Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast Michele Perchonok has, like nearly all of us, spent her whole life on Earth. But she constantly thinks about what it will be like to live on Mars.
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| © Provided by The Daily Beast Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast |
By Neel V. Patel, The Daily Beast
Michele Perchonok has, like nearly all of us, spent her
whole life on Earth. But she constantly thinks about what it will be
like to live on Mars.
“The picture I always use in my mind is that you launch from Earth,
and you see the planet getting smaller and smaller, and you realize you
will not see Earth at that size for another two-and-a-half to three
years,” she told The Daily Beast.
Perchonok, however, doesn’t
think about the journey to Mars as much as she thinks about what will
happen after we finally land, and what we’ll eat.
A food scientist by trade and the current president of the Institute of Food Technologies,
Perchonok previously spent 17 years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in
Houston as the Advanced Food Technology Project Manager and the Shuttle
Food System Manager, overseeing the direction of the agency’s food
program and the development of what it chooses to feed astronauts living
and working in low Earth orbit.
The challenge isn’t just to
produce a menu for space dwellers. It must account for myriad
problems—which can get tricky when solutions conflict with one another.
“We can’t develop a food system as a silo, for any mission for NASA,”
said Perchonok. “[Food] affects everything else.”
The first major
issue with food in space has to do with delivery. Human food wasn’t
meant to be floating around weightlessly in a cold vacuum outside our
atmosphere.
“There are challenges at NASA that you wouldn’t
consider anywhere else,” Perchonok said. “One of those is mass and
volume.” Every single cubic inch inside a spacecraft needs to be heated
and pressurized, and doing so takes an enormous amount of energy.
Because
that internal space is so valuable, it’s critical that astronaut food
occupies as little of it as possible—using half a spacecraft as a giant
walk-in pantry would be egregiously inefficient. Items must be compact
and packaged tightly, like TV dinners.
Shelf-life is another
consideration—there’s still no way to grow or make food in space. We’re
forced to send packages from Earth. The rockets that carry those
supplies are expensive to make and launch, so new food packages can only
be sent once in a while, and must stay fresh for a minimum of several
months.
The design and engineering of space food is, in fact, a
multidisciplinary endeavor, integrating the biochemistry of food
compounds, the chemistry and materials science of packaging and
preservation, and the physics of how space environments transform and
modify.
The fact that the journey to Mars will take six months
complicates the already difficult juggling act of food delivery and
storage in space.
For one, how do you cook in space? Voyagers will
have to prepare a meal in microgravity with limited kitchen tools. In
addition, there will be dietary restrictions and preferences (a good
meal can go a long way to making life in a stressful environment—like
hurtling through space in a gravity-free tube— a lot more bearable).
Then
there’s shelf-life. “Shelf-life for food is really a combination of the
environment it’s stored in, the packaging, the ingredients and how they
are processed,” among other things, Perchonok said.
Then there’s
the problem of refrigeration. One might think the vacuum of space or the
sub-zero temperatures on Mars would naturally refrigerate food, but
such low temperatures would irrevocably distort the cell structure of
the food and the packaging itself. Storing food outside of a spacecraft
or habitat would also create the hurdle of suiting up to reel those
packages in at meal time.
This creates what Perchonok calls a
“matrix” of a problem. Concocting a new type of starch that keeps foods
preserved at higher temperatures is possible, but limits what kind of
food we could have. Artificial refrigeration within the spacecraft might
be possible, but the insulation and energy required would be
impractical.
“You can’t put yourself in a bubble,” Perchonok said.
“Chemistry is happening in that package, and as time passes, you’re
losing nutrients and food quality. You have to make sure those things
last from the beginning of the mission to the end.”
Eventually,
however, we want to start farming on Mars. The first few missions will
probably rely exclusively on packaged foods, resembling what astronauts
already eat on the International Space Station, imbued with longer
shelf-lives.
But, “as the level of missions progresses, I think
you’ll see more progression into growing plants,” Perchonok said. The
larger goal will be to use agriculture to creating a sustainable food
system that lets future Martian colonists grow what they need on the Red
Planet itself.
So what exactly will we be farming on Mars? Wheat
and soy will probably still be off the table for a while (and brought
over to Mars in bulk), since these foods take a lot of time to process
into edible foods. But fear not, bread-lovers: NASA is already testing
how viable it is to grow certain forms like dwarf wheat in space, which could lead the way to eventually growing such plants in larger agriculture habitats on Mars.
Fruits
and vegetables, on the other hand, are largely ready for consumption
once they grow large enough and ripen on their own time. Perchonok
thinks we’ll see fresh fruits and vegetables being grown on Mars by new
colonists soon after they land. A single type of agricultural habitat could be employed to grow all kinds of different plants, with modifications to temperature and moisture applied as necessary.
Scientists are already experimenting with growing vegetables like lettuce in space and microgravity environments, with a surprising amount of success (with some trial and error along the way). Future experiments will be aimed at testing the viability of growing and harvesting tomatoes on the space station as well. The 2015 movie The Martian
popularized the idea of growing potatoes on the red planet, and while
we’ve yet to try this, some scientists in Peru have demonstrated that potatoes could grow in Mars-like conditions, which is encouraging.
The advent of technology also means the possibility of growing cultured meat on the red planet, enjoying a bite of steak that’s been brewed in a lab.
“My
understanding is right now, it is nowhere close to being
resource-efficient,” Perchonok said. It would take too much time and
space and energy to grow even something minimal. One company’s production costs,
for example, still hover to just a little below $2,400 per pound of
artificial meat. “[But] I have heard through the grapevine that the
industry believes we’ll have this fixed in 10 years,” she said. “We’ll
see.”
We might also develop viable aquaculture systems to grow
fish on Mars. The work on this is extremely preliminary and fraught with
difficulties: the ISS already operates a specialized fish tank
(courtesy the Japanese Space Agency) to study how a school of medaka
fish get along in space, and microgravity doesn’t seem to suit their fishy bodies.
But if those kinks can be worked out and we can create a habitat that’s easy to maintain, then fish like tilapia
might prove the best candidates for life on Mars, thanks to their high
nutritional value and protein content. In fact, fish might be an
exceptional solution to preventing astronauts from experiencing bone loss in low-gravity environments.
Sourcing
foods is one problem, but cooking is an entirely different beast. Part
of the reason TV dinners have worked so well for astronauts so far is
that they require extremely little preparation, apart from heating and maybe a dash of hot sauce to counteract the dulling of the taste buds in space.
On Mars, however, people are going to want to cook good meals for themselves, their colleagues, and their families. It’s human.
“Even
cooking a pasta dish, you’re going to need some sort of stovetop,” said
Perchonok. “You need pots and pans and big spoons and tools, and you
need to boil water.” There will also be a big concern for conserving
resources as effectively as possible—if you mess up a dish, there won’t
necessarily be enough water or heat to make a new one.
No one has
much of a clue what this is supposed to look like on Mars, where gravity
is one-third what it is on Earth. How does boiled water on Mars behave?
Does it splash around too much, or is it able to stay grounded enough
to soften up the pasta well? Does the pasta itself maintain its
structure as it warms up in the water? Will the sauce you’re using
maintain the sort of consistency you’re looking for? Will any oils or
spices you use mix in well enough? Will microgravity make it difficult
to transfer things from one bowl to another? Will it distort how wet or
how dry we keep certain things? Answering these questions will be a
scientific process in its own right.
“We just don’t know how much
the Martian gravity will change these things,” said Perchonok. “It’s
exciting to ponder these things for the future, but they’ll also take a
lot more study and testing to really understand.”
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