Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
21.08.2023 - 11:54 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
I imagine the Apollo 11 astronauts had plenty to do while they were hurtling towards the Moon, but from a bystander’s perspective it was probably pretty dull stuff. Still, it’s Day 3 of the mission, so let’s have a look at what they’ve got stashed away in their space age picnic basket.
In February 1962, when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in his Mercury spacecraft, there were concerns about whether humans would be able to successfully eat and drink in space.
After some tentative sips of water, with which he had some xylose sugar tablets, Glenn ate applesauce from a tube, and then a mixture of pureed beef and vegetable. Apparently he chose not to eat a tube of spaghetti. The tubes of food were an idea developed by the military for fighter pilots, which enabled them to eat without removing their gloves and helmet. Yummy.
In fact, though, Yuri Gagarin had already had a meal in space, in April 1961. He also had to squeeze it from tubes, and had beef and liver paste, and a chocolate sauce dessert.
In those early days, cosmonauts ate better. The Soviets developed 30 different tubes of food to choose from, and also sent up bite-sized bread rolls that could be eaten without making crumbs (a surprisingly big hazard in zero-g) plus pieces of salami and fruit jelly. They had various sorts of fruit and vegetable juices.
By Project Gemini, NASA had introduced freeze-dried food in powder form or bite-sized cubes coated with gelatine or oil to prevent crumbling. Astronaut John Young carried two of these meal packages to trial on his Gemini 3 mission. He also, famously, took along a unsanctioned corned beef sandwich, which created crumbs and got him into trouble with NASA. Project Gemini astronauts could try shrimp
Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps the latest space plant news and then talks about some of the seeds with space stories.
Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.
While we’re waiting for Tim Peake to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin his Principia mission, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the first Briton in space – Helen Sharman, who was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991.
One of the nerdy things I enjoy doing in my spare time is researching the first seeds to have made it into space. This is what I have found so far:
It has been a month since we set up the AeroGarden and started our journey into space gardening. It came with three herbs – basil, dill and parsley. The basil was the first to burst into life and has been the fastest growing. I trimmed the top of one of the young plants at the end of July, and it’s probably ready for another trim now. The parsley was the slowest to germinate and isn’t remotely close to catching up, but it is growing well now.
From the moment humans started to reach for the skies, we have used other species from Earth to test what’s safe and what happens to life away from its natural habitat on the planet’s surface.
Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps important spacecraft Arrivals and Departures and learns about growing nutrients and medicines in space. There’s a new plant experiment running on the International Space Station, and exciting news from ESA.
Fifty years ago today, at 13:32 UTC, Apollo 11 launched on its mission to drop off the first humans to set foot on the Moon. It’s something that hasn’t been achieved again since the Apollo program ended, although interest in going back to the Moon has been rekindled somewhat of late. While we remember it as one of the crowning moments of the 20th century, it’s worth noting that the Apollo program wasn’t without its critics. In an interview in 1961, Norbert Wiener, a professor and legendary mathematician at MIT, dismissed the Apollo program as a “moondoggle”!
In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.
Aldrin and Armstrong blasted off from the Moon in the Eagle lander at 17:54 UTC on 21st June, after spending 21 hours and 36 minutes on the lunar surface. They were carrying 22 kilograms of samples, including 50 rocks, fine-grained lunar “soil” and two core tubes that included material from up to 13 centimetres below the Moon’s surface.
Back in 2014, I bought some seeds that had been into space. They are cinnamon basil (Ocimum basilicum Cinnamon), still sealed into their space packet.