"space station" news and stories

As anybody who's ever gone camping can attest, cooking in an unfamiliar environment can be a real chore. Pre-planning meals, carefully choosing ingredients based on weight and convenience, and foraging for fresh ingredients can tax anyone's patience. Add in a forgotten spice or a broken cooking implement, and you have a recipe for misery.

Still, as hard as it can be to find oneself on the trail with insufficient foodstuffs, these miseries are nothing compared to the total annoyance of floating thousands of miles above the surface of the earth, trying to cadge together a palatable cuisine out of preserved Russian and American meats and veggies. While the space program brought us delicacies like freeze-dried ice cream and Tang, it is also responsible for sausage in a tube and irradiated bread!

But, as Astronaut Sandy Magnus demonstrates in this blog, the possibilities of space cuisine are limitless ... as long as one packs enough dehydrated sausage and sun-dried tomatoes!

Three crew members of the international space station are scheduled to return to earth today. They have been in space for six months and what did they miss most? Real food, of course! Not that their families aren't important to them - they are - but the freeze dried and prepackaged space station rations are hardly what you might call gourmet. While it may not be the classic definition of comfort food, Astronaut Bill McArthur wants a salad and a good cup of coffee. He misses the crunch of fresh produce and the flavor of strong coffee. Where do you think he'll go - Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts?

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