- Hi it's me, Tim Dodd,
the Everyday Astronaut. I'm in space! Well, I'm in the space station mock up here at Johnson Space Center in Texas. I'm here to talk to you guys about food because food is obviously
a huge part of our lives. Not only is it how we
get nutrition to live but it's also a really big
part of our mental well being and even feeling at home. Can you imagine being away
from home for six months, a year, two years if you're going to Mars and you never had those
foods that make you feel all cozy and warm? Those foods that you love and adore. 'Cause although space food
has actually come a really long way and there's a
ton of science involved in all of this stuff, to date, we've never actually baked
anything fresh in space. So imagine never having
warm pizza with the aroma wafting up into your nose, or
a coffee or even fresh baked cookies, the smell floating
throughout your house. To me that is how you feel at home. I've got some good news 'cause
we're actually working on that exact thing as we speak. Let's get started. - [Announcer] Three, two, one. Lift off! (upbeat music) One small step for man. (announcer mumbling) - On November 2nd, 2019,
Northrop Grumman launched a Cygnus Cargo Ship on a resupply mission to the International
Space Station for NASA. On board was just over 3,700 kilograms of science experiments, vehicle hardware, crew supplies, and lots of
other important space stuff. But included on this
flight was a space first. An oven. And not just any oven,
but a custom zero g oven developed by Nanoracks,
who's a leading provider of commercial access to space. This oven will be used to
bake the first food in space a DoubleTree chocolate chip cookie. So today, I thought we should
do a history of space food, figure out why we haven't
ever baked anything in space before, and
learn from the experts on how DoubleTree by Hilton,
the sponsor of this video, will actually bake their cookies on the International Space Station. Okay so let's start off
with a really quick run down on the history of space food. After all, space food has been around since the dawn of human spaceflight. The first human in space
ever, Yuri Gagarin, having ate from toothpaste
like tubes of pureed meat and chocolate sauce. Yum. The first two crewed missions
from the United States didn't even bother with any food due to their short suborbital flight times lasting only about 15 minutes. So it wouldn't be until almost
a year after Yuri's first flight that NASA would bother
feeding an astronaut in space. The lucky astronaut was John Glenn, and being the first US
astronaut to go into orbit, he spent five hours in space, warranting the need for an inflight snack. Like Yuri, he too ate from
tooth paste like tubes filled with applesauce,
pureed beef and vegetables. Although, he chose not
to eat the spaghetti which was in a tube. That sounds disgusting. Most of the early 1960's flights
from the Mercury program, the Vostok, Voskhod and
early Soyuz programs pretty much all just ate food from tubes, and it was pretty much
unanimously considered awful. It wasn't until the United
State's Gemini program that space food would get
a little more advanced. Gemini 3 was the first crewed
launch of the Gemini program and had commander Gus Grissom
and Pilot John Young on board, and NASA was excited for them to try their new menu of space food. This included new things
like shrimp cocktail, chicken, vegetables, toast
squares, butterscotch pudding and apple juice, all of
which were either dehydrated or covered in gelatin coatings. But my favorite thing about this mission is how excited NASA was to
get the astronaut's feedback on this newly developed menu and to study the astronaut's
health after the flight. So you can imagine their
shock when they found out John Young snuck a corned
beef sandwich on board and gave it to Gus Grissom
to eat, which by the way, Grissom wasn't supposed to
eat anything on the mission, let alone a corned beef sandwich. The sandwich was almost
immediately put away when crumbs began floating
around the cockpit, which is generally considered
a really really bad thing. After a congressional
hearing and slapping Grissom and Young's wrists, NASA went
back to tweaking their food to make it more appealing, more appetizing and more nutritious. This is especially since NASA
was preparing to send humans out to the moon, not having
them throw up their food, and making it desirable was
actually a really big deal. With the Apollo program
NASA introduced hot water for rehydrating freeze dried foods. They also developed
something called a spoon-bowl which allowed for more normal
eating practices in zero g. The next big leap in space food wouldn't be until after the
official Apollo program ended. Advances were made for the Skylab program which had huge living areas, allowing for an actual
refrigerator and freezer! This allowed some new menu
items like butter cookies, Lobster Newberg, fresh
bread and even ice cream. It should be noted, the fresh bread wasn't actually baked fresh,
it was just not freeze dried. A nice upgrade nonetheless. During this time there was
also the Apollo-Soyuz mission which was the first time US
astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts would flavor each other's food. The crew of Soyuz 19
provided canned beef tongue, Riga Bread and tubes of
beet soup and caviar. Fun note, the beet soup
was labeled as Vodka as a joke to the American crew. I actually love that. Apollo-Soyuz is literally
