Meals for Mars

A standard mission to the International Space Station is six months long. About nine months before launch, each astronaut tastes the 200 or so items on NASA’s space menu and chooses what they want to be sent into space for them. Nutritionists weigh in to make sure they get the nutrients they need, and astronauts can take some ‘bonus’ treats with them. These can be off-the-shelf foods, and astronauts from different nationalities often have special space meals prepared for them. (Tim Peake got a bacon sandwich, beef stew with truffles and sausages and mash, courtesy of Heston Blumenthal.)

As you can imagine, during their six months of eating nothing but ready meals they have to rehydrate, and things out of cans, most astronauts suffer from menu fatigue. But they can’t nip out for a takeaway, and their ability to rustle something up from ingredients is minimal (although some do try it). Making sure astronauts get their nutrients is a medical issue; making sure there’s something they want to eat is a psychological one. A mission to Mars would take two to three years, and NASA is doing serious research on how best to ensure happy and well-fed astronauts for the whole trip.

Doing research in space is expensive, and so as much research as possible is done here on Earth, in analog missions (we have to use the American spelling, apparently!) that aim to recreate conditions in space. The EDEN ISS mission uses Antarctica as an analog, investigating how best to grow food in space.

There are also various crewed missions, where analog astronauts do everything they would do on a space mission – except leave Earth. One of these is the NASA-funded HI-SEAS (Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation), an isolated habitat set in a