Do you like extreme diets? Do you like NASA, and the fantasy of living in space for months on end? How about Hawaii? If you answered “yes” to all three of these questions, you’d be a great candidate for an epic experiment that NASA has planned for March 2013: HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation). The space agency is going to send a team of six to live in Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano to simulate what it might be like for a team of astronauts to endure the very long trip to Mars.The heart of the upcoming Hawaii mission has nothing to do with zero gravity endurance or anything like that. It’s food — freeze-dried food, to be more specific. For over a decade, NASA’s been working with the food science folks at Cornell University on coming up with a menu of culinary options for astronauts living in space for extended periods of time, like those who will inevitably fly to Mars. The six participants will be kept in tight quarters while their communications with the outside world will black out intermittently, just like it would if they were zooming through space at a few thousand miles per hour. They’ll also have to eat nothing but space ice cream for 120 days. Just kidding. Space food is actually significantly more sophisticated than that.Along with a team from the University of Hawaii, Cornell’s Jean Hunter has been developing the menu. “Astronaut ice cream feeds the imagination more than the mouth, I think,” Hunter told Fast Company this week. “If our people wanted to make ice cream, they’d start with dried milk, maybe some hydrolyzed milk fat, or they’d break out one of their very few cans of sweetened condensed milk, and they’d figure out how to make that into ice cream mix, then they’d have to freeze it in a bag inside of a bag of ice and salt.”
The interesting underpinning to the whole experiment is that food scientists think that NASA’s astronauts will not only need food to eat. They’ll need food to cook. While about half of the HI-SEAS participants’ food supply will be made up of freeze-dried ready-to-eat meals, the other half will be freeze-dried ingredients for cooking, like dried vegetables and powdered milk and what-not. The idea is that the inevitably repetitive menu of ready-to-eat items might put the astronauts at risk of malnutrition, whose degenerative effects are felt more strongly in zero gravity. Plus, it’s boring.“When you eat the same thing over and over again, you get bored by it, [you get] full sooner, and end up eating less. For astronauts who might be somewhere far away from home where there’s not much variety in their lives, getting bored with the food can be really serious,” Hunter said. “In space, they’re going to get bored with a lot of things. Having the food be interesting will improve morale, but it will also make them eat more.”This isn’t the first time that NASA’s run such a food experiment. Back in 2000, Cornell scientists led a similar exercise with 16 volunteers that lasted only 30 days. Most of the food they ate was vegan, lightweight and nutritious. Salt was kept at a minimum since the sodium would screw up the hydroponic crops the astronauts would grow in space, which would be watered with recycled urine. This time around it seems like they’re expanding the menu to include some animal products (freeze-dried milk), and they’ve put a new focus on space cooking. As Hunter explained, studies have shown that people actually absorb more nutrients and eat more when they cook their food.Oh, and sorry to tease you a little bit earlier, but the team of six HI-SEAS participants has already been selected. You can follow the progress of preparations and, eventually, the mission itself on Kate Greene’s blog. She’s a former editor at MIT’s Technology Review and will be along for the ride. Or rather, the simulation.
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