one of my favorite missions because of two cold war enemies
unifying over spaceflight. Let's not get me started. It wouldn't be until the
Space Shuttle program, and later the International Space Station that we'd see an actual oven put in space. But wait, isn't this whole video about the first oven in space? Well the space shuttle's
oven could only reach 82 degrees celsius, so it was
only capable of warming food, not boiling water or cooking meals. For the most part, the way
food was done on the Shuttle is how food is done on the
International Space Stationtoday. The astronauts do get
supplies of fresh fruit on resupply vehicles
every few months though, along with some other surprises! But perishables don't last
long and cargo resupplies are few and far between. In 2015, the Italian Space Agency launched an espresso machine, called
ISSPresso or I-S-S Presso which allowed astronauts
to freshly brew espresso. They even had a cool zero-g coffee cup. But the Coffee in space
mission ended in 2017. So that brings us up to speed, to today, when there is finally an actual oven capable of cooking fresh
meals and items in space. So in order to understand
where exactly this new oven will be installed on the
International Space Station, I spoke with Liz Warren
who is the Senior Associate Program Scientist for the
International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory. (light music) First off, where am I? - We are in the US lab,
also known as Destiny. - Destiny okay, 'cause obviously
there's tons of modules. And the other thing that
is important, specifically to this video is where
is this oven going to go? - Well the zero g oven is
gonna go in an overhead rack. - Overhead? - In the Destiny module. Of course, it doesn't
matter that it's overhead when we're in space, 'cause
we're just gonna float and use it normally. This rack also features
a potable water dispenser which is where the astronauts are able to fill up drink bags. They're also able to
rehydrate food pouches that have been dehydrated in
order to launch them to space. - That's basically the only way
right now that we have a way to have, I guess, fresh-ish
food or add flavor or texture that we might be more used to. We dehydrate it to go up and
then have to rehydrate it? Is that pretty much right? - That's pretty much it. There's food that is thermal stabilized. So it's been put into
a pouch and irradiated so it's very safe, no
microbes for the astronauts. - Maybe potentially boring? - Hmm, actually the food
is tremendously good. I've tried a lot of different
foods that are launched to the Space Station,
but it is little limited after day in and day out. There's the dehydrated
food that we talked about, adding either hot or cold water, to reintroduce water into the food. Then very rarely, when a new
cargo resupply ship arrives there's some treats,
some fresh fruit maybe or some fresh food, but not very often. Of course you also know
there is a veggie facility where lettuce can sometimes be grown. - What's that called again? - It's called Veggie.
- It's Veggie. - We've been able to grow
some fresh vegetables in there but it's also kinda limited in size and it's not enough to make
a salad every day for-- - [Tim] Specially not for a crew of six. - No it goes pretty quickly. - I guess the question is
then, this is obviously it's a pretty big deal to be able to actually bake something in space. It opens up some new possibilities
for your diet obviously. - Absolutely and it asks some
pretty interesting questions. So not only does it provide
the ability to in the future for astronauts to be able
to make their own foods which is a challenge, right? But it also asks really
interesting questions. So there's no convection in
space, hot air doesn't rise, cold air doesn't sink, so
how is an oven gonna work? It also has to be safe.
- Obviously, yes. - So designing an oven to
work on the space station took a lot of work. - Is that why, it's never been done before and we've been in space for over 50 years, almost 60 years now and we've
never baked anything in space. It seems like a pretty important step. - I think part of it also has to do with the amount of time that you have. The astronauts aren't given
hours of time for meal prep. They're working 12 hour days. So the ability to take
some pouches, put 'em in, it's literally a warming container. It's got some thermo-electric
heating coils, it just warms up their
food, or they add hot water. But it's eating on the go, they're not spending
a lot of time on this. But when we're talking about going to Mars and back to the Moon,
there may be some more time for exploration in terms of cooking. - This actually opens up
the possibility of some day literally having the first space chefs. - Right. - Otherwise imagine your
meals, well here we go. Well this evening I've
prepared for you this pouch. (both chuckle) - The future holds space hotels. The future holds, you better
have some good culinary experiences for your customers. - Absolutely! - We need to test that oven. And a space station is
a tremendous test bed for innovative ideas and
that's part of the reason why we're doing this. - You literally can't really
test that anywhere else. - You really can't. You really can't. - Literally you can't
test it anywhere else. - There's no laboratory like the International Space Station. There's no place on Earth like it. - Yeah.
