NASA Is Reinventing Snack Bars Because …
Space Food Bars Will Keep Orion Weight Off and Crew Weight On, NASA
“To help reduce the amount of supplies Orion will carry for its crew, scientists are developing a variety of food bars that astronauts can eat for breakfast during their spaceflight missions. In the United States, it’s common for people to substitute an energy bar or shake for breakfast, or to skip the meal all together. Food scientists determined that developing a single calorically dense breakfast substitution can help meet mass reduction requirements.”
Keith’s note: Why is NASA spending money on a big fancy kitchen to produce something that I can buy at REI? Why doesn’t NASA do Space Act Agreements with companies to figure all of this out – at their own expense – and give them the ability to put their logos on the snack bars we send on the #JourneyToMars ?
Keith’s note: according to this NASA article “There’s no commercially-available bar right now that meets our needs, so we’ve had to go design something that will work for the crew, while trying to achieve a multi-year shelf-life,” said Takiyah Sirmons, a food scientist with the Advanced Food Technology team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.”
So I have asked NASA “Can you provide me with a copy of the specific NASA nutritional and storage requirements that you are using as the basis for developing the food bars mentioned in this article?”
Let’s see if they release this information or try and keep it secret and force me to file a FOIA request.
Heh. So they’re going to reinvent Apollo-Era astronaut food as well, complete with heavy bar use?
Heck they did this fifty years ago – they should ask Pilsbury for the recipe for Space Food Sticks!
I remember those things. I ate a whole box once which was not how you were supposed to eat them. Butterscotch as I recall.
Best of all, if you washed them down with a glass of orange Tang, you could feel like a real astronaut!
Why when they are still for sale at Amazon?
https://www.amazon.com/Toys…
But if NASA has to make its own the recipe is online.
http://www.cooks.com/recipe…
No commercial alternative according to NASA. Umm… I will remember this now every time someone says I have “unique requirements” and must reinvent that wheel to save an ounce. It’s the trap we get into, where the answer even if right, is wrong, having started at the wrong question.
In this case, I suspect they’re saving grams, not ounces. Calorie dense food bars are quite common in camping stores, but they’re not as big (total calories) as NASA wants. And eating multiple bars would increase the packaging mass (the horror) by a few grams per person per meal.
“Michele and Vickie must plan 7,000 meals and snacks to nourish six people for up to three years. And if food is sent ahead of the astronauts, it will have to keep for five years. Yet only seven of NASA’s 65 thermo-stabilized edibles have that kind of shelf-life. The rest end up like this.”
So, this looks nasty. You are losing flavor, nutrients, probably texture, you’re losing everything. A solution might be new packaging that keeps out all water and air, unlike today’s plastics. With that packaging, we get a about a 9- to 12-month shelf-life. So there is no way we are going to Mars with this kind of packaging.”
Watch at about 26:30
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nov…
A quick search finds many commercial suppliers offering food for survivalists that last 10-20 years. Even Walmart is selling MREs that are suppose to last 81/2 years. Why not just use them?
Or does micro-gravity increase the rate that food spoils?
Or is it just a case of not invented here since the U.S. Army has done most of the research?
The mass of the packaging….
So just use edible packaging. Eliminates waste as well.
http://www.bloomberg.com/ne…
“U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers have discovered that a milk protein called casein can be used to develop an edible, biodegradable packaging film. The casein-based film is up to 500 times better than plastic at keeping oxygen away from food because proteins form a tighter network when they polymerize, the researchers found.”
“Flavorings, vitamins, and other additives can be used to make the packaging, and the food it surrounds, tastier and more nutritious.”
If the packaging is food, wouldn’t it have to be packaged?
Exactly. NASA always has some requirement that no one in the private sector aka The Real World – can provide. Often times NASA will stop and think about something that they can say that they and they alone need to have – something that they can then call a unique requirement simply for the purpose of justifying more play time and useless projects.
Just another symptom of a system gone wrong. Just another sad excuse for meandering goals and visions lost. Just more wasted effort and time.
There are plenty of hard grains that have a shelf life of between 10 – 12 years. Maybe we should lose our fancy tastes and palate to return to something more traditional…Porridge, Gruel, etc. And then after sustainability has been achieved, we can open a new spice road.
Or review the recipes that polar explorers developed by trial and error over a hundred years ago when they had the exact same problem to solve. They often published them in their reports or stories of the expedition. Maybe instead of a big research project they should just go to the University of Houston library and borrow a few books.
