From tubes to tortillas: a history of astronaut and cosmonaut food — and what's on the menu for the Moon and Mars

From a toothpaste tube to 58 tortillas

On 20 February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to eat in space — squeezing pureed applesauce out of an aluminium tube aboard Friendship 7, followed by a beef-and-vegetable puree and a few xylose sugar tablets washed down with water. NASA wasn’t worried about taste. It was worried about whether a human could swallow at all in zero gravity, and whether crumbs floating into instrument panels would end a mission. Sixty-four years later, the crew of Artemis II will fly with a 189-item menu that includes 58 tortillas, 43 cups of coffee, and maple syrup and maple cream cookies packed specially for Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. In between lies one of the stranger case studies in food engineering: how do you feed a human being who cannot go to the shop, cannot use a stove, and might not come home for three years?

The tube-and-puree years

The earliest space food, Soviet and American alike, was built entirely around the fear of crumbs and the uncertainty of swallowing. Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space in 1961, ate pureed meat and chocolate sauce squeezed from tubes — practically toothpaste with a different job. Glenn’s Friendship 7 menu the following year was the American equivalent: purees, not food you’d recognise as a meal, chosen because they could be swallowed reliably and left nothing loose in the cabin.

That obsession with crumbs produced the most famous incident in the history of space food. On 23 March 1965, aboard Gemini 3, astronaut Wally Schirra had bought a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s, a delicatessen near Cape Canaveral, and slipped it to crewmate John Young, who smuggled it aboard in his spacesuit pocket. Young offered it to commander Gus Grissom mid-flight. It made headlines, and Congress hauled NASA in to explain the crumb-contamination risk — prompting NASA administrator George Mueller to publicly promise it wouldn’t happen again. It’s a small, almost absurd story, but it’s real, well documented, and it explains why the food that followed was engineered so aggressively against mess: freeze-dried cubes coated to reduce crumbling, and rehydratable pouches you added water to through a nozzle. When Apollo 11 landed, the crew’s first scheduled meal on the way to the Moon was nothing more dramatic than the next rotation on the menu — bacon squares, peaches, sugar cookie cubes, a pineapple-grapefruit drink and coffee.

Skylab gets a fridge. Shuttle gets a tortilla.

The next real leap came with Skylab in 1973–74, which carried the first freezer and refrigerator ever flown in orbit. Suddenly astronauts had a 72-item menu across a six-day rotation that included ice cream, filet mignon and lobster — and a proper triangular dining table so the crew could eat facing each other, a small but deliberate piece of psychology for long-duration missions. It’s a reminder that space food improvements were never purely about calories; NASA treated a normal-feeling meal as a tool for crew morale on missions that stretched from days into months.

The Space Shuttle era brought a smaller but very practical fix: the tortilla. Mexican astronaut Rodolfo Neri Vela flew on STS-61B in 1985 and introduced tortillas as a bread substitute — they don’t shed crumbs the way sliced bread does, which made them an obvious win for a crumb-phobic engineering culture. NASA later started sourcing space tortillas commercially, including from Taco Bell, for their shelf stability. Decades on, the tortilla is still the default bread on the ISS and the single largest food-item line on the Artemis II manifest.

What the Soviets were eating

Soviet and Russian food took a different path, mostly favouring tins over pouches — jellied beef tongue was a real, documented Soviet space food, opened with a can opener rather than reconstituted with a nozzle. And yes, alcohol made it aboard, carefully. NASA astronaut Norman Thagard has described decanting Russian cognac into taped-over containers labelled “juice” before a 1995 Soyuz launch, and cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin has confirmed that small amounts of alcohol were considered part of cosmonaut rations, framed around health rather than celebration. It fits a broader pattern: where American space food engineering was obsessive about eliminating anything loose or risky, the Soviet program treated a taste of normal life — right down to a drink — as worth the trouble of smuggling into orbit.

The International Space Station: 200 menu items and a vegetable garden

Today’s ISS food system has no refrigeration for crew meals at all — every item has to be shelf-stable for over a year before it’s even loaded onto a resupply craft. That’s achieved through a mix of thermostabilization, freeze-drying, and a small set of FDA-cleared irradiated items, spread across more than 200 possible menu choices so crews aren’t eating the same six days on repeat for a six-month rotation.

The more interesting shift is that astronauts are no longer only eating food that launched with them. NASA’s Veggie experiment, activated in May 2014, grew romaine lettuce aboard the ISS, and in August 2015 astronauts Scott Kelly, Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui ate the first food ever grown and consumed entirely in orbit on camera — Kelly compared the taste to arugula. It’s a genuinely new category: not food designed to survive the trip, but food grown after arrival.

One more thing changes in orbit, and it isn’t the food — it’s the astronauts. Microgravity shifts fluid toward the face and causes a kind of permanent low-grade congestion, which measurably dulls smell and, with it, flavour. It’s a documented reason ISS crews lean hard on hot sauce and heavily spiced food: not personal taste, but a physiological workaround for a nose that temporarily doesn’t work as well.

Feeding a Mars crew with no delivery truck

Every system described so far shares one assumption: a resupply ship is never more than a few months away. That assumption breaks completely for Mars. A round trip runs two to three years, with no possibility of a grocery run partway through, which means mission planners face a problem no ISS crew has ever had to solve: either pack food that stays genuinely edible for years, or grow a meaningful share of it after arrival.

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency have been running open competitions to close that gap. The Deep Space Food Challenge (2019–2024) put $3 million in prizes behind teams building closed-loop food production systems; the final grand prize, $750,000, went in August 2024 to Interstellar Lab’s “NUCLEUS,” a self-contained system for growing food with minimal input. A follow-on round, “Mars to Table,” opened registration in January 2026 with a further $750,000 purse. Separately, NASA’s 2023 Authorization Act funded a ten-year, $15 million Food System Roadmap, with bioregenerative technology — Veggie-style growing systems, in-situ food production, even 3D-printed food — projected to supply as much as 30% of a crew’s caloric needs by 2040.

None of that replaces packed food entirely; the Artemis II menu is proof the tortilla-and-thermostabilized-pouch approach is still the backbone even for the missions flying next. But it marks the first time space food planning has had to think less like a very extreme version of provisioning a ship, and more like designing a working farm with a three-year harvest cycle and zero tolerance for a bad batch.

The same discipline, on Earth

Every stage of this story — freeze-dried cubes replacing loose crumbs, a dining table added purely to keep morale up, a tortilla chosen because it doesn’t shed crumbs, a decade-long roadmap to grow 30% of a crew’s calories on-site — is really the same problem restaurant and catering operators solve every day, just under far more extreme constraints: know exactly what a dish costs, weighs and yields, keep it consistent across every batch, and know precisely how far your supply will stretch before the next delivery. NASA’s version of that discipline has a $15 million research roadmap behind it. In a professional kitchen, the equivalent is knowing your recipe costs, yields and stock levels in real time — which is the everyday problem CalcMenu exists to solve, no rocket required.

Sources

• Space Food: Applesauce, Friendship 7 — Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
• Astronaut John Glenn Was the First Person to Eat in Space — TIME
• Russian Space Food — Food Perestroika
• Fallout From the Unauthorized Gemini III Space Sandwich — NASA
• Contraband Corned Beef and the Early Days of Space Biology: the Gemini III Mission — NASA Ames
• First Meal Eaten on the Moon Was Bacon Squares — Smithsonian Magazine
• Skylab’s Space Kitchen — Naked Kitchens
• How the Tortilla Became a Space Station Staple — The Takeout
• Why NASA Sources Tacos and Tortillