The Importance of Baking in Space

The sight of a cookie had never left me wholeheartedly before this one showed up in my inbox.

DoubleTree by Hilton, the hotel series, announced it would send just a tiny oven and a batch of cookie dough into the International Space Station so astronauts could, for the first timebake chocolate-chip cookies in space. The cookies, which the hotel gives guests at no cost if they check in, are “the ideal food to make the cosmos a welcoming area,” DoubleTree explained.

Call me a grump, but the project felt nostalgic, the most current in a long line of efforts to promote a business ’so merchandise, in Tang orange beverage to KFC sandwiches, contrary to the dreamy backdrop of outer space. The program reminded me most of the attempts by Coca-Cola and Pepsi to make space travel-friendly soda cans to get astronauts flying around the now-retired Space Shuttles. The firms poured a staggering amount of money to the design–millions, in Pepsi’s case–but it wasn’t exactly powerful; both the cans leaked and sputtered, and the pop was hot . Carbonated drinks are bad in space even without a particular may; gas bubbles don’t float to the top and fizz out as they do on Earth, therefore astronauts eat more gas when they sip, which means they burp more. And with no gravity into anchor the contents of their stomachs, burping could deliver some of it back up.

Raw cookie dough appeared similarly inconsistent. Charles Bourland, a retired NASA scientist, claims that the bureau never tried to come up with a space-friendly oven because it was simply too risky. Bourland spent 30 years creating food for astronauts, starting with all the Apollo program, until retiring in 1999.

“If a thing else catches on fire and begins burning, you’re going to need to get some way of beating this,” Bourland says. “You could ’t simply open the window and then let the smoke out. ”

But as I spoke with astronauts and many others from the area community, my skepticism concerning the space cookies softened. Bourland stated many astronauts that he ’d worked with liked cooking. Plus they missed it in space.

[Read: Everything you never thought to ask about astronaut food]

Today, astronauts on the International Space Station have varied breakfast, lunch, and dinner selections, plus snacks and desserts, and even NASA’s meals laboratory regularly tests new recipes that may withstand the room environment. (They never handled to get cheesecake directly, though.) But astronauts don’t do any baking or cooking .

Those hotel chocolate-chip cookies is going to be the closest astronauts have come to truly baking something in their own high-flying kitchens. NASA says astronauts won’t actually eat the cookies because they’re, technically, a science experiment. The treats will be returned home for evaluation.

But imagine if space travelers, whether they’re orbiting in a space station high above Earth or residing in domes on Mars, could make their own meals. Not merely to live, such as Matt Damon using his own waste to develop potatoes from The Martian, but to enjoy themselves.

Astronauts on the International Space Station already do things to make the place feel like home, such as playing board games and binge-watching TV reveals . They often eat meals together, particularly during the holiday season. Cooking could offer another distinctly human knowledge in a strange, alien place. It may bring comfort, and even ease stress. It might, for a short time, distract them from their odd surroundings, which, given the opportunity, would probably kill them.

For the time being, meals are mostly created for themon Earth. About the International Space Station, meals comes thermo-stabilized or freeze-dried in disposable components, the products of years’ worth of tinkering and testing at NASA’s meals labs. Astronauts inject hot water to the freeze-dried entrees and heat them up in a little oven that doesn’t get hotter compared to 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Salt and pepper come from liquid form. There are no refrigerators. Some simple cooking is possible, but even the easiest recipes take a great deal of work. Sandy Magnus, a retired NASA astronaut, once tried producing cooked garlic and onions, a procedure that involved repurposed foil packs in the Russians, bits of onion sticking to her hands, and hours of waiting.

Eating requires significant care, too. The meals “may just float anywhere, and sometimes you find yourself using your own spoon or your own mouth to chase round the meals and be sure you get everything in your mouth, instead of stuck against the walls or someone ’s confront,” explains Drew Feustel, a NASA astronaut who returned from his latest trip to the space station this past year.

For your chocolate-chip cookies, astronauts will get detailed instructions for using the experimental oven, constructed by NanoRacks, a space firm that helps develop experiments to the International Space Station. They’ll also get a heavy-duty oven mitt.

“It appears that something you get at a hardware shop for welders,” says Ian Fichtenbaum, the co-founder of Zero G Kitchen, which compensated NanoRacks to grow their oven idea. (“Zero gravity” is actually a misnomer for the surroundings on the space station, or anywhere around Earth; if there were no gravity at all, we’d lose the moon. Astronauts experience weightlessness because the station moves so quickly –17,500 miles per hour–that everything on board is in continuous free drop.)

[Read: How can plants grow in space? ]

In microgravity, ovens reduce the efficiency of their most important attributes: convection, the tendency of warm air to grow, and lovers to circulate that air to evenly distribute the heat. There’s the matter of maintaining anything you’re dried in place. “Here on Earthit’s fairly simple; you catch cookie dough and you plop it onto a tray and you slide it into the oven” says Mary Murphy, a payloads supervisor at NanoRacks who helped develop the space oven. “Our difficulty was, if you push the cookie in the center of the oven, then where does this go? Is it likely to remain there in the center? Is it likely to slide to the side someplace? ”

NanoRacks created that a cylinder-shaped oven lined with heating system parts that may bring inside temperatures to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. It bakes one slab of cookie dough at one time, which is held in place inside a sealed tray. The oven will plug into a device about how big carry-on luggage that supports scientific experiments with electricity, cooling, and other needs.

Doubletree By Hilton

The yummy baking aromas will port to this compartment, Murphy says, therefore astronauts won’t get a whiff until the cookie is completed and the oven has cooled enough to start. (They’ll need to gesture a little more aggressively for the aroma to waft over them, because the warm air won’t rise as it’s on Earth.)

Unlike nearly all of space-station meals, the cookie dough hasn’t been modified for the special dietary constraints of space travel. No one knows for sure how the cookies will turn out. Murphy predicts the cookies will be curved. Fingers crossed they don’t shed too many temptations, which  can be free-floating nuisances on the space station, responsible to get swept into air filters and even the crew’s lungs. During the Space Shuttle era, astronauts asked Bourland, the food scientist, to quit sending pecan sandies, a delicious nosh on Earth but a crumbly nightmare in orbit.

The oven cleared NASA safety reviews in the spring and again can hitch a ride into the space station on that a resupply mission in October. Jordana Fichtenbaum, another half of Zero G Kitchen and Ian’s wife, presents a future where astronauts attract an range of kitchen appliances to their new houses beyond Earth. High-tech farming will keep spacefarers fedup, but bustling about the kitchen can keep them all happy.

“As longer-duration spaceflight gets more genuine and more common, you would like to consider exactly how to create astronauts more comfortable, and what exactly you can incorporate to make it feel more like Earth and more like house,” Jordana says.

They’re considering a blender next.

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