What and how astronauts are eating today 50 years after Apollo 11

In 1969, Charles Bourland flew to Houston to interview for a food scientist position at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. From his hotel’s lobby, he watched with millions of Americans as Apollo astronauts took their first steps on the moon.

It was a “pretty impressive thing” to witness while considering a NASA job, he remembers with a chuckle.

Bourland, now 82, came onboard that year; he retired in 2000. In his 31 years as a NASA food scientist, he did a lot of things to improve the quality of what astronauts eat, including adding potassium back into processed goods.

Being a NASA food scientist can be tricky — the team has had to address a range of challenges, from extending shelf lives by years to maximizing nutritional value and minimizing weight to keeping dishes from flying apart in microgravity.

NPR spoke to Bourland and Vickie Kloeris, a food scientist and food systems manager at NASA from 1989 to 2018, about their craft and its evolution. To commemorate Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary this month, here’s how eating in space has evolved — from John Glenn’s first bite of applesauce to today’s beloved Sriracha bottles.

When Kloeris joined NASA’s food program in the 1980s, food teams sent bread into space — but it wasn’t ideal. Bread tends to crumble, and in microgravity, crumbs fly everywhere, contaminating the surrounding air and potentially jamming sensitive equipment. It also has a very short shelf life, growing moldy in just a few days.

But in the mid-1980s, a payload specialist from Mexico named Rodolfo Neri Vela went into space and requested a different type of bread product — tortillas. More at PNG.org