Meals on a Mars Mission
Humans need food to survive- not only that, but the food can’t just be any
food. It must be nutritious, with a degree of variety and good enough taste.
Food not only affects the physiology of the person consuming it, but their
psychology too. That food must also be practical- we simply can’t afford to
send supplies to Mars on a constant basis, so astronauts will have to find a way
to make their food renewable.
Various organizations have tried many different methods of supplying
food for future planned missions to Mars. Some methods apply only to the transit
time to and from Mars, and some methods apply to the future Mars colonies
themselves, and some even cover both.
One idea is to continue to do what the ISS crew does- simply bringing
prepackaged food into space with them. However, prepackaged food would
not have a long enough shelf life for a
trip to Mars, with the longest lasting
packages currently only reaching two
years. There’s also the issue of how
much space it would take up on a
shuttle, and the more mass to the
shuttle, the more it costs to launch it;
prepackaged food for such a long flight
would take up more space than it’s
reasonable to allot. The crew eating these repetitive meals would also
eventually become sick of eating it, and would stop eating as much as they
should, instead only eating what they need to survive. Time for eating should be
considered a positive experience, not a chore, and having a crew view meals
as the latter would ruin morale. Prepackaged foods would be more effective as
a backup or emergency supply than the primary
food supply.
Another option being looked into is 3D
printing food on Mars. While this would give
astronauts a much greater variety of what they
could eat, and it would be more efficient and
cleaner than cooking. A team at Cornell
University, led by Jeffrey Lipton, have developed