Sex, Bombs and Burgers (18 page)

The whole notion of space travel traces its origins back to the military. While today we think of space exploration as a purely scientific endeavour and the ultimate example of international co-operation, that was definitely not the case in the early days of the Cold War.

At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was at a big military disadvantage to the United States. Not only did the Americans have the atomic bomb, they had also recruited the best German scientists and engineers and a good number of the V-2 rockets the Germans had built during the war. Through the late forties, the U.S. Army quickly transformed the Nazi V-2 program, which was responsible for more than
2,500 deaths in Allied countries and a further 20,000 in German concentration camps, into its own space and missile programs.
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As the fifties dawned, Americans were brimming with confidence—their country’s clear technological superiority meant a safe and prosperous future lay ahead. A journey into space was merely a matter of when, not if.

On October 4, 1957, however, Americans had to eat a generous helping of humble pie (it was probably appleflavoured) when the Soviet Union, using its own Germancaptured technology and know-how, launched the first-ever man-made satellite, Sputnik I, into space. Despite its head start, the United States had got caught with its figurative pants down because of internal squabbles over funding and which branch of the military should have control over the space program. The surprise sent the American government and public into a tizzy.

In the fifties, launching rockets into space wasn’t about who could venture farthest from Earth, but rather who could land nuclear weapons closest to their enemy. The Soviet Union had developed its own atomic bomb in 1949, but until Sputnik, the American government wasn’t terribly worried. Bomb-laden Soviet planes, while potentially deadly, could be detected and shot down well before they reached American territory. V-2 rockets, meanwhile, were only capable of making short flights, like from East Germany to the United Kingdom. No one knew yet how to fire a nuclear missile from one continent to another.

All of a sudden, the Soviet Union possessed that ability— and could wipe out the United States with the push of a button. The same, however, was not true in reverse. For the first time in their country’s history, the American people were faced with the very real possibility of annihilation by a technological superior.
The doomsday clock neared midnight and the Cold War shifted to a new level of urgency.

President Eisenhower ordered the formation of two agencies, the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to ensure that the United States would never again be surprised on a technological level. We’ll take a look at ARPA, which soon added “Defense” to its name to become DARPA, in chapter seven. NASA, meanwhile, was to be a civilian-run agency in charge of all aspects of space exploration and long-term aerospace defence research. The civilian veneer was designed to give the United States a sense of moral high ground over the secretive Soviet program, but there was little doubt that for much of the Cold War, the main motive behind any country’s space program was to establish military superiority and hang the threat of nuclear annihilation over one’s enemies, whether through rocket technology or espionage capability. That’s why seven of the nine countries that have so far developed nuclear weapons (eight out of ten if you count Iran) have also launched rockets into space. It also explains why there is so much current concern over North Korea’s attempts to shoot rockets into orbit.
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In 1961, before NASA and DARPA could get up to functional speed, the Soviet Union again beat the United States to the punch by making cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. NASA countered the following year by launching John Glenn who, during his five-hour-and-fifteen-minute flight, became the first human to eat in space while he was in orbit halfway between Australia and Hawaii. “I lifted the visor of my helmet and ate for the first time, squeezing some applesauce from a toothpaste-like tube into my mouth to see if weightlessness
interfered with swallowing,” Glenn wrote in his biography. “It didn’t.”
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And so began the era of space food.

And the Bland Played On

Aside from the two T-38 Talon jets on display outside its main gate, there is little to distinguish the Johnson Space Center from any other American government research facility. The complex, consisting of a hundred or so buildings sprawled out over 650 hectares south of Houston, looks very much like a college campus. The rectangular low-rise buildings, linked by a grid of narrow, tree-lined roads, could conceivably house students learning socio-political theory or business administration. Instead, they’re occupied by some of the sharpest brains around— scientists devoted to preparing humans for leaving Earth.

The only way for non-genius scientists to get past the guards at the front gate is to take a tour from Space Center Houston, the public visitors’ building across the street, appropriately named Saturn Lane. After checking out garish, Disney-like displays of shuttle cockpits and moon rocks, visitors can ride a tram into NASA’s facility to catch a glimpse of the agency’s inner workings. Highlights of the tour include a visit to the sixties-era main control room, which was used during the Apollo program and now—with its push-button consoles, vacuum tubes and monochrome projector screens—looks like a kitschy set from the original
Star Trek
series. Visitors also get to see the cavernous training centre, where astronauts prepare for missions by working inside full-scale replicas of the shuttle and space station modules.

Not on the tour, likely because it’s nowhere near as sexy, is Building Seventeen: NASA’s food lab. Here a dozen scientists
dissect, formulate, test and create foods for consumption by astronauts on shuttle missions, the International Space Station and, perhaps soon, journeys to the moon and Mars. The main testing area looks like a cross between a cafeteria and a bachelor pad, with a large dining table set a few feet away from a kitchen counter. Various packaged foods are chaotically strewn across the room. A box-shaped contraption, like the automated detergent dispensers found in coin laundries, sits at the end of the table. Dr. Michele Perchonok, NASA’s food system manager, greeted me with a smile when I visited and revealed that the box was indeed an oven used on the space shuttle. My previous experiences with so-called space food amounted to eating the tasteless freeze-dried strawberries and ice-cream sandwiches sold at museum gift shops. I just couldn’t believe that was what astronauts really ate, so I had to find out for myself.
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Perchonok served up a plate of beef brisket, accompanied by baked beans, cauliflower and cheese, mixed berries, cookies and, to wash it all down, a pineapple drink. I’d heard from talking to astronauts that the brisket was good, and it was indeed fantastic—the beef strips, flavoured with tasty Texas barbecue sauce, were so tender that they seemed to melt in my mouth. The beans also had a nice smoky flavour while the cauliflower with cheese, despite looking like an unappetizing yellow blob, was savoury too. I wasn’t so thrilled with the berries, which were tart and lumpy, and the pineapple drink was the sort of run-ofthe-mill powdered stuff you get at the grocery store. Still, the meal far exceeded my expectations. I was ready for total chemical blandness, the kind you get with pouched camping foods, but instead I got a meal that would pass muster in a decent restaurant. (NASA’s brisket was actually on par with a plate I had later that
night at the Goode Company Barbeque, a renowned Houston eatery.)
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None of this was news to Perchonok, of course. “Mmm hmm,” was all she said as I praised her cooking. Space food, which today is a mix of freeze-dried, dehydrated and irradiated products, has come a long way from applesauce in a tube.

