. Not to mention that I had a good sales ring that day...
Vacuums are not insulators.
I remember a great demonstration given in the Toronto Science Museum. A piece of rubber tubing placed into a bell jar. A vacuum pump extracting the air until it reached a near-vacuum. Pause... allow air back into the bell jar. Strike rubber with small hammer, rubber shatters and when touched, little pieces of it are _very_ cold indeed.
An object in a vacuum radiates its heat and unless there is an equally warm object radiating heat back, it will cool off until it reaches the temparature of the surrounding radiation, which is (I believe) quite close to absolute zero in darkness, and probably somewhat higher (but nothing like 0 Celcius) in direct sunlight.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Who was the first human being to jack off in space?
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Many male astronauts prefer to shave as little as possible, and all agree that it's one area in which their female colleagues have all the advantages.
So women in space have hairy legs and hairy armpits? Cancel my ticket, I'll stay on Earth.
Red indians in space!
In Soviet Russia the overlords
1. Welcomes you
2. ???
3. Profit
Actually, brining the turkey will result in a very moist meat. Healthier than frying, by far.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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That goes for us Ethiopians too.
think about it eat all you want and still weigh next to nothing, literally. is space eating the next big diet?
That explains this $136,216.20 proposal to NASA to study Development of Extended Shelf-Life for Tortillas for Long-Duration Space Missions".
They wanted to (or did?) use MRI scans of tortilla dough to determine whether there were any changes on a molecular level that could be linked to tortillas taking on a bitter taste after being on the shelf for extended periods of time.
I wish I could get my own NMR spectrometer by saying that I want to study tortillas.
Does anyone else find this to be hilarious?
Yes, very clear.
I retract my argument based on the rubber tube demonstration.
Do you have any idea how fast heat radiation will cool an object in space? Stick a warm turkey in a plastic bag, chuck it out into space, how long will it take to freeze, and how cold will it get?
Or will the turkey remain nicely hot for ages? If space is an insulator, this is what we'd expect...
Ceci n'est pas une signature
If the gas has low velocity, then does it just hang around? There's no gravity, so no convection (hot air doesn't rise, cold air doesn't fall).
Since farts are flammable, if you farted and then tried to light a cigarette, wouldn't you be enveloped in a cloud of flame?
Do they use fans to circulate the air and eliminate this problem?
Inquiring minds need to know.
The Russian looks more like he is mixing some mad rhymes on his turntables than making dinner ;)
I tried to give the astronaughts a treat, I called my local Jimmy's pizza (better than any chain) delevery, but it turns out they only deliver within 10 miles, and ISS is always farther away than that, even when not on the other side of the earth.
OTOH, 747s fly at less than that distance from the ground, next time I have to fly I'm going to order pizza with those inflight phones. I'm sure the captin will detour a little to hit the delivery area if I bri^h^h^hgive him a large pizza.
Right. Gravity is actually still quite strong in LEO; the way you maintain orbit is by falling into the gravity well, while having enough 'horizontal' speed so that you're following the curvature where the gravity is the same. Effectively, you're falling toward the ground, but always miss it. You could be in orbit 10m from the ground, assuming you could sustain enough speed in Earth's atmosphere.
I bet there are refrigerators, but I expect they are reserved for scientific experiments, and not food storage, no doubt due to both space and power considerations.
Man, I realize that this is very grammar nazi-ish of me, but there is a phenomenon on /. that is really starting to piss me off: the use of the phrase "I, for one, blah blah blah". It clearly derives from the now old "I, for one, welcome our new so-and-so overlords", but taken out of context it is terrible. It serves no grammatical or informational purpose, and it reads like crap. In the above example the parent could have merely said "I was amazed...". I would think that most people here would have some respect for stating ideas clearly and succinctly without clouding them with useless language.
Bah, sorry for the rant but please stop using this phrase.
After reading that article, I find my self still wondering...
What did they have for Thanksgiving?
There is no definite answer in the article.
Sharkbait... Ooh haha
Great, so in the future we are all Mexican.
At least our lawns will be well maintained.
The Space Program has already paid off in my opinion; Astronaut Ice Cream. Finally we've got really dry ice cream that doesn't melt. It's a dream come true. Of course I hear that they don't take Astronaut Ice Cream into space, WTF?