(Liz laughs) - Sorry. - Is that your tag line? - It should be. - There's no place on Earth. Well except for this. - Well, this is, yeah. (both laugh) - [Tim] So once I got a good
sense of where the oven will be and why it's important, I went
down the road to Nanoracks, who built the oven the
DoubleTree chocolate chip cookie will be baked in. (light music) - So, a typical oven in
a terrestrial environment would work by convection. So you would have heat,
usually generated at the top or the bottom of the oven and then it would set
up convection currents. The warm air would rise, it would drive cold air out of the way. And you would get this distribution
of heat inside the oven. In space there's no up, so
there's nowhere for air to rise, so you don't get convection
and you just get pockets of hot air around a heating element. Then you're dependent upon treating your entire air mass as a conductor. Air is a really good insulator, so it's not a very good conductor of heat. - So literally will heat just get stuck on the heating element basically, it doesn't really radiate off of there? Oh radiate it would.
- It will radiate but your primary mode of transfer of heat is convection in air. You will have basically like a little, our heating elements are
wires that run back and forth inside this oven chamber,
so you'll have basically a little cylinder of really
hot air around that wire and then it'll have a
gradient tapering off. Our modeling shows that in
the steady state condition the chamber walls of the oven
conduct heat away very quickly so they stay relatively cold but the hot air mass will heat up and collect heat in the center of the oven where the cookie is
actually actively baked. This is a validation of that model. That's what we expect to happen, that's how we designed
the oven to operate. We'll bake a cookie, if
the cookie bakes properly we'll know that this is sound science and if it doesn't bake properly, well we'll scratch our heads
and try and find out why. - So you literally, okay. So you have to place what
looks like the cookie ends up on this little, what
looks like a plastic bag. I assume it's not this plastic
that melts into the cookie and then you get plastic-- - No, this is food grade silicon. This is designed to
completely house the cookie and all it's crumbs. You can already see some
crumbs floating around in here. Obviously we can't have these
floating around the station they'll get ingested in the equipment, could be aspirated by an astronaut. So everything has to be contained. So the sample tray provides
the structure to slide and hold onto inside of the oven, to keep the cookie from
just floating around. The sample tray slides into
the oven on those rails and is securely held in
place, prevents the cookie from floating around and
running into heating elements. The silicon sheets contain
all the cookie crumbs and bits that could come off of it. - [Tim] Right, especially
when you open the door you wouldn't want it, there
probably some air currents that could happen and fling
a bunch of stuff everywhere. - Yeah, and the other important thing too and the other rationale for why
we really had to do the tray other than obviously all
the points Caleb's already made about containment and all that is also keeping it in
the center of the oven. If you put something
and you let go in space, it just goes wherever it was going or whatever direction it was headed in. So part of the issue that we had to solve was actually keeping it stationary
in the center of the oven so that it will actually be
affected by that heat evenly and to keep it centered in the
heat instead of moving around or getting all the way
towards the back or something like that where we'd have
a problem with the baking. - Right. For some reason heat flows
is one of those things that still hurts my head. I just don't get it, especially
when dealing with rocket engines and stuff like that. Well, but it's touching it. I don't know, it hurts my brain, I'm not very good at understanding. So does the tray at all end
up receiving any heat flow and directly heating the cookie through, would that still be convection? - It's entirely conduction
with very little radiation. The radiation tapers off with distance as r squared I think, one
over r squared or something. I have to look the formula up again don't quote me on the video on that. The radiation tapers off with distance so with the very small heating element, your radiation effect of
the heating is so small by the time it gets to the cookie that it's almost negligible. But the entire air mass is heated. With the air mass being hottest
in the center of the oven and it will be conducting to the cookie. The air mass is conducting
to whatever you're cooking in a typical convection
oven, it's the same concept. It's just your air currents
distribute the heat evenly around the inside
of the oven versus-- - The heat's physically
moving, like the heat's rising and moving through the medium or-- - Well the medium is expanding
and becoming less buoyant. So the air expands when it's heated, becomes more buoyant and so
floats to the top of the rest of the air mass and then when
it floats up, it displaces cooler air that fills
in the space underneath it then heats up and you
get this convection cycle. So in this oven, with no up,
there's no convection cycle so we just evenly heat the whole air mass. We treat the air mass as a
