Maggie Coblentz

As you say, you need Velcro.

You can't just have something sitting on a table.

But still, it was this human nature to have some kind of design intervention for a meal and for socializing with their fellow crewmates.

I borrow pieces from all of these different fields or ologies to create something new or

What are they eating up there in general?

The history of space food is so fascinating that the different space agencies have their own dining modules or their own cooking equipment.

So NASA and the European Space Agency

seem to share different systems for preparing food on the ground to go up to space.

And then how do you actually prepare the food in space?

So originally it was canned, which is extremely heavy and not the most practical, although it is a mode of preserving food, but this is heavy and costly to actually get to space.

So at some point we're creating freeze-dried foods.

So this is just a dried food like Tang, but it's not always powdered form.

It

usually looks more like a sponge.

I actually have some sitting in front of me right now.

So it's a burger patty that's been snapped in half and packed into this plastic wrap with all of the liquid removed from it.

So it weighs practically nothing, a tiny circle of Velcro on the side.

So an astronaut could attach it to a wall and there's a barcode on it because astronauts are, everything that they eat is monitored from the ground.

So they would scan in what they eat so that their nutritionist could

supervise this for them.