Maggie Coblentz

So there's this stereotype that seems to be true that astronauts love hot sauce.

And I think that's one of the reasons just to try to add salt, add hot sauce to boost that flavor.

At present is mostly on the ground.

So yeah, all this food is prepared in different lab contexts and packaged and probably put into some kind of quarantine, tested and then goes to space.

Even the vegetable project I referenced earlier where they're growing herbs and different things in space to see how it works.

The astronauts usually aren't allowed to eat them and even like touching them or interacting with them is...

extremely restricted.

I mean, I won't get into toileting on this conversation, but you can imagine there's a whole long list of challenges to do with that and zero gravity.

So they're very concerned with astronauts getting sick, getting food poisoning in space, because what would you do?

So for that reason,

My space food helmet came about because I was going to go on this zero gravity flight.

And because I was working with food and liquids and small edible things, they were concerned that this could get in the way of other people's experiments because this was a research flight.

So we had, I think, around 20 different engineers and scientists on this flight, all conducting quite serious science experiments.

And they wanted me to have a glove box, which is commonly used in science.

So it is basically what it sounds like.

It's a...

A clear box with gloves where you can insert your hands and then you don't actually put your hands inside the box because you're really putting your hands inside the gloves inside the box, if that makes sense.

And then you can see yourself conducting the experiment.

Everything is very contained and sterile.

And scientific.