Nov 24 1978
From The Space Library
If research now in advanced stages went well, Space Shuttle orbiter crews would enjoy tasty and nutritious meals served in an attractive manner, NASA announced. Menus would be well balanced (3000 calories a day) with hot entrees, "reasonably cold" fruit beverages or dessert, and plenty of condiments. A typical daily menu on the Space Shuttle might be: breakfast-orange drink, peaches, scrambled eggs, sausage, sweet roll, cocoa; lunch-cream of mushroom soup, ham and cheese sandwich, stewed tomatoes, banana, cookies, and tea; dinner-shrimp cocktail with sauce, beefsteak, broccoli au gratin, strawberries, pudding, cookie, and cocoa. Many of the foods (breakfast bars, for example) would come off supermarket shelves. All meals would be prepared with variety in mind, so that a crew would have a different menu for six successive days; on the seventh day the cycle would begin again. Dining would be from a food tray at a table in the galley, or the tray could be held in the lap or affixed to the wall. Ordinary eating utensils would be used.
Foods planned for Shuttle crews included (thermostabilized) thermal/heat-processed foods canned or packaged in laminated foil pouches, such as cheese spread, tuna, beef with barbecue sauce; (intermediate moisture) foods preserved by controlling the available moisture, such as dried apricots, peaches, breakfast bars; (rehydratable) dehydrated foods reconstituted with water, such as scrambled eggs, beef patty, chicken and noodles, all beverages; (irradiated) foods exposed to ionizing radiation to effect preservation, such as bread, rolls, and beefsteak; (freeze-dried) foods with all water removed to be rehydrated, or eaten as is with saliva acting as the moistening agent, such as strawberries, shrimp, bananas; (natural form) foods such as nuts and cookies. All this was far from the space meals of an earlier era, when Mercury and Gemini astronauts had to squeeze various kinds of food into their mouths from tubes, or when floating crumbs had to be recaptured before they got into the instruments. Some of the same people who had pioneered space food preparation were still working at JSC putting together the Space Shuttle food systems.
From the beginning of the national space effort, the topic of food had captured the attention of both observers and participants. On short spaceflights, food was not too important; it became amore serious consideration, then a vital one, as crews began to range farther and stay longer. First menus had included only the tubes of paste-like food served at room temperature, lukewarm dehydrated cubes, or a few freeze-dried items. By the time of the long-duration Apollo flights, the types of and systems of preparing space food had become more sophisticated, and new means of heating and cooling had brought improved palatability. A breakthough came during Apollo 8 when the crew was surprised with a home-cooked Christmas dinner: pieces of turkey with most of the trimmings, eaten with a spoon rather than squeezed from a container. The turkey and gravy was a thermostabilized product packaged in a laminated foil pouch, leading to the development of a "spoon-bowl" plastic pack for rehydratable foods into which water was injected through a valve. Contents were spooned out through a zippered opening. Main differences between Space Shuttle food and that served on earlier flights would be greater variety and larger amounts, more efficient handling of food, and more comfortable natural dining arrangements. (NASA Release 78-176)
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