Last year it was exactly 50 years since the launch of the first multi-seat spacecraft "Voskhod" -1. From that moment on, the cosmonauts who went on the flight had someone to break a piece of bread with. At the same time, ordinary people who remained on Earth were always terribly interested to find out what the conquerors of the cosmic depths actually eat.
Today you can taste real food for astronauts, for example, in the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics at the All-Russian Exhibition Center. However, in order to fully experience all the delights of a space meal, you still need to ascend to Earth's orbit, since the process of eating in space is quite complicated, and a simulator for ordinary inhabitants of the Earth has not yet been created.
HE SAID: LET'S GO
For half a century of space flights, food for astronauts has come a long way of evolution, no less complicated than the improvement of all space technology as a whole. The first astronauts' menu was rather meager. For example, Yuri Gagarin, despite the fact that he spent very little time in space, nevertheless had a full meal on board. Soviet scientists prepared several dishes for him, packed in special tubes, such as liquid pasta and chocolate sauce.
True, Yuri Gagarin only tasted food as an experiment. The first person who managed to have a full meal in space was German Titov, whose flight was fantastic for that time 25 hours. On the first, he had a glass of vegetable puree soup, the second course was liver pate, and on the third there was a glass of blackcurrant juice. In just a day of flight, the second cosmonaut of the USSR ate three times, but, by his own admission, remained hungry!
Subsequently, the menu of Soviet cosmonauts included beef jellied tongue, fish pies, Ukrainian borscht, entrecotes, Pozhansk cutlets, chicken fillet, two dozen varieties of juices, fruit purees and vegetable sauces. By the 1980s, the astronauts ration consisted of more than 200 different types of dishes.
American astronauts, trying to catch up and overtake the Soviet space explorers, during the flights ate food in the form of small pieces of food, special powders and liquids. However, they did not like such meals, consisting of freeze-dried products. Moreover, fear affected: how would the astronaut's body react to eating in space?
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True, John Glenn, an American who made the first orbital flight under the US flag on February 20, 1962, said that, despite his fears, there is nothing wrong with swallowing food in space, and squeezing the throat muscles in zero gravity is almost no different from a similar process on Earth, the only thing that both Western and Russian cosmonauts noted, sometimes there is a significant distortion of the taste of products.
The first domestic tubes with food weighed 165 grams, and the first sample of the products of a specialized plant was taken by Yuri Gagarin himself. By the way, in space he, besides the very pasta and chocolate sauce, had borsch, potatoes, cutlet and juices. After all, no one knew what food the human body could painlessly accept in space. Gagarin reassured: "You can eat from the tubes!"
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPACE DINING
Back in the early 1960s, the early developers of food for astronauts posed a simple question: What criteria should it satisfy? It turned out to be only a few: to preserve all nutrients, be fully absorbed by the body, be compact and have as little waste as possible.
Not surprisingly, scientists first came up with the idea of a miracle pill that would collect all the nutrients necessary for the human body. It was not so! It was not possible to invent such a pill, especially since the astronauts insistently demanded normal human food.
As a result, in the early years of manned space exploration, the flight participants were offered portable food. These were three-course dinners, each of which was sealed in a tube (similar to the one that stores toothpaste). Food was squeezed out of the tube by the astronaut himself directly into his mouth.
It is interesting that today each member of the cosmonaut corps, going into space, tastes many dishes. He assesses each of them on a ten-point scale. The food that received the highest marks is prepared for the flight, while the “Losers” remain on Earth. Then a varied menu is prepared for eight days, after which the entire cycle of dishes is repeated.
Astronauts eat like children four times in the allotted time. As a rule, the menu includes: Borodino bread in the form of tiny bars (so that there are no crumbs: mini-bars are eaten in one bite), honey gingerbreads, ham, pork in sweet and sour sauce, beef with mayonnaise, azu, quail, pike perch, fried chicken in jelly, cheese, sturgeon, cottage cheese, green cabbage soup and borscht, cutlets with mashed potatoes, strawberries, cookies, chocolate, tea and coffee.
At the same time, modern astronauts love to eat fresh fruits and vegetables in Earth orbit. Most often, the choice falls on those products that grow in the cosmonaut's homeland. Americans prefer citrus fruits, while domestic space explorers prefer native apples, tomatoes or onions. It got to the point that astronauts even began to celebrate holidays with national dishes. So, the Swede Christer Fuglesang was forbidden to take baked meat into space. Instead, he celebrated Christmas with dried venison on the table.
DINNER IS SERVED
However, it is not enough to deliver food to orbit, you first need to properly prepare it on Earth, and then be able to warm it up in space. How does this happen in practice? The products are first frozen to -50 degrees, and then, under vacuum, heated to +50 for 32 hours… + 70 degrees. In this case, the ice does not turn into water, but instantly evaporates, retaining in the product all the nutrients that usually go away with water, significantly reducing the volume and weight of each portion of space food.
It sounds surprising, but today cereals, canned meat and various mashed potatoes, being in space in metal cans made of thin aluminum, are an analogue of ordinary earthly canned food. Astronauts use dried fruit and vegetable juices as drinks.
Food is delivered to orbit in a small container, on the lid of which an inventory of the products contained in it is necessarily attached. The size of each “food set” is no more than a schoolboy's portfolio of Soviet times and contains a three-day ration for one cosmonaut. During a meal, cans are placed on the "kitchen table" in special nests, where they are first heated up, and then the astronauts open them with ordinary can openers.
Eating is also done using ordinary spoons straight from the cans. Certain difficulties are caused only by fluid intake. The package with the beverage concentrate is attached to a special unit, which, using a complex technology, releases the required amount of water into it. The result is soup, puree or juice. Astronauts drink them straight from the bags.
At the same time, it is acute in space. there is a problem of crumbs from cookies or bread, which can get into the eye or cause damage to expensive spacecraft or orbital station devices, so they are destroyed using a special fan built into the “kitchen table”.
There are other problems in space besides crumbs. So, in zero gravity, any liquid, including that drunk by an astronaut, tends to rise upward, thereby increasing the risk of nasal blockage and swelling of the entire face. It is difficult for bones to retain and replenish calcium losses, muscles atrophy, provoking bowel problems and heart palpitations.
But the most unusual thing is the change in the astronaut's height during the flight. Scientists have noticed that due to the reduced pressure acting on the astronaut's spine during the flight, almost all of them, after returning home, gain an average of 3-5 cm in height.
FOOD COMBINE
Of course, the production of space food requires unique equipment. Today only one enterprise produces "space food" for Russia and the CIS countries. This is the Biryulevsky experimental plant PACXH, which is located in the Leninsky district of the Moscow region. The plant's management in numerous interviews has repeatedly stated that the creation of space food is an extremely difficult task, requiring the use of the most modern technologies.
And how could it be otherwise, because food sent into space must take up relatively little space, preserve all the nutrients, be sterile, and most importantly, be stored for a long time. Today, astronauts are fed on the basis that a man in space should consume 3,200 kilocalories daily, and a woman - 2,800.
At the moment, Biryulyovskoye production supplies domestic space crews with food by 80 percent. The remaining twenty are mainly canned fish and dishes. They are produced at a similar plant in St. Petersburg.
In order for the reader to appreciate the work of the "space chefs", we can cite a few figures: in the entire history of manned space flights, more than 80 tons of food have been sent, 50 thousand food rations have been developed, and the average space lunch nowadays costs about 20 thousand rubles. Moreover, this is the cost only of producing lunch, and the cost of delivering food to space is, of course, considered separately.
Dmitry LAVOCHKIN