Food to eat in a space capsule must be the opposite of a Wolfie’s deli sandwich. It must be lightweight. Every extra pound that NASA launches into space costs thousands of dollars in fuel needed to lift it into orbit. It must be compact. The Gemini III capsule was no bigger than the interior of a sports car. Because of the strict size and weight limits, space food technologists were preoccupied with “caloric density”: packing the most nutrition and energy into the smallest volume of food. (Polar explorers, facing similar constraints and caloric demands but lacking government research budgets, pack sticks of butter.) Even bacon had to be squeezed under a hydraulic press and made more compact (and renamed the Bacon Square).
Compressed food not only took up less stowage—which is how children and aircraft designers say “storage”—space, it was less likely to crumble. To the spacecraft engineer, crumbs were more than a housekeeping issue. A crumb in zero gravity does not drop to the floor where it can be ignored and ground into the flooring until the janitor comes around. It floats. It can drift behind a control panel or into an eye. That’s why Grissom stashed the corned beef sandwich when he saw it was falling apart.
Unlike a Wolfie’s sandwich, a sandwich cube can be eaten in a single bite. Even a piece of toast will drop no crumbs if you are able to pop the whole thing into your mouth. Which you can do when your toast, as Young and Grissom’s did, takes the form of a Toasted Bread Cube. As an extra margin of safety, crumbs were held in check by an edible coating. (“Chill fat-coated toast pieces until they congeal…,” goes the recipe.)
The aerospace feeding teams—some Air Force, some Army, some commercial—devoted considerable effort to perfecting the coatings for their food cubes. One technical report outlines a Goldilocksian progression of formulas. Formula 5 was too sticky. Formula 8 cracked in a vacuum. But Formula 11 (melted lard, milk protein, Knox gelatin, cornstarch, sucrose) was thought to be just right. Except by those who had to eat it. “Leaves a bad taste in your mouth and coating on the roof of your mouth,” Jim Lovell complained to Mission Control during Gemini VII.
IT IS ONE THING to craft a lacquered sandwich cube that weighs less than 3.1 grams and resists fragmentation “when the sandwich is dropped from 18 inches onto a hard surface.” It is another to make this the sort of food a man will happily, healthily eat for weeks at a time. The missions of the Mercury and Gemini programs were, with one or two exceptions, of short duration. You can live on just about anything for a day or a week. But NASA had set its sights on lunar missions up to two weeks long. They needed to know: What happens to the digestive health of a man who consumes regular servings of lard flakes and pregelatinized waxy maize starch? How long could a human being survive on the kinds of foods being dreamed up by military test kitchens? More direly, how long would he want to? What does this sort of food do to morale?
Throughout the 1960s, NASA paid lots of people lots and lots of money to answer these questions. Space food R&D contracts were handed out to the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories (AMRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and, later, the School of Aerospace Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base. The U.S. Army Natick Laboratories drafted the manufacturing requirements, commercial vendors did the cooking, and AMRL and SAM inflicted them on Earth-bound test subjects. Both these bases constructed elaborate space cabin simulators where teams of volunteers were confined for mock spaceflights, some for as long as seventy-two days. Food was often tested at the same time as spacesuits, hygiene regimens, and different cabin atmospheres—including, delightfully, 70 percent helium.
Three times a day, experimental meals would be left by dieticians inside a pretend airlock. Over the years, recruits survived on all manner of processed and regimented aerospace foods: cubes, rods, slurries, bars, powders, and “rehydratables.” Dieticians weighed, measured, and analyzed what went in, and they did the same with what came back out. “Stool samples were…homogenized, freeze-dried, and analyzed in duplicate,” wrote First Lieutenant Keith Smith in a nutritional evaluation of an aerospace diet that included beef stew and chocolate pudding. You had to hope Lieutenant Smith kept his containers straight.