NASA began developing its own food with the start of the Apollo program in 1961. With the goal of landing on the moon, Apollo missions would obviously be longer than the short Mercury and Gemini jaunts, so astronauts would need to eat. (Apollo 7, the first manned mission in the program, orbited the Earth for eleven days, while Apollo 15, the longest of the Apollo missions, clocked in at twelve and a half.) The problem was, no one really knew what to expect when it came to putting food in space. Microbes might mutate and become harmful, new kinds of bacteria might sprout up or the food might simply rot faster. There was also limited data on the long-term effects of zero gravity on astronauts’ bodies. NASA played it safe and went with the most sterile and bland food it could find. In other words, army food.

The military had learned a valuable lesson during the Second World War: fighting an industrial-sized battle tends to work up an industrial-sized appetite. Fortunately, companies such as Hormel had stepped up to meet the military’s food needs, even if it was with Spam. Though the post-war processing revolution resulted in longer-lasting and more portable foods, the military couldn’t rely on private industry to put in the research and resources needed to meet its specialized requirements, which were likely to change with each new conflict. So Congress gave the Pentagon the green light to set up its own food science lab, and in 1952 the Quartermaster Research Facility opened for
business in Natick, Massachusetts, a small town near Boston. The facility has added functions over the years and changed its name several times. Today it is known as the Army Soldier Systems Center, or more colloquially as the Natick Army Labs, and it supplies the military with food, clothing, portable shelters, parachutes and other support items.

At first, the lab developed standard canned rations that could be eaten in any battle scenario, but the tins ended up being too heavy and bogged troops down. One historian found that a special operations team could become “virtually immobile due to the weight of needed supplies ... Mobility and stealth are decreased when loads become too heavy, and the soldier is too often worn down by midday.”
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In the sixties, just as the space race was getting under way in earnest, Natick’s focus shifted toward making lighter and more portable food packages, with a heavy reliance on dehydration and freeze-drying. Early versions of the Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE) became available to troops, to mixed reviews. The new rations contained a range of rehydratable foods, including beef hash, chili, spaghetti with meat sauce and chicken with rice. Soldiers complained about the taste, but were thankful for the reduced weight and simplicity, which validated the lab’s approach. As the food-processing industry had learned in the fifties, making food that wouldn’t spoil was easy—the hard part was getting it to taste good.

NASA scientists worked closely with their Natick counterparts to develop foods for the Apollo program, with the two labs refining freeze-drying and irradiation processes. Aside from weight and space considerations, the organizations discovered that they had much in common. NASA found
that astronauts lost mass after spending time in space because there was no gravity resistance on their muscles. (Imagine not walking at all for a week; your leg muscles would become feeble from the lack of use.) The solution was regular exercise while in space. Today, astronauts on the International Space Station spend two hours a day on treadmills and other muscle-building machines to counter the effects of weightlessness. All that exercise requires extra calories, which makes astronauts similar to soldiers. Running around shooting at bad guys is tough work, so soldiers need about 3,600 calories, versus 2,000 for a regular (non G.I.) Joe.
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That requirement contrasts significantly with the consumer industry, which has been under pressure for several decades to lower the caloric content of its foods.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of longevity. “Our requirements fit more with the military’s than the food industry’s,” Perchonok says. “We’re both looking for longer shelflife foods, shelf-stable food, which means they don’t require refrigeration,” since there are no refrigerators on the space shuttle or station. Dr. Patrick Dunne, Natick’s senior advisor in nutritional biochemistry and advanced processing, says soldiers also need to be able to heft food around without refrigeration, so the military and NASA are both looking for foods with shelf lives of more than a year, compared with the industry’s need of only a few months. “That makes our research environment a little unique compared to a commercial food producer,” he says.

Although the two food labs have evolved in virtual lockstep, NASA has diverged from Natick in several ways. In zero gravity, astronauts generate fewer red blood cells, which absorb iron. Space foods must therefore be low in iron to prevent the mineral from being stored in other parts of the body, which can cause
health problems. Weightlessness also causes bones to weaken, which means astronauts have to watch out for two imbalances: too little vitamin D and too much sodium. Even though they’re considerably closer to the sun than we Earthlings, astronauts receive much less vitamin D because of all the heavy shielding on the spacecraft, so their diets must compensate. As for sodium, if you’ve ever looked at the nutritional information on a can of soup or a frozen entrée and the potential salt overdose they offer, it’s easy to understand why NASA has avoided using commercially available products. With health consciousness growing among the public, food producers are starting to look to the space agency for help in decreasing sodium levels. “I have a feeling we’re going to be working together in that,” Perchonok says.

Poppin’ Fresh Space Food

When Congress passed the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, it insisted that NASA “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof” and “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.”
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In other words, the space agency was required to enrich American businesses by allowing them to profit from the technologies it invented. The specifics were outlined in the follow-up Technology Utilization Act of 1962. Taken together, the legislation served as President Eisenhower’s not-so-secret weapon to make sure that the United States would never again be Sputnikked.