Sure, space travel sounds exciting, but space travelers are still workers – workers who could ordinarily go to restaurants for lunch or go home for dinner. And while the dining habits of cosmonauts, astronauts, taikonauts, and other void-venturers might seem trivial to us Earth-bound folks who’ll never get to traipse among the stars, space travelers do face serious complications from their truly risky missions in which they sacrifice days, months, or even years away from family, friends, and Earth to expand our knowledge and prepare a multiplanetary future for humanity.
One such risk is “space anorexia,” the failure of space travelers to consume sufficient calories due to factors including disruption in circadian rhythms. That caloric deficit drives bone loss and muscle shrinkage. Then there’s the psychological barrier of knowing your meals will be repetitive, or worse, if certain experiments prove practical, that your last … uh… output … could become your next input.
So, if not the answer, could space smoothies be an answer?
In a paper recently published in ACS Food Science & Technology, researchers from Australia’s University of Adelaide and the UK’s University of Nottingham discuss how creating a space-based smoothie bar will fight flavor fatigue while incorporating essential omega-3 fatty acids. To overcome the morale-withering blahs of dried, shelf-stable foods and the ick of squeeze-tubes, the researchers designed emulsified drinks stable in microgravity with a choice of flavors and sweetness levels.
“Fortified beverage emulsions could potentially help there, especially when providing nutrients at levels not met by normal nutrition,” says first author and co-lead Svenja Schmidt, a researcher in the School of Chemical Engineering and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space at Adelaide University. “We suggested omega-3 fatty acids to help protect against space radiation and increase the bone formation rate.”
Focusing on creating stable mixtures with water-soluble substances such as sugar and oil-soluble ones such omega-3 fatty acids, the team developed a capillary-force system for emulsifying small amounts of water and oil. According to co-lead Volker Hessel, this microfluidic system will work in microgravitic environments such as that of Artemis missions and the International Space Station.
While Schmidt and her team aren’t quite ready to open their own line of space-based Jamba Juice outlets, they have experimented with various blends of fish oils, fruit acids, coconut fats, emulsifiers, flavorings, and, of course, sugar, to craft six customizable recipes, which in a 330-mL (11-liquid-ounce) serving offers up to a third of daily required omega-3 fatty acids.
As soon as feasible, the team will send its space smoothies on an actual mission so crew members can report their taste and mouth-feel in microgravity, and evaluate how long the components will last. After all, who wants to haul a shipping container of smoothie mix to Ceres or Titan if after a few months it blends and tastes like sawdust? Regardless of the results, Hessel says that “being one small piece in the big puzzle of human space exploration and helping astronauts to stay healthy is a visionary privilege.”
Of course, space food has greatly advanced since the days of tube-food and chalky ice cream. Dehydrated and canned foods are common, and Russian cosmonauts on the ISS currently enjoy any of a whopping 450 dishes including beef tongue with olives, cottage cheese with sea-buckthorn, and – stereotype alert – goulash and borscht, while trading cottage cheese for shrimp from US astronauts, and sashimi and ramen from Japanese uchuu-hikoushi (宇宙飛行士).
And while in North America there’s hardly a tiny town without its own Chinese restaurant, aboard their very own space station Chinese taikonauts feast on yuxiang pork, Kung Pao chicken, freshly roasted chicken wings and steaks, eight-treasure rice, fresh fruit including apples and grapes, fresh lettuce from their own space garden and, of course, moon cakes.
But smoothies would still be pretty nice, too.
Source: American Chemical Society