Because you can’t buy this at REI; it’s a single bar with ‘700 to 900’ calories.
Maybe not that many calories in a single bar, but you could eat more than one bar to get that many calories. Yes that’s more packaging, but what does an empty food bar package mass, a couple of grams? NASA’s obsession with reducing the mass of every little thing to the extreme just drives up costs for something like this.
Even if NASA insisted on a particular number of calories per package/bar, why do it themselves? Just contract to REI or whoever supplies them? I’d think they’d be happy to repackage the bars. They’d charge, but it would still be cheaper and easier than NASA reinventing the wheel.
Not necessarily. Non-traditional NASA contractors might do the work just for the publicity. As Fisher did with the “Space Pens” during Apollo.
Mars Ba… oh, right, never mind.
So use the existing space food stick recipe and supersize the bar.
I agree with you Keith. When I read the quote, I immediately thought of the “Larabar” we got with many meals at the Philmont Scout Ranch (New Mexico) back in 2011. My favorite was the “carrot cake” flavor. 190 calories in a 45 gram bar. So, to get to the 700 to 900 range, just eat 4 Laurabars for a total of only 180 grams of food.
Calorie dense food bars are extremely common at camping stores, and are great for backpacking.
I used to be an active rock climber (my wife still is) and I can’t walk by an REI without going in. I have been on month-long expeditions to the arctic and Everest Base Camp. Trust me, there are many existing commercial products that could fit the bill and they come in all the flavors that astronauts like.
Back in the 50s and 60s NASA and its predecessors, and the military were working at the cutting edge of technologies that didn’t exist.
That is not the case today. Industry is now at the front in many realms and NASA should buy its products.
Instead of NASA creating everything they need, just put out requests, and bid out the supply contracts.
Strong agreement here! Somehow, this discussion made me think of TANG, the orange drink the astronauts drank when they went to the Moon. I was 9 years old when Apollo 11 moon-landed. Plus I liked sugary drinks, so yeah, I drank lots of it. Knock on wood, my blood sugar is fine, thanks. My mother’s kitchen still has some empty glass containers she uses to store sugar, coffee, etc. Sorry for going off on a TANGent. =)
But Tang was not invented for NASA. It already existed,
NASA just bought an existing product. From NASA’s own history page.
http://education.ssc.nasa.g…
“Tang was originally made by General Foods in 1957, but its popularity reached new heights when it was chosen to fly with John Glenn on Friendship 7 and on later Gemini Program missions.”
The same history page also states this
“When NASA wanted to expand on the solid foods consumed during the Mercury and Gemini programs, they looked to Pillsbury food scientists to come up with a high-energy alternative to what was then the almost universally despised standard: gelatin-covered cubes. The “Space Food Stick” eventually made its way onto the third Skylab mission, but not before it became a pop culture icon and staple of NASA and museum gift shops. The Space Food Stick is considered by many to be the forerunner of today’s energy bar.”
Yes, NASA did do things different in the Apollo era…
I used to gobble those space food bars with my Tang. Whatever became of them?
As I noted in a post further down they are available on Amazon, and the recipe has been published online.
Just bring these back: https://www.youtube.com/wat…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Don’t forget Skylab bars used to extend the Skylab 4 mission, and developed by Pillsbury. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
When I live out in the wilderness, I live on energy bars, granola, and ramen. Whether this constitutes a balanced diet is another matter. There are a number of energy bar companies who produce products that do not live up to its advertising and in fact are fairly unhealthy. For long term missions, however, a varied diet may be more critical to human health.
It always amazes me when all the space food experts come out of the woodwork, experts because they eat every day or have tried some different food. Where does it say NASA is developing a big fancy kitchen. That has been around for years. Where does it say NASA did not consult with industry to produce these prototype bars. NASA does not have bar forming equipment, so no doubt some commercial company likely made these bars. Someone suggested survival foods stored in number 10 metal cans. Most requires boiling water, what are you going to do build a fire and heat it up?
Who suggested survival foods in metal cans? I thought those have been obsolete since the 70’s or 80’s. Military style MREs have been around for decades and are not stored in metal cans.
I am very familiar with MREs having evaluated some of the initial production. I was basing the metal cans on “Mountain House foods are packed in airtight NITROGEN PACKED #10 cans”.
I know there are other packaging options, but don’t know about the shelf life. Another problem with survival food is that it may not meet the nutritional requirements dictated by flight medicine. Reduced sodium, iron, and fat.