solid for modeling purposes and then we show that the
air mass will be hottest right around where the cookie's sitting. - I'm probably gonna play the
why don't they just version, why don't you guys just do this. Which I'm sure your
engineering team probably had a lot of fun actually
trying to figure out. Like if air flow is important in an oven and convection normally creates
rising currents and things why didn't you just put a fan
in there and move air around? - We had considered it, but
getting a fan to withstand the heat that's gonna be generated in here is one of the problems we
would have to overcome. Our initial approach and our
models show that this should be effective, so we decided
to just press on with this. Simpler approach, simpler design. - Why have moving parts that
can fail and all that stuff. - Then there's RPM limits
NASA instills on fans. The concern of creating
debris if there's a failure. There would have to be
screens and what not to protect debris from being
blown around by the fans. This is a simpler approach
and a faster approach and should be an effective
approach if the science is right. - There's also acoustic
limitations as you mentioned too as well and so things
like that and then also there's the heat load in
terms of what we can push out. So it's also a function of what we're actually expelling into the racks. So some of it too is
that we don't want to be pushing that hot air immediately out. We want to let it be a
little bit cooler by the time we actually exit the air
from the back of the oven. So we don't want to just
be blowing all the hot air from the oven, 'cause
then we won't get, right. 'Cause part of the issue
is the efficiency and using the energy that we have to
actually heat the cookie. - Yeah if you blow it out the back you just waste it.
- So if we're losing that heat then that's gonna be even
harder to heat it up. So efficiency also in space is obviously very important as well. - Right. And how hot does it actually get? What temperature are you cooking to? (Caleb mumbles)
What temperature are you cooking cookie too? - We're cooking the cooking to 350. I don't recall what we
sized the heating elements for the max heat to be. I think it was somewhere
around 400 or 425. - So pretty standard operating range. It's not like you had to be
at like 25,000 centigrade or something for the coils
and then it tapers in or something, it's pretty-- - We don't want to incinerate the cookie. We just want to bake. (laughs) - That's a good idea. I actually got these numbers later on. The first cookie will be baked at 163 degrees celsius for 18 minutes. The teams will then analyze
the results of that cookie and adjust the temperature
and time for each of the next cookies based on the results
of the previous cookies, until they end up with the perfect cookie! - And obviously when you approach NASA and you say, "Hey we have
something that's gonna get hot." They freak out immediately
because they don't want to burn an astronaut,
they don't want a risk of anyone being burned or starting a fire. So we couldn't get too extreme with the heat generation inside here. - Since we're also not
sure about performance we want to start with a lower temperature and see what we get. So we want to actually bake
at different temperatures and see what the result of that baking is because we're not sure. Even if you bake at a
high altitude or you bake here on the ground, the
difference in the temperature and the time that you take to bake is actually quite different. So we do actually want to
bake at a couple of different temperatures to see what do
we actually get as a result and adjust from there. - Yeah, and especially
can you imagine being able to some day have a bigger
and bigger garden in space and being able to cut up
vegetables and things. Is that something you'd be
able to do, would you be able to put other things besides
cookie in the tray for now, or eventually and be able
to bake all sorts of things, lasagnas and--
- Oh absolutely. - How does that open? How do you actually get the
cookie in and out of there? - So this one was purposely
designed to keep people from accessing it, since
this is really the first time that we're doing this and
we really do want to see the scientific results of this and obviously there's a lot
to prove in terms of safety and all that as well. So for this first attempt,
we really want to be sure that everything is safe and
kept clean and away from anyone from any possible contamination
or things like that. Obviously for future
consumability and baking things that people will eat in the future, we will have to consider a
modification to this design, to allow for more ease of access. Unfortunately it is pretty much riveted so it is designed to keep
people from getting to them. But in the future of course we will have a more accessible tray. - If I understand this correctly,
'cause I think I've read that the first cookies actually
baked they don't get to eat. Isn't that kind of torturous? Isn't that mean? Hey, we got to eat fresh cookies. Yeah, go back to your. Is that true? - It is true. Unfortunately that is true. We do need the samples back
really to learn from then and to really figure out
how are we actually going to bake in space successfully, right? So we need to know how
this first experiment goes so we can iterate from
