The company was started in 1951 by a Girl Scouts leader interested in lighter foods to take camping. Ames got in touch with Boulder, Colorado-based American Outdoor Products, one of the few companies making freeze-dried food for the consumer market. In 1973, the visitor center at Ames Research Center in California had a new idea: what if visitors could taste astronaut food?įreeze-dried food was key in the astronaut diet at the time but still only just starting to hit the wider market. Looking to capture-and expand-that interest, museums developed exhibits on space exploration, and their gift shops offered new ways for visitors to take the experience home. With millions of people around the world riveted to TV footage of astronauts landing on the Moon, interest in the space program grew enormously in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Not only does it help preserve nutritional value and extend shelf life, but removing the water also reduces the weight significantly, which is always an important consideration in space travel. In the decades since, NASA has continued to improve the cuisine it sends for its astronauts-among other advances, astronauts on the International Space Station have access to a refrigerator for fresh fruits, as well as an oven to better heat up their meals-but freeze-drying continues to play a role. The new gravies were encased in a special plastic container that made it easier to mix in the water. NASA funded research at the Army Natick Laboratories, which was able to develop special gravies that, when freeze-dried, could be reconstituted with 80-degree water in just five minutes. Previously, reconstituting dried food required boiling (or near-boiling) water, and most foods needed a good 20 minutes to prepare. Among other requirements, the team was looking for “food that could be reconstituted in cold (approximately 80 ☏) water,” according to the 1971 report, in just 10 minutes or less. The astronauts complained, and for the Gemini missions, NASA went back to work. Not only were the foods unappetizing, but they were hard to rehydrate and prone to sending crumbs floating into the spacecraft’s instruments. In the earliest human missions, the Mercury flights, astronauts ate bite-sized cubes, freeze-dried powders, and semi-liquids squeezed out of aluminum tubes like toothpaste. None of these methods of preserving is new, but NASA has contributed to and stimulated advances in this area,” explains a 1971 report prepared for the Agency’s Technology Utilization Office. “Of these, the most prominent are: dehydration, freeze-drying, intermediate moisture, pasteurization by irradiation, and nitrogen packing. NASA funded research on an array of possible food preservation techniques. Food needed to be shelf-stable and long lasting, and it needed to pack small and light and be easy to prepare. In the early days of the space program, one of the many problems to solve was feeding the astronauts during their time away from Earth. But first, astronauts brought it on trips into orbit-and NASA helped create a novelty ice cream treat to connect young museum visitors to the wonder of space exploration. Hikers carry it on backwoods treks and doomsday preppers stock it in their basements. It’s in the baby food aisle and next to the dried apricots. Freeze-dried food, today, is commonplace.
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