A photograph from this era depicts a pair of men in impossibly cramped conditions, wearing hospital scrubs and belts with some variety of vital-signs monitor. One young man sits hunched on the lower tier of a bunk bed so narrow and thin as to resemble a double-decker ironing board. He holds what appears to be a petit-four in his left hand, and a plastic bag containing four more layered cubes in his lap: dinner. A piece of tubing is taped to his nose. His roommate wears black Clark Kent glasses and a communications headset and sits at the kind of console that looked futuristic in 1965 and now looks Star Trek campy. The caption unhelpfully reads: “Space food personnel, 1965 to 1969.” Perhaps the writer had tried something more informative—“Testing the effects of miniature sandwiches on heart and breathing rates”—but could find no way to phrase it without compromising Air Force dignity.
Many of the shots are Before photos, luckless smiling airmen posed on the threshold of the SAM test chamber alongside dietitian May O’Hara before they step inside and she closes the hatch. O’Hara looks exactly as you imagine an Air Force dietician to look—neither over-nor underweight, well coiffed and nice-looking, though unlikely to have a profound effect on the heart rate and oxygen uptake of young Air Force recruits. O’Hara was a good Egg Bite. In a military news service article, she voices concern over the acceptability of the various space foods “day after day for 30 days or more.”
She seemed to be the lone voice of reason. Though cube foods were getting tepid ratings, their developers pressed on enthusiastically, relentlessly, hydraulically. They could not see that foods that require you to rehydrate them with your own saliva—by holding them “in the mouth for 10 seconds”—might be a spirit dampener on a weeklong flight. And they were. On mission after mission, sandwich cubes were, says retired NASA food scientist Charles Bourland, “some of the things that routinely came back.” (He means they were still on board after landing, not that they were regurgitated. I think.)
I telephoned O’Hara at her home in Texas, just after lunch on a weekday afternoon. She is in her seventies now. I asked her what she’d eaten. It was a dietician’s lunch, and a dietician’s answer, laid out like a cafeteria menu: “Grilled beef and cheese sandwich, grapes, and fruit punch.” I asked May whether the SAM simulator subjects often quit the studies early or busted out of the airlock to make a midnight run for Whataburger. They did not. “They were all just as cooperative as they could be,” said May. For one thing, she explained, they’d just come out of basic training. The prospect of a month with no physical demands more strenuous than chewing had a certain appeal. Plus, in exchange for volunteering, they were given their choice of Air Force assignment, rather than simply being sent someplace.
Over at the AMRL simulator, the volunteers were paid under-grads from nearby Dayton University. Perhaps because they were paid, or because Dayton was a Catholic school, these men too were compliant and generally well behaved. Though missing Communion* occasionally became an issue. One volunteer became so agitated that the scientists broke protocol and summoned a priest, who gave Holy Communion over closed-circuit TV and microphone. Into the pass-through port was placed a small portion of wine and a single Communion wafer, whose palatability probably scored on a par with more typical chamber fare.
One test diet scored even lower than the cubed foods. “It was milk shakes in the morning, lunch, and supper. And the next day, it was milk shakes in the morning, lunch, and supper,” says John Brown, the officer who had been in charge of the AMRL space cabin simulator. On a scale of 1 to 9, volunteers who lived on them for thirty days gave the food an average score of 3 (dislike moderately). Brown told me 3 probably meant 1: “The subjects filled out their forms telling you what you wanted to hear.” One subject confided to Brown that he and his fellow volunteers had been regularly dumping portions of their formula under the cabin flooring. Despite the diet’s unpopularity, the
researchers evaluated no less than twenty-four different commercial and experimental liquid diet formulas. I once read an Air Force technical report that lists the desired attributes of edible paper: “Tasteless, flexible, and tenacious.” It’s how I imagine some of these space food guys.
Meanwhile, over at SAM, Norman Heidelbaugh was testing a liquid diet of his own devising. An Air Force press release called it the “eggnog diet.” May O’Hara described it as “sort of a powdered Ensure.” “That was really not acceptable,” she said with uncharacteristic bite to her words. Heidelbaugh himself seemed to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths.
Though it appeared that the science of nutrition was attracting a unique breed of gustatory sadist, other forces were at work here. It was the mid-sixties. Americans were enraptured by convenience and the space-age technologies that bestowed it. Women were going back to work, and they had less time to cook and keep house. A meal in a stick or a pouch was both a novelty and a welcomed time-saver.
