In 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the protagonist of the first manned space flight. After him there have been many who have traveled outside the Earth, but taking with them two of the most earthly needs possible: going to the bathroom and eating.
Speaking of the latter, feeding in space has its rules and formats, making it much rarer than the feasts we can indulge in today. Let’s review how and what astronauts eat.
The food in the first space flights
As we said, Yuri Gagarin was the protagonist of the first space trip and also the first to eat his 108-minute flight in space . In his case, he ate a mixture of beef and liver paste through a tube like toothpaste.
In fact, until then not even the scientists of the time were sure that it could be swallowed in a state of zero gravity.
A year later, in 1962, John Glenn flew on Friendship 7, the Mercury Atlas 6 mission spacecraft, and found the process of eating pleasant enough, though the menu wasn’t the most appetizing: bite-sized cubes, lyophilized and semi-liquid powders filled in aluminum tubes.
The Project Mercury astronauts complained not only that the food was unappetizing and that they did not like to squeeze the tubes, but that the freeze-dried dishes were almost impossible to rehydrate and crumbs from the buckets floated around the cabin and interfered with the wiring. on the walls.
Later, in the Gemini Program, the aluminum tubes were completely discarded and a special gelatin coating was applied to the cubes and the freeze-dried food was packaged in a special plastic container to facilitate reconstitution.
The weirdest space pizza and hamburger
As astronaut Donald Thomas , who carried out four shuttle missions in the 1990s, totaling 44 days in orbit, correctly refers to in Nutrition Today in 1969, “nobody goes to space for food… views are amazing.
Thomas himself starred in taking a pizza into space. “We were allowed to bring a snack to the launch pad in case of weather delays. My favorite food is pizza, so I said, ‘can you make me a pizza instead?’ And NASA did: “I think it was the first pizza that flew into space.”
Stranger was the peculiar hamburger prepared by astronaut Terry Virts, who created his own “cheeseburger”, putting a patty of meat, cheese, tomato paste and Russian mustard in a wrapper of Mexican tortillas .