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
I mean, either suit up and stick anything in the shadow of the ISS and it'll be cold pretty darn quick, or mount a metal box flush with any exposed bulkhead directly connected to the skin of the ISS on the shadowed side - you'll have a bloody cold little cupboard in no time.
I mean, it's not like it's rocket science. Well, wait...
-Styopa
I recently attended a talk by a NASA education guy on the subject of living in space - on the shuttle and ISS. For the most part, it's really not that different from what you might expect; the main problem is not so much things intrinsic to zero gravity (though there's some of that with liquids, crumbs, etc.) but that NASA generally skimps on the sort of amenities you might think the astronauts could use. For example, there was no "table" on ISS, until the crew up there built one out of some surplus supplies. And, similarly, no refrigerator or freezer. Things will be quite different once the first space hotel goes up.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Does NASA put urine through a nano filter so the water component can be drinked again?
Not to mention enough lateral vectoring to avoid all the objects ~10m off the ground but not in your orbit (ie on-the-ground, part-of-the-ground, or other loonies orbiting @ 10m).
Anyone out there with a slide rule?
What would be the speed required for such a low orbit?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Who cares what they ate at ISS, I wanna know when they're going to have guests for Thanksgiving. =)
I'd be interested in seeing how well octupi developed in 0-g conditions. Octupi (like squid) grow & multiply at phenonmenal rates (they're probably the only realistically "sustainable" ocean food resource). High in nutritional value, fast growing, versatile... I'm curious.
Its never been done before!
theres a flaw in your theory
"have you heard of the klingon proverb that revenge is a dish best served cold... it is very cold, IN SPACE...." -wrath of KAHHHN
so there!
Nowhere in this piece of press release is there mention of the end result of eating in space: pooping in space. I could only find links to press release material about the toilet, though, too.
I doubt that they're eating anything specifically for Thanksgiving, seeing as none of them are from the US. (Michael Foale doesn't count, even if the UK does look more and more like the 51s state lately.)
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
What's the difference between someone floating due to orbit, or floating due to a true lack of gravity, ie. in an imaginary space ship thats out out out past the edge of the solar system, past that whats-it-called point where voyger is.... Would the sensation "feel" the same? Would it "look" the same?
What the hell is brining? I've now got a hideous mental image of a shrivelled turkey floating in a large jar of saltwater....
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Even a dewar flask isn't a perfect insulator. On Apollo 13, one of the survival problems the astronauts had was just keeping warm enough. There wasn't enough fuel to spin the craft after the oxy tank exploded to keep the temperatures evenly distributed across the LEM. The astronauts got very cold as a result.
The title, "Thanksgiving in space", quite erked me when I read it.
/. reader.
I am at a loss as to what the article writers were thinking. Its called the "International Space Station", but they've made such a blatant disregard for any other culture than US culture here.
Sure, Americans celebrate thanksgiving on November 27'th... but does any other nationality?
Canada celebrates it more than a month earlier, on October 13'th.
And I'm willing to wager a hefty sum that Russian culture DOES NOT CELEBRATE THANKSGIVING on *either* of those dates, if at all.
-Just a pissed off non-us
There's some video clips here showing the [astro|cosmo]nauts eating various unedible looking substances. There's also some shorts on the preparation of spacefood. All in all the stuff seems really noxious (we all know the freeze-dried icecream from museum stores is god-awful). I think the next ISS module should be a soul food shack. Am I the only one who wonders what the *nauts do when dinner doesn't sit well? Do you suppose Febreeze works in space?
To change the subject...
If NASA is so worried about errant crumbs perhaps they should spend a few million bucks researching a dustbuster that works in zero gravity instead of funding magnetic resonance imaging research into why their (crumb-free) tortillas taste bitter after six months on the shelf.
LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. A. Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
The velocity of an object in a stable orbit a r distance from the center of a massive object is v = sqrt(GM / r)
Here r = 6370000 m
G = 6.67 * 10^-11 Nm^2 / kg^2
M = 5.98 * 10^24 kg
So v = 7913.05 m / sec
That's 28486.98 km / h or 17701 mph.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Don't they get satellite TV? :P
I mean, if you're careful to make sure the container isn't air-tight, it would even be vacuum packed. How much better preservation do you need?
Admittedly, the walk out to the fridge isn't one you'll make when you wake up at 3am wanting a snack...