Maggie Coblentz

And it tells you how much water to add.

So there's a little spout on the top of the package and they would attach it to something called the rehydration station, which is on the international space station.

It's something almost like 90 or 99% of the water that's used is recycled from human urine, human perspiration.

And then that gets processed and you put that back into your food as a warm or hot water and then let it sit and cut the package open with scissors and eat it directly from the bag.

So a lot of these foods are modeled after MREs, which are military rations.

Shut up and chow down.

Exactly.

But today it's different.

There's, I think, Lavazza sent up an espresso machine because the coffee is, again, just powdered like an instant coffee.

You add water.

Another company called Zero Tea Kitchen sent up an oven so they could bake the first cookie in space.

There's lots of people who are trying to help these poor astronauts with food.

Yeah, I guess it would be...

Around the Apollo era, when astronauts started going to space for longer term and they would actually need to bring days of food supply and keep it in their capsule with them.

And then now the food plans are changing even more where the current food system is supposed to last five years and they have the deep space food program at NASA, at least, to start to think about what is food for Mars.

And what are the challenges associated with preparing those foods?

How will different space environment conditions impact the food?

Will it degrade?

Will the color, texture, nutrition value change for these trips where the return date is not even known?

Sometimes I'm sitting in a room and I don't know if I'm on a set of a science fiction film or if I'm actually in a real science movie.