by Of all the freeze-dried, heat-stabilized, and commercially available foods she helped send into space, Vickie Kloeris’ personal favorite was cherry-blueberry pie.
Kloeris, a food scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for 34 years, not only enjoyed the cobbler, she helped develop it.
“During the transportation program, we weren’t really developing any products. All we did was, if a product went missing, we would find a commercial product to replace it,” he said in an interview with CollectSPACE.com. “It wasn’t until we got to the International Space Station [program] We finally got the funding to develop some products, and the first thing that came up was desserts.
More than just a desire to satisfy astronauts’ sweet tooth, Kloeris and his team at the Space Food Systems Laboratory felt there were benefits to adding desserts to crew members’ menus.
“We really thought that, from a psychological perspective, having a dessert that you could heat up would be great. And they were; they were very accepted.”
Plus, the cherry and blueberry pie was just “very, very good.”
Related: Food in space: What do astronauts eat?
Kloeris shares more details about the desserts’ development and more anecdotes from his NASA career in his newly released memoir, “Space Bites: Reflections of a NASA Food Scientist,” published by Ballast Books.
CollectSPACE spoke with Kloeris about the book, space food, and the challenges facing its 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 food was, but what was your least favorite food that you sent to space?
Victoria Kloeris: I guess for me, personally, it was the pea soup. I’m not a pea person.
The thing about split pea soup is that it was in a bag. And since it was in a bag, it had to have a certain level of viscosity. It had to be quite thick. And not only were they peas, which I didn’t like, but they were very thick. So that was the one I liked the least.
cS: As you explain in “Space Bites,” some foods just don’t pair well with the microgravity space environment. You write about why tortillas are the perfect bread for spaceflight, which is the same reason chips are not a good idea: the crumbs (or lack thereof). But when you mention an attempt to blow up potato chips in cans, you refer to them generically, rather than calling them Pringles. Is this just a force of habit, given NASA’s aversion to referring to foods by their brand names?
kloeris: I was definitely talking about Pringles, but, yeah, it was a force of habit that I didn’t identify the brand.
We used to joke about that. The fact that M&Ms are called “candy-coated chocolates” dates back to before my tenure, but more than once I was asked, “Do you delete all the little m’s from candy?” [No.] But for most of my career at NASA, “marketing” was a dirty word. Now the pendulum has swung far in the opposite direction.
Now the overall goal of the agency is: how can we market? And it’s interesting to see that it hasn’t reached the food system yet. For example, Axiom Space’s third private mission to the space station is about to carry 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: Private space station: How Axiom Space plans to build its orbital outpost
cS: You remember in “Space Bites” how, early in your career, you were tasked with cleaning out a closet and discovering all those food scraps (cubes of space food). of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Not only did you clean it, but you tried some of them. Was that the earliest example of space food you’ve eaten?
kloeris: Cubes were probably the oldest space food I ate, and they were pretty awful.
cS: There are space food packages that you prepared that are now in private and museum collections. Would you recommend someone try eating them?
kloeris: It depends on how and where it was stored, because the bag material that NASA has been using for freeze-dried foods is not completely impermeable to moisture. We use an envelope with a layer of aluminum to keep moisture out aboard the space station. But if you had a freeze-dried package that had been exposed for a long period of time, in theory, it could absorb moisture and freeze-dried foods are not sterile; there are bacteria there.
We tested the cube packs before eating them to make sure there were no pathogens.
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cS: Are bacteria or pathogens a concern for future longer missions, such as when we send astronauts to Mars?
kloeris: The interesting thing about NASA’s Artemis program is that the food system will actually be a step backwards. This could change, but the latest I’ve heard is that they will not have food heating capabilities in the Artemis vehicles.
But for Mars, shelf life is definitely the biggest challenge. I talk about this in the last chapter of the book, but it’s most likely having to pre-position food for a mission to Mars (having to produce it, put it on a cargo rocket, and send it to Mars) for when the crew eats it. . , it’s going to be very old. It could be anywhere from five to seven years old, potentially, depending on how they preposition the food and when they preposition it.
We can prepare foods that are safe to eat during that period of time. The challenge will be what kind of nutritional content it will still have, because while freeze-drying and thermostabilization control microbial growth, they can’t actually stop chemical changes in food. Over time, chemical changes will cause nutrition to decrease, especially with certain nutrients.
And the quality degrades. So color, flavor and texture. After a while, if the quality is bad enough, astronauts will eat just enough to survive and not enough to thrive. So that’s a challenge, because NASA wants high-performing crew members during a three-year Mars mission or whatever that ends up being. That is the biggest challenge.
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