That was the mindset that propelled one of the AMRL’s least popular liquid diets into a long and lucrative career as Carnation Instant Breakfast. The Space Food Stick also began life as a military washout. What the Air Force called “rod-shaped food for high-altitude feeding” was originally intended as food that could be poked through the port of a pressure suit helmet. “We couldn’t get them stiff enough,” O’Hara told me. So Pillsbury took back its rods and went commercial with them. Bourland says they occasionally went up with the astronauts simply as an onboard snack—sometimes under the name Nutrient-Defined Food Sticks and other times as Caramel Sticks, fooling no one.
Even the companies who made food sticks and breakfast drinks didn’t expect the American family to eat nothing else. I have reason to believe that a cabal of extreme nutritionists was influencing thought at NASA. These were men who referred to coffee as a “two-carbon compound.” Who wrote entire textbook chapters on “topping strategies.” Here is MIT nutritionist Nevin S. Scrimshaw defending the liquid formula diet at the Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems in 1964: “Persons with other worthwhile and challenging things to fill their time do not necessarily require bits to hold in their mouth and chew or a variety of foods in order to be productive and to have high morale.” Scrimshaw boasted of having fed his MIT subjects liquid formula dinners for two months with no complaint. The Gemini astronauts narrowly escaped a fate worse than cubes. “We are hoping, in the Gemini program,” said NASA man Edward Michel at that same conference, “to go to some type of formula diet…. We will use it during pre-flight, during the flight, and for a 2-week period post-flight.”
Scrimshaw was wrong. People do “necessarily require bits to hold in their mouth and chew.” Put them on liquid diets and they crave solid food. I spent just one morning on the Mercury-era tube diet, and I did. The astronauts no longer eat tubed food, but military pilots do, when they’re in the middle of a mission and can’t stop to unwrap a sandwich. Vicki Loveridge, a helpful and congenial food technologist with the Combat Feeding Directorate at U.S. Army Natick, said the formulation and technology have changed little since the Mercury era. Loveridge invited me to Natick. (“Dan Nattress will be making Apple Pie in the tubes on the morning of the 21st.”) I couldn’t go, but she was kind enough to send me a sampler box. They look like my stepdaughter Lily’s tubes of oil paint.
Tube eating is a uniquely disquieting experience. It requires bypassing the two quality control systems available to the human organism: looking and sniffing. Bourland told me the astronauts hated the tubes for precisely this reason: “Because they could not see or smell what they were eating.” Also unnerving is the texture, or “mouthfeel,” to use a food technology coinage. When a label says Sloppy Joe, you expect some Joe. The Natick version has no discernible ground-beef qualities. It’s puréed. All tubed food is, because, as Charles Bourland put it, “the texture is limited to the orifice of the tube.” The very first space food was essentially baby food. But even babies get to eat off spoons. Mercury astronauts had to suckle theirs from an aluminum orifice. It wasn’t heroic at all. Or, as it turned out, necessary. A spoon and an open container will work fine in zero gravity as long as the food possesses, to quote the adorable May O’Hara, “stick-to-it-ive-ness or whatever.” If it’s thick and moist enough, surface tension will keep it from drifting off.
The Sloppy Joe tasted like frozen enchilada sauce. The Natick vegetarian entrée—which someone, obviously at a loss, had simply labeled “Vegetarian”—was another vaguely spicy tomatoey purée. Being a Mercury astronaut must have been like being trapped in the sauces aisle of a very small grocery store. But the Natick applesauce—identical in formulation to John Glenn’s history-making applesauce tube*—was A-okay.
Partly, I imagine, because it’s familiar. You expect applesauce to be puréed. One of the problems with the early space foods was their strangeness. When you’re hurtling through space in a cold, cramped, sterile can, you want something comforting and familiar. Space cuisine appealed to the American public as a novelty, but astronauts had had enough novelty for several lifetimes.
FROM TIME TO TIME, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don’t rise to the surface. “You just get a foamy froth,” says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don’t rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. “Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray,” Bourland adds.
