by Of the freeze-dried, thermos and off-the-shelf food items she helped fit into the space, Vickie Kloeris’s favorite was blue-cherry cobbler.
As a food scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for 34 years, Kloeris not only enjoyed the cobbler, but helped develop it.
“During the shuttle program, we weren’t really doing any product development. All we were doing was, if a product went, we’d get a commercial product to replace it,” she said in interview with collectSPACE.com. “It wasn’t until we got into the International Space Station [program] that we finally got the funding to develop some products, and the first thing that came up was desserts.”
More than satisfying the astronauts’ sweet tooth, Kloeris and her team at the Space Food Systems Laboratory realized that there were benefits to adding desserts to crew members’ menus.
“We really thought, from a psychological point of view, it would be great to have a dessert that you could warm up. And they were; they were very well received.”
Plus, the cherry-blueberry cobbler was just “really, really good.”
Related: Food in space: What do astronauts eat?
Kloeris shares more details about the development of the desserts and more stories from her NASA career in her newly released memoir, “Space Bites: Reflections of a NASA Food Scientist”, published by Ballast Books.
collectSPACE spoke to Kloeris about the book, space food and the challenges facing her successors as commercial spaceflight expands and astronauts embark on longer space missions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
collect SPACE (cS): So we know what your favorite is, but what is your favorite food that you sent into space?
Vickie Kloeris: I guess for me, but personally, it was the split pea soup. I’m not a pea person.
The thing about the split pea soup – it was in a pouch. And because it was in a pouch, it had to have a certain level of viscosity. It was to be quite thick. And so not only was it pea, which I didn’t like, but it was really thick. So that was the one I liked the least.
cS: As you explain in “Space Bites,” some foods are just a good match for the microgravity space environment. You write about why tortillas are the perfect bread for spaceflight, which is the same reason that potato chips – crumbs (or lack thereof) are not a good idea. But when you mention trying to fly chips in cans, you refer to them generically, rather than as Pringles. Is that just an act, when NASA is prevented from referring to foods by their brand names?
Cloris: I was definitely talking about Pringles, but, yeah, I used to not recognize the brand name.
We used to joke about it. The fact that M&M’s are called “candy coated chocolates” predates my period, but more than once I’ve been asked, “Do you remove all the little manna from the candy?” [No.] But for most of my career with NASA, “commercial” was a dirty word. Now the pendulum has swung far in the opposite direction.
Now the whole goal of the agency is, how can we commercialize? And it is interesting to see that it has not yet gone down to the food system. For example, Axiom Space’s third private mission to the space station is about to fly a Thai product, and that was done through an agreement between three different companies. NASA is not yet in a position to consider something like that.
Related: A private space station: How Axiom Space plans to build its orbit
cS: In “Space Bites” you recall how, early in your career, you were tasked with cleaning out a closet and finding all this leftover food – space food cubes – from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Not only did you clear it out, but you tasted some of them. Was that the oldest sample of space food you’ve eaten?
Cloris: The cubes were probably the oldest space food I ate, and they were pretty awful.
cS: There are space food packages that you prepared now in private collections and museums. Would you recommend someone trying to eat them?
Cloris: It depends on how and where it was stored, because the pouch material used by NASA for freeze-dried foods is not completely impermeable to moisture. We used forwrap with a layer of foil to keep the moisture out on board the space station. But if you had a freeze-dried package that was sitting out on display for a long period of time, in theory, it could pick up moisture, and freeze-dried foods are not sterile; it contains bacteria.
We tested the cube packs before eating them to make sure they were free of pathogens.
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cS: Are bacteria or pathogens a concern for longer-duration missions in the future, such as when we send astronauts to Mars?
Cloris: What’s interesting about NASA’s Artemis program is that the food system will be a step backwards. That may change, but the latest I’ve heard is that they won’t have the ability to heat food on the Artemis vehicles.
But for Mars, shelf life is definitely the biggest challenge. I touch on this in the last chapter of the book, but it’s more likely that I have to prep the food for a mission to Mars – it has to be produced, put on a cargo rocket and sent to Mars – by the time the eat it’s a team. , it will be really old. It could be five to seven years old, it could be, depending on how they prep the food and when they prep.
We can make food that is safe to eat for that distance. The challenge will be what kind of nutritional content will still be there, because while freeze-drying and thermostating control microbial growth, it cannot actually stop the chemical changes in the food. Over time, chemical changes will cause nutritional decline, especially with certain nutrients.
And quality degrades. So colour, taste and texture. After a while, if the quality is poor enough, the astronauts eat just enough to survive and not enough to thrive. So that’s a challenge, because NASA wants high-performance crew members during a three-year mission to Mars or however long it ends. That’s the biggest challenge.
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