Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

The first food consumed by a NASA astronaut, but not the first food in space. The Soviets won this space race, too. Glenn’s applesauce lost out to Laika’s powdered meat and breadcrumb gelatin and the unnamed snack of Yuri Gagarin (in the words of Elena, the Gagarin Museum archivist, “Some say soup, some say purée. For sure there was something in the tube!”).

Sorry, I mean innovative. That is the adjective used by the author of Lepkovsky’s 1985 UC Berkeley obituary. Here we learn that Lepkovsky coauthored the first atlas of the chicken brain and isolated riboflavin from “several hundred thousand gallons of milk.” In what little spare time remained, he enjoyed dancing and amateur stock-market analysis, no doubt reaping great gains in dairy futures.

The space simulator diet tests were big news in San Antonio, Brooks Air Force Base’s home town. In addition to the Express story, the San Antonio Light ran a story. The advertisement that ran alongside was for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, then the nation’s leading insurer. The tag line, and I will send you a copy if you don’t believe me, reads, “Come on, San Antonio! Let’s all go No. 1!”

Egesta is my new favorite euphemism for “feces,” and an even better toilet brand name than Ejecto. Certainly better than Toto. Who names a toilet after a lapdog? Unless it’s Shit-Tzu. I’d buy a Shit-Tzu toilet.

Could astronauts live on steak and eggs? Bad idea. Setting aside cholesterol issues, you’d be missing most vitamins. Fahey pointed out that even wild dogs don’t live on protein alone. “When they kill prey, they eat a smorgasbord of things.” It is a different smorgasbord than the one at Sweden House. “They’ll eat the stomach contents first usually.” Since the prey is usually some grazing animal, this is their side of vegetables.

If you’re among the 50 percent of the population who produce methane, you can play human pilot light. Your friends can hold a match to your gas and watch it ignite and burn blue.

Cabbage resurfaced in the form of kimchi—fermented spiced cabbage—on board the International Space Station when Korea’s first astronaut visited. Space kimchi developer Lee Ju-woon works at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, where scientists are developing ways to harness energy from intestinal kimchi fission. No, they aren’t. But they should be.

If it’s cordless, fireproof, lightweight and strong, miniaturized, or automated, chances are good NASA has had a hand in the technology. We are talking trash compactors, bulletproof vests, high-speed wireless data transfer, implantable heart monitors, cordless power tools, artificial limbs, dustbusters, sports bras, solar panels, invisible braces, computerized insulin pumps, fire-fighters’ masks. Every now and then, earthbound applications head off in an unexpected direction: Digital lunar image analyzers allow Estée Lauder to quantify “subtleties otherwise undetectable” in the skin of women using their products, providing a basis for ludicrous wrinkle-erasing claims. Miniature electronic Apollo heat pumps spawned the Robotic Sow. “At feeding time a heat lamp simulating a sow’s body warmth is automatically turned on, and the machine emits rhythmic grunts like a mother pig summoning her piglets. As piglets scamper to their mechanical mother, a panel across the front opens to expose the row of nipples,” wrote an unnamed NASAfacts scribe, surely eliciting grunts from superiors in the NASA Public Affairs Office.