Innovations In Space Food.

[Everten P.]

I know that dehydrated food can be compacted very easily with lots of it fitting in a small area. Therefor, I ask you to speculate and give me your ideas on new types of food copacting techniques and possibly have gourmet food eventually becoming a food in future well good luck!

[Kerbart]

How about a food 3D-printer? Not just for space. Imagine watching food network and just hitting "print" if you want to eat what they're showing!

[m4rt14n]

Well it'll be like eating rubber/soap.... with 3d printer

[Streetwind]

Space chef is actually a specialized job that NASA and Roskosmos hire highly qualified people for. They work around the clock to come up with new ways to a.) cook diverse and high quality food that can be launched safely and cheaply into space; and b.) launch said food safely and and cheaply into space.

This is especially important with the ISS, since they need to keep the crew fed for hundreds of days in a row without boring or disgusting them with bland pastes in tubes. After all, psychological well-being becomes an additional factor besides pure nutritional value over the long term. Plus, long-term exposure to the microgravity environment brings special nutritional requirements in order to minimize muscle and bone loss.

Look at the menu of the ISS sometime - they really go out of their way to treat these people (even if the food still comes pre-cooked and cold out of small vacuum sealed cans).

[Everten P.]

I mean like imagine that the space elevator is made a hundreds of people are booking to go to space, companies investing in building their HQs in space for safety and privacy. I am sure that the people, civilians, and CEOs wouldn't want a space chef to cook their food because it would be expensive to find someone who was willing to "flip" burger in space so you would need a person who has been in space and understands that it could be dangerous to get grease somewhere rember CEOs will not want to eat peanut butter on a tortilla.

[Idobox]

There are chocolate and sugar 3D printers already. What you're thinking of is far more complex, since you need to reproduce texture and taste, not likely to happen in the near to mid future.

The innovation that would make complete sense would be to have a bioreactor on board the ISS. Use either direct sunlight or leds to grow algae, providing a healthy (but boring) source of food and recycling the air. You definitely don't want algae as your main food source for long periods of time, but you could mix it with tastier stuff, or use it to grow Quorn, feed shrimps, or transform it into something tasty (like all the stuff they do with Quorn or soy).

With this, you would need fewer supply missions, saving a bunch of money, and this type of technology could simplify interplanetary missions a lot.

[Kilmeister]

I read something about printing a pizza a while ago. I think they're not too far off from the flavor, but the texture is the problem. Forgive me if I'm mistaken. I didn't re-read.

http://www.space.com/21250-nasa-3d-food-printer-pizza.html

[Camacha]

I love the fact that the Soviets actually took space wodka with them. It does not get much better than that.

Yes, this was real. Also:

Almost every member of the crew of the Mir space station had a bottle of cognac at their disposal.

Alexander Poleshchuk, who spent six months on Mir in 1993 said that when their personal reserves ran out, some on the space station would explore it for more, removing interior panels during their expeditions.

"Sometimes we would bump into a bottle of cognac," he said. "What a joy it was."

[Nuke]

just take a couple hillbillies into space, im sure they could build a still out of station hardware.

[jwenting]

dehydrated wodka, just add water...

Had to laugh when reading "cheaply into space" in combination with NASA. As long as launch cost is not down to the low hundreds of dollars per pound there's no talking about getting things to space cheap.

[Dispatcher]

Don't forget the tried and true:

Space Food Sticks

Tang