Of all the freeze-dried, thermostable and ready-to-eat food products she helped send into space, Vickie Kloeris' personal favorite was the cherry-blueberry cobbler.
Kloeris was a food scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for 34 years and not only enjoyed the cobbler, but helped develop it.
"During the shuttle program, we weren't really doing any product development. All we were doing was if a product went away, we would find a commercial product to replace it," she said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "Not until we entered the International Space Station [program] that we finally got the funding to develop some products, and the first thing that came up was desserts."
More than just a desire to satisfy astronauts' sweet tooths, Kloeris and her team at the Space Food Systems Laboratory found there were benefits to adding desserts to crew members' menus.
"We really thought that, from a psychological perspective, having a dessert that you could reheat would be great. And it was; they were very accepted."
Plus, the cherry-blueberry cobbler was just "really good."
Related: Food in space: what do astronauts eat?
Kloeris shares more details about the desserts' development and more anecdotes from her NASA career in her recently released memoir, "Space Bites: Reflections of a NASA Food Scientist," published by Ballast Books.
collectSPACE spoke with Kloeris about the book, space food and the challenges her successors face as commercial spaceflight expands and astronauts embark on longer space missions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
collectSPACE (cS): So we know what your favorite was, but what was your least favorite food item that you sent into space?
Vickie Kloeris: I think for me personally it was the split pea soup. I'm not a pea person.
The thing about the pea soup: it came in a bag. And because it was in a bag, it had to have a certain viscosity. It had to be quite thick. And so not only was it peas, which I didn't like, but it was also very thick. So that was my least favorite.
cS: As you explain in "Space Bites," some foods just aren't a good fit microgravity environment of space. You write about why tortillas are the perfect bread for space flights, and it's the same reason chips are not a good idea: crumbs (or lack thereof). But when you talk about trying to make potato chips fly into cans, you're calling them generic, instead of Pringles. Is that just a habit, given NASA's aversion to calling foods by their brand names?Kloeris: It was definitely Pringles I was talking about, but yes, it had become a habit of me not identifying the brand name.
We used to joke about it. The fact that M&M's are called "candy coated chocolates" predates my tenure, but more than once I've been asked, "Did you erase all the little m's from the candy?" [No.] But for most of my career at NASA, "commercialization" was a dirty word. Now the pendulum has swung far in the opposite direction.
cS: You remember in "Space Bites" how early in your career you were tasked with cleaning out a cupboard and discovering all this leftover food - space food cubes - from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Not only did you clean it, but you also tasted some. Was that the oldest example of space food you've eaten?The overall goal of the agency is: how can we commercialize? And it is interesting to see that this has not yet penetrated the food system. For example, Axiom Space's third private mission to the space station is about to fly a Thai product, and that happened through an agreement between three different companies. NASA is still not in a position where it would consider something like that.
Related: Private Space Station: How Axiom Space plans to build its orbital outpost
Kloeris: The cubes were probably the oldest space food I ate, and they were pretty awful.
cS: There are space food packages that you have prepared now in private and museum collections. Would you recommend anyone to eat them?
Kloeris: It depends on how and where it was stored, because the pouch material NASA uses for freeze-dried food is not completely impervious to moisture. We used a foil-lined enclosure to keep moisture out on board the space station. But if you have a freeze-dried package that has been on display for a long time, it can theoretically absorb moisture, and the freeze-dried food is not sterile; it contains bacteria.
We tested the cube packs before eating them to ensure there were no pathogens.
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To follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @gathering SPACE. Copyright 2023 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.cS: Are bacteria or pathogens a problem for future longer-duration missions, such as when we send astronauts to Mars
Kloeris: What's interesting about NASA's Artemis program is that the food system is actually taking a step backwards. This could change, but last I heard they won't have the capacity to heat food on the Artemis vehicles.
But for Mars, shelf life is definitely the biggest challenge. I'll go into this in the last chapter of the book, but if I have to prepare the food for a Mars mission most likely-produce it, put it on a cargo rocket, and send it to Mars-by the time the crew gets it eat it, it gets really old. It could be anything from five to seven years old, possibly, depending on how they pre-position the food and when they pre-position it.
We can make food that is safe to eat during that time. The challenge will be what nutritional value it will still have, because although freeze drying and thermostabilization control microbial growth, they cannot really stop the chemical changes in the food. Over time, chemical changes will cause nutrition to decrease, especially when it comes to certain nutrients.
And the quality is deteriorating. So colour, taste and texture. If the quality is poor enough after a while, the astronauts will only eat enough to survive and not really enough to thrive. So that's a challenge, because NASA wants high-performing crew members for a three-year Mars mission, or however long that will last. That is the biggest challenge.