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One small step for man, one giant leap for carne asada.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have successfully grown and harvested peppers in space and enjoyed their loot for the first time this week. Megan McArthur, an American astronaut with a grin from ear to ear, said on Twitter she added peppers, rehydrated tomatoes and artichokes to her fajita steak to create “the best space tacos ever.”
Delicious tacos are always something to celebrate. But in this case, they make even more sense.
Astronauts often eat freeze-dried packaged food to reduce its size and volume, and some fresh produce is occasionally delivered to the station during routine supply missions. But a longer trip to Mars, which could take up to three years, would make it impossible to get fresh food, and delivery logistics would be difficult even on a shorter trip to the moon.
Therefore, growing food crops in space is seen as a crucial challenge to be overcome by allowing astronauts to supplement their diets. Last year NASA announced lettuce growing in space it was safe to eat and just as nutritious as grown on Earth. But chiles were more difficult to grow; NASA specification He described the experiment as “one of the most complex experiments to date at the station due to its long germination and growth times”.
There is additional benefits for growing chiles. Astronauts who don’t like the taste of their food can eat less and potentially cause health problems. Could add some spice improve morale and reduce fatigue with limited cuisine options available.
Because fluids flow to the head in a weightless environment, many astronauts get choked up and crave spicy food. Some brought hot sauce with them.
NASA researchers spent two years searching for the perfect pepper to grow, evaluating more than two dozen options. They settled in Hatch Chile from Hatch, NM, with ratings of 2,000 to 4,000 Scoville Heat Units, roughly the level of Tabasco sauce. (Like sparkling wine produced outside of Champagne, France, peppers grown on the space station are not technically Hatch peppers as they are grown outside of the Hatch Valley.)
Although astronauts have been growing plants in space for decades, growing edible food has proven difficult without the benefits of gravity and natural light. Veggie, a room on the space station that has been used to grow lettuce and other crops since 2014, feeds plants in a porous ceramic clay instead of soil and uses wicks to direct water to the roots.
A NASA team planted 48 pepper seeds to Earth with a fertilizer specifically designed for peppers and sent them to the space station on a SpaceX cargo resupply mission. In July, the astronauts began watering them and pollinating some flowers; A few of the plants have developed fruit harvested for tacos, and it will be back in November, NASA said.
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