there and figure out how are we going to make
this baking in space something we can do in
the long run sustainably. So that is really an unfortunate fact. As a negotiation, or as
a thank you for the crew. We have arranged to
actually have pre-baked cookies sent to them, so
they'll actually receive a tin of pre-baked cookies, like that one. So there actually will
be cookies available that are already baked and are safe to eat so they can choose to eat
those if they'd like to. Especially after hopefully
having some lovely aroma of a fresh baked cookie in space. - I think one of the most
important questions is, you said it would vent
hot air, does that mean there's a good chance
that the actual aroma of fresh baked cookies on the
International Space Station will actually go out? - Yes, yes. The silicon sheets here have
a 40 micron vent in them to allow water vapor and gases to escape to prevent it from inflating. In our initial tests we didn't have vents and we ended up making a
balloon inside the oven. So we added the vents and
there's also a 40 micron vent at the back of the oven to
prevent pressure from building up inside the oven. So the cookie smell will
be vented out of the oven and enter into the avionics air plenum and be circulated in the station. - But the other good thing is
that when the crew actually removes the cookie sample
in the tray from the oven, they will also be able
to smell through the vent the actual aroma of the cookie. - Again, it won't actually, that smell wouldn't rise from the cookie. It might just dissipate of it.
- The fumes. - Interesting. - You can maybe waft it across
at the gentleman near you. - Yeah, here you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're saying that maybe
we can see a new tradition some day of when a crew is
arriving, they might start baking fresh cookies in
anticipation of their arrival, so that when they arrive,
it smells more like home. They get a little bit of
feeling of hospitality. I think Doubletree obviously,
that's a good fit for them. I can see why they did this. Because that's a huge concern,
is that home away from home feeling that is very, very absent when you're I think on the
International Space Station that I don't think a lot
of people understand. - [Caleb] It's a very spartan environment, it's very utilitarian. Anything we can do to help
them feel more comfortable and have a more positive
experience up there is important. - And they're there for a long time. I mean I'm sure at the
beginning it's not so bad but after you've been there for a while I can see it getting quite homesick and as we look at going
further and further away it becomes more and more
important to have an opportunity to really provide that comfort. (upbeat music) - So to summarize. Food is important, period. Food in space is even more important than food down here on Earth. As humans get ready to send humans further and further away from our
natural sources of food, it becomes more and more
important to have ways to prepare food that's not only
nutritious, but also delicious. The oven that will bake the
DoubleTree Chocolate Chip Cookies is a small but important step in how humans can prepare food in space. The simple design that
Nanoracks came up with has virtually no moving parts and takes safety into
account first and foremost. But like all science, testing
your models in real world conditions is always
the most important step, so having this oven
actually do some baking and test out the science is
actually a really big step. As for why is this just now happening after 60 years of human spaceflight. It mostly comes down to
time being the most valuable and limited resource on the
International Space Station. The crew onboard the ISS
are working 12 hour days, so having a meal that's
quick and easy to prepare helps free up precious time. And in general, things aren't really made for human comfort on
the floating laboratory. So food in space has always
been a bit of a practical thing. But in the future, we need to
take comfort and hospitality even more into focus as paying customers might expect finer things
on their space trips. And it's probably a good thing I'm not onboard for
these first experiments. Despite the first cookies
being riveted shut, I'd probably be like,
"Houston, we have a problem. "Something strange happened up
here and the tray broke apart "and the cookie accidentally
flew into my mouth" I wanted to say a quick thanks
to the team at DoubleTree for helping arrange time for
me to see the International Space Station mock up, which was awesome, and speak to the experts at Nanoracks. If you guys know me at all,
you know I like to learn by asking a lot of questions,
so that was awesome! Let me know what other questions
you have about space food, the future of space food, or
just spaceflight in general. And let me know what
things you would want most in a space hotel in the comments below. And as always I have a
special thanks to my Patreon supporters for helping make
videos like this possible. If you want to help me do
what I do, consider going to Patreon.com/everydayastronaut. Thank you. And another fun way to
support what I do is to go Everydayastronaut.com/shop and
check out some awesome merch. Thanks everybody, that's
gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut bringing space down to
earth for every day people. (upbeat music)
