Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

by Mary Roach

In Choosing the Right Stuff, Santy cites the development of the private space bathroom—“probably more than any other reason”—as the motivating factor behind NASA’s decision to allow female astronauts.

Were toilets a reason to exclude women, or an excuse?

The irony is that female astronauts are the more practical choice for spaceflight. On average, they weigh less, breathe less, and need to drink and eat less than men. Which means less oxygen, water, and food have to be launched.

Rather than keeping launch costs down by flying smaller, more compact humans, NASA chose to fly smaller, more compact pot roast and sandwiches and cake. Rarely has anything so cute been so loathed.

Astronaut Wally Schirra ordered it to-go and drove it back to Kennedy, where he convinced astronaut John Young to smuggle it on board the Gemini III capsule and surprise his crewmate Gus Grissom. Two hours into the five-hour-long flight, that is what Young did. The moment did not go entirely as envisioned.

The “corned beef sandwich incident” became ammunition for NASA detractors at congressional budget hearings later that year.

The contraband Wolfie’s sandwich violated no less than sixteen of the formal manufacturing requirements for “Beef Sandwiches, Dehydrated (Bite-sized).” The requirements cover six pages and are set forth in the ominous phrasing of biblical commandments. (“There shall be no…damp or soggy areas.” “The coating shall not chip or flake.”) Moreover, the Wolfie’s sandwich exhibited Defect #102 (“foreign odor, e.g., rancid”) and Defect #153 (“breaks when handled”), among dozens of others but hopefully excluding Defect #151, “visible bone, shell or hard tendonous material.”

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.)

stowage—which is how children and aircraft designers say “storage”

The aerospace feeding teams—some Air Force, some Army, some commercial—devoted considerable effort to perfecting the coatings for their food cubes.

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.

Over the years, recruits survived on all manner of processed and regimented aerospace foods: cubes, rods, slurries, bars, powders, and “rehydratables.”

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.

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.

Even the companies who made food sticks and breakfast drinks didn’t expect the American family to eat nothing else.

Tube eating is a uniquely disquieting experience. It requires bypassing the two quality control systems available to the human organism: looking and sniffing.

Also unnerving is the texture, or “mouthfeel,” to use a food technology coinage. When a label says Sloppy Joe, you expect some Joe.

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.

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.

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. “...

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, requi...

Had it flown, the Skylab sherry would not have been the first alcoholic drink requisitioned by a government as rations ...

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,...

“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?’”

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!

The cubes were a digestive fiasco. The coating had been modified, with palm kernel oil used in place of lard. The palm oil waltzed through the gut largely undigested, giving the young airmen steatorrhea, and you and me a new vocabulary word. (Steatorrhea is fatty stool, as opposed to diarrhea, which is watery stool.)

to quote the San Antonio Express,* “gastrointestinal effects which were incompatible with efficient performance in an orbiting vehicle.” The reporter was being coy, but the technical paper spelled it out. Oily stools are foul-smelling and messy.

The report didn’t mention anal leakage, but I will. If you have oil in your stools—be it from Olestra or from space food cube coatings—some of it may ooze out. When you have one pair of underpants for a two-week spaceflight, anal leakage is not your pal.

IRONICALLY, IF YOU wanted to minimize an astronaut’s “residue,” you could have fed him exactly what he wanted: a steak. Animal protein and fat have the highest digestibility of any foods on Earth. The better the cut, the more thoroughly the meat is digested and absorbed—to the point where there’s almost nothing to egest (opposite of ingest).

“For high-quality beef, pork, chicken, or fish, digestibility is about ninety percent,” says George Fahey, professor of animal and nutritional sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Fats are around 94 percent digestible. A 10-ounce sirloin steak generates but a single ounce of, as they say...

Best of all: the egg. “Few foods,” writes Franz J. Ingelfinger, a panelist at the 1964 Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, “are digested and assimilated as completely as a hard-boiled egg.” That’s one reason NASA’s traditional launch day breakfast is steak and eggs.

“Under current conditions,” wrote Franz Ingelfinger, “with the emphasis on short-term flights, I am sure that the most practical solution to the waste-disposal problem has been a constipated astronaut.”

Owing to differences in intestinal bacteria, half the population produces no methane. This makes them attractive as astronauts, not because methane stinks (it’s odorless), but because it’s highly flammable.

Up through Apollo, beans, cabbage,* Brussels sprouts, and broccoli were blacklisted. “Beans were not used until Shuttle,” states Charles Bourland.

Upon the occasion of history’s first manned flights—in the 1780s, aboard the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons—someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. “What use,” he replied, “is a newborn baby?”

The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in. War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism. I see a backhanded nobility in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying “I bet we can do this.” Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government red-lining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let’s squander some on Mars. Let’s go out and play.