The Weirdest Foods Astronauts Eat

No mealtime is complete without the option of salt and pepper, the king and queen of table seasonings. A little dash of both spruces up a bland meal into something flavorful (well, at least edible), and flavor is, well, kind of a big deal — just ask literally every person who's ever worked in a restaurant. So, astronauts naturally have the option to salt-and-pepper-slam a meal, but they do it a bit differently.

Crumbs are a huge no-no in space. Anything that might crumble off into minuscule pieces and float idly around the shuttle poses some serious dangers. Runaway salt or pepper could potentially clog up air vents, invade switchboards, destroy electronic equipment, or lodge itself into the eyes, nose, and ears of crew members. To prevent all that mayhem, NASA provides the crew with liquid salt and pepper. A couple squeezes of the bottles does a bland space meal wonders.

According to SBS, the salt is dissolved in water, and the pepper is mixed into oil. It might seem strange, but it's probably a big help to astronauts trying to choke down some of the other strange foods they have to eat. 

Imagine the absolute excitement — and bewilderment, of course — of a shuttle crew coming upon a floating Taco Bell in the middle of the galaxy. Astronauts would excitedly ditch their vacuum-sealed NASA delights to "think outside the galaxy" and snag a Crunchwrap Supreme. It's a nice — but impossible (c'mon Taco Bell! Space is an untapped market!) — thought. However, Taco Bell still manages to make appearances during plenty of space travel (and we're guessing it's a sight for sore eyes).

Taco Bell entered into the space tortilla game in the late '90s, and they stepped onto the court ready to throw down. Bread is a giant no-no in space because it creates a lot of crumbs, which, as we know, is cause for a lot of panic inside of a zero-gravity space shuttle. So how were the astronauts supposed to enjoy sandwiches? Maybe there was something else that could work in the place of bread... like a tortilla.

Here's where our favorite Mexican fast food chain comes in. The people behind the food development scenes at Taco Bell engineered a tortilla that didn't abide by a standard shelf life. No, these things lasted much longer than what you'll find on grocery store shelves. Once NASA realized these doughy disks were still functional food even after one entire year, it pounced on them. And astronauts have been living mas ever since.

Look, when you're part of a team manning a space shuttle floating around the universe, you're not exactly privy to even a fraction of the resources here on Earth. So, you make do with what you have, and you find inventive ways to recycle. Well, American astronauts who work aboard the International Space Station found an ingenious — albeit stomach-churning — way to keep up the supply of water: Run urine through an intricate filter system for reuse as drinking water. That's right. Some astronauts drink pee, folks. 

And it's not just urine, it's also condensate that comes from the air on the space station. According to The Guardian, condensate is "collected breath and sweat of the crew, shower runoff, and urine from animals on board the station." That's even better, right?

According to some crew members, you'd never even know the difference. Layne Carter, the water subsystem manager for the International Space Station at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center said, "It tastes like bottled water. As long as you can psychologically get past the point that it's recycled urine and condensate that comes out of the air."

ISS commander Chris Hadfield, explains in a video for NASA that the system allows astronauts to recycle about 6,000 extra liters each year for the space station. He also claims the recycled urine creates water that is "purer that most of the water that you drink on a daily basis at home."

Americans and Russians on the space station have separate water systems, and the Russians refuse to drink recycled urine. We can't say we blame them!

Yes, we know. The four words making up this meal roll off the tongue about as smoothly as a blind skier painfully crashing their way down a mountain of moguls. If a dinner guest ever asked, "So, what's on the menu tonight?" and your response was a loud-and-proud, "Tube borscht and rassolnik!," that guest would high-tail it to the nearest Applebee's instead. But, in a world where zero-g is the name and weird food is the game, sometimes Russian foods like borscht and rassolnik come in for a useful crash landing.

Both borscht and rassolnik are kinds of Russian soup; borscht is a sour soup comprised of beetroot, and rassolnik is made with pickled veggies and pork or beef kidneys. That kind of rich flavor is a welcome treat to crew members. "The Americans love our first courses — borsch, rassolnik, kharcho — as well as our cottage cheese, canned food and caviar," Viktor Dobrovolsky, Director of the Research Institute of the Food Concentrate Industry and Special Food Technology, told Russia Beyond.

Much like the coffee (and many other items served in space), The Ledger explains that some soup in space is freeze-dried and placed into pouches. It's then injected with hot water and allowed to reconstitute before it is eaten straight from the package. SBS says other soups, like the Russian varieties many astronauts enjoy, are eaten straight from tubes that look a whole lot like toothpaste. 

We can think of few things that are less appealing than eating something with the words "irradiated meat" on the package. For astronauts, they have little choice — all the meat sent into space must first be irradiated. Beef steak, for example, is cooked and packaged in foil-laminated pouches. Then, it's briefly exposed to radiation with gamma rays or electron beams. This sterilizes that packaging to kill off any bacteria and also makes the steak shelf-stable — a necessary step considering that there is no refrigeration in space.

It sounds like something out of a horror movie, but it turns out exposing food to radiation doesn't cause any harm. The food continues to maintain its original nutritional quality, taste, and texture, and it certainly doesn't become radioactive. Several food organizations have evaluated the safety of irradiated foods and found them safe for consumption, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). We're glad this process keeps astronauts from getting sick in space, but the idea of eating cooked meats zapped with radiation sounds like a weird way to get a workout for your jaw.

One of the biggest challenges of space food is the crumbs, so sandwiches seem like they'd be a no-go in space. Especially after Gemini 3 pilot John Young smuggled a contraband corned beef sandwich on his 1965 expedition. The sandwich bread started to crumble as soon as Young took it out of its wrapper, and scientists were concerned that the stray crumbs could damage the spacecraft. Space sandwiches remained a mystery until British chef Heston Blumenthal took on the challenge.

The Guardian reports that getting Blumenthal's sandwich into space was quite the process. It required the approval of the UK Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and NASA, along with a lot of trial and error to make it happen. There was one caveat: it had to go into a can, which would be heated at high temperatures for two hours to kill off the germs and make the food "space stable." The end result wasn't exactly the BLT you'd expect, and it was quite small (about the size of a Starbucks coffee lid). But, it was a bacon sandwich: "Dense, sticky brown bread [and] tough lobes of bacon placed between grouting-like layers of a thick lard-like butter."

If you think your coworkers hate you for heating up tuna casserole in the office microwave, imagine how astronauts feel about eating seafood in the recirculated air of a spaceship! And yet, tuna fish and tuna fish spread is a common space food for astronauts. On the Apollo 12 mission, astronauts were given bags of thermostabilized tuna fish. They would rehydrate the fish by injecting water into the bag and kneading it for three minutes. This tuna fish must have been very delicious, because one of the astronauts couldn't even finish his small packet. A 16-minute transmission between space and mission control occurred on the third day of the trip. One of the astronauts had leftover tuna fish spread, and they were trying to determine whether the leftovers were still safe to eat (they didn't eat it).

Today, NASA still sends tuna fish and salmon into space, but hopefully it tastes a little bit better than the stuff from the 1960s mission. The fish is still thermostabilized — a process that heats the food to destroy harmful microorganisms — but the process is done in cans instead of using dehydrated food pouches. It sounds weird, but they have easy-off tops, just like the cans you'll find at the grocery store.