Bourland was in charge of a short-lived effort to serve wine with meals on board Skylab. University of California oenologists steered him toward sherry, because it’s heated during production, and thus keeps better. It’s the pasteurized orange juice of the wine kingdom. Bottles aren’t allowed in space, for safety reasons, so it was decided that the sherry, a Paul Masson cream sherry, would be packaged in plastic pouches inside pudding cans. Further limiting the already limited appeal of cream sherry.
The sherry cans, like any other new technology bound for space, were taken up on a parabolic flight for zero-gravity testing. Though the packaging worked fine, no one on board that day left with much enthusiasm for the product. A heavy sherry smell quickly saturated the cabin, compounding the more standard nauseating attributes of a parabolic flight. “As soon as you opened it,” recalls Bourland, “you’d see people grabbing for their barf bags.”
Nonetheless, Bourland filled out a government purchase order for several cases of Paul Masson. Just before the sherry went into the packaging, someone mentioned it in an interview and letters from teetotaling taxpayers began arriving at NASA. And so, after having spent God knows how much money on the packaging, requisitioning, and testing of canned cream sherry, NASA scrapped the whole endeavor.
Had it flown, the Skylab sherry would not have been the first alcoholic drink requisitioned by a government as rations for a mission of national service. British Navy rations included rum until 1970. From 1802 to 1832, U.S. military rations included one gill—a little over two shots—of rum, brandy, or whisky with the daily allotment of beef and bread. Every hundred rations, the soldiers were also given soap and a pound and a half of candles. The latter could be used for lighting, barter, or, were you the tidy sort, melted down and used to coat your beef sandwiches.
NUTRITIONISTS WERE NOT entirely to blame for the inhumanity of early space food. Charles Bourland alerted me to something I’d overlooked: the abbreviation “USAF VC” after liquid diet promulgator Norman Heidelbaugh’s name. Heidelbaugh was a member of the Air Force Veterinary Corps. So was Robert Flentge, one of the editors of Manufacturing Requirements of Food for Aerospace Feeding, a 229-page handbook for preparers of astronaut foods. “A lot of the food science guys were military veterinarians,” Bourland told me. Dating back to the Aerobee monkey launches and Colonel Stapp’s work with the deceleration sleds, the Air Force has had colonies of test animals and, by necessity, veterin
arians (or, for those who felt six syllables weren’t enough, “bioastronautics support veterinarians.”) According to the 1962 article “The Sky’s the Limit for USAF Veterinarians!” their responsibilities came to include “testing and formulating foodstuffs”—first animal and eventually astronautical. Bad news for space crews.
Veterinarians in charge of feeding research animals or livestock were concerned with three things: cost, ease of use, and avoiding health problems. Whether the monkeys or cows liked the food didn’t much enter into it. This goes a long way toward explaining butterscotch formula diets and Compressed Corn Flake and Peanut Cream Cubes. It’s what happens when veterinarians make dinner. Recalls Bourland, “The vets would say, ‘When I feed animals, I just mix up a bag of feed and take it out there and they get everything they need. Why can’t we do that with astronauts?’”
Sometimes they did. Witness Norman Heidelbaugh’s 1967 technical report, “A Method to Manufacture Pelletized Formula Foods in Small Quantities.” Heidelbaugh made Astronaut Chow! The top two ingredients, by weight, were Coffee-mate “coffee whitener” and dextrose/maltose, casting doubt on the vet’s claim that the human pellets were “highly palatable.” Again, deliciousness was not among this man’s overriding concerns. Weight and volume were. By those criteria, Heidelbaugh had a winner: “Caloric density would be sufficient to provide 2600 kcal [2.6 million calories] from approximately 37 cubic inches of food.”
Heidelbaugh’s space-saving methods sound extreme, but only until you read the solution proposed in 1964 by Samuel Lepkovsky, professor of poultry husbandry at the University of California, Berkeley. “If it were possible to find suitable astronauts who are obese,” Lepkovsky begins, seemingly unaware that he is nuts.* “An obese person with 20 kilograms of fat…carries reserves of 184,000 calories. This would provide over 2900 calories daily for 90 days.” In other words: Think of the rocket fuel that could be saved by not launching any food at all!