Maggie Coblentz

So that was a huge challenge.

I also gathered that being in weightlessness is a lot of fun and it's so fascinating.

But just having to...

relearn how you use your body for the most basic of tasks, including eating, including switching a knob, turning on your camera, how you position your elbows.

And it's just a really surreal experience, almost like being a baby and trying to learn how to walk.

Your legs are not needed, which is also really interesting to think about accessibility in space and things that are useful here on earth are not necessary in a zero G environment.

So you get to think through all of these ways of existing.

So that's like the holistic approach.

experience that i took from it and then just the pure joy and playfulness that at least through this experiment we were able to bring to it which i think when you look at an astronaut's schedule their entire day is planned into these 15 minute increments of different tasks and operations their time is so valuable when they're up there on space they barely have time to do anything and so for our experiment same thing it had to be line by line exactly what you're going to do but

Can we intervene and leave room for mistakes and leave room for improvisation?

And then with astronauts, I conducted some on-Earth taste tests and interviews with virtual reality to kind of customize these different experiences.

For one astronaut who grew up near an apple orchard, they wanted to have this experience of eating outside.

So could they, you know,

eat something freeze-dried while using this virtual reality to kind of have this nostalgic feeling of being back on Earth.

And at least in this context of this experiment, they, you know, it was highly effective and at least like evoked these stories and helped draw out what the importance of culture and ritual and food was for them in an environment where that's not always part of the discussion.

I think they're eating...

less up there because they're reporting to experience this food fatigue for all the reasons that we, you know, generally unpleasant.

There's another story I love of these twin astronauts, Scott and Mark Kelly.

One went to space, one was an astronaut, did not go to space, and they wanted to conduct this really interesting genetic study on these individuals because they were identical twins.

So really understanding what happens to the body in space compared to