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Until now food in space meant pre-cooked homogenised meals of meat and potatoes in squeezy, metallic pouches. Food was purely functional. Yet as space travel will become more ambitious over the coming decades we will see astronauts complaeting longer missions in zero gravity. Growing and cooking food as well as enabling proper sit-down meal times is something that innovators are taking very seriously.
Food and nutrition was instrumental in allowing sea-faring crews to explore the far corners of the earth and opened up a whole new world to humans. Space is no different and quite soon we are going to see the first food cooked in space. It’s going to be something on the sweet side and more a ‘treat’ than sustenance, but it will be an all-American favourite – the chocolate chip cookie.
Double Tree by Hilton are working with Zero G Kitchen, a company that specialises in appliances for microgravity use for long duration space flights to create history with the first food ever cooked in space.
A batch of the company’s cookie dough will accompany a prototype oven on board a rocket bound for the international Space Station (ISS) later this year where the microgravity experiment will take place.
You may be able to think of some alternative ideas as to what the first food cooked in space should be – surely something healthier would serve astronauts on long haul space flights than something so sugary. Cookies will not sustain an astronaut in orbit around our planet for very long.
Double Tree by Hilton have already announced their plans to build a hotel on the moon and this next project shows their looking skyward to the future. It’s also part of the company’s aim to inspire the next generation of aspiring space travellers and have them thinking about solutions to space travel problems from the off.
It remains to be seen whether the cookie dough will ‘rise’ in zero gravity.
