John Glenn, Jr., was the first U.S. astronaut to eat in space. Here, he is seen entering his space capsule, nicknamed Friendship 7, where he consumed a small tube of applesauce during a three-orbit flight in 1962.
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NASA
This small food packet was designed for emergency use on NASA’s Mercury flights, the first American manned-space-flight missions.
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NASA
Some of the provisions for the 1965 Gemini 3 mission: dehydrated beef pot roast; “bacon-and-egg bites”; toasted bread cubes; orange juice; and a moist towelette for cleanup.
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NASA
James Lovell—the astronaut played by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 —eats from a food packet in a 30-foot altitude chamber during a “dress rehearsal” for the 1966 Gemini 12 flight.
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NASA
Astronaut Eugene Cernan eating in weightlessness aboard the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. According to NASA’s archive, “Cernan appears to be eating chocolate pudding.” Apollo astronauts were first to be able to use spoons in space, thanks to innovations in food packaging.
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NASA
In an early NASA horticultural experiment, botanists grew plants in lunar soil (brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts). Here, specimens of sorghum and tobacco in 1969.
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NASA
In 1975, for the final flight of the Apollo program, a U.S. spacecraft docked with a Russian Soyuz craft and the two crews toured each other’s digs. Here, American astronauts jokingly toast each other with tubes of borscht (which have vodka labels pasted over them) aboard the Soyuz.
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NASA
Young oat seedlings are shown in a ground laboratory after being flown into space on the Columbia shuttle in 1982. They grew to look similar to the Earth-bound control seedlings.
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NASA
In 1995, researchers discovered that exposure to microgravity increases a particular plant hormone; that hormone can cause tomato plants to grow large, seedless fruits like those shown.
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NASA
A close-up of a droplet of water clinging to a pea leaf in microgravity. The pea plant was part of a Russian experiment aboard the International Space Station in 2003.
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NASA
Potato plants growing beneath LED lighting in space, 2004.
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NASA
STS-105 mission commander Scott J. Horowitz (center, floating) opens a can of food as astronauts and cosmonauts from three different crews prepare to share a meal on the International Space Station.
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NASA
Another view of pea plants being grown in the Russian experiment on the International Space Station.
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NASA
Left to right: A specialized LED lighting array that NASA-sponsored researcher Cary Mitchell dubs "lightsicles"; green leaf lettuce grown under an overhead LED array in a hydroponic culture.
Image Courtesy of
Gioia Massa/Mitchell Laboratory of Controlled Environment Agriculture/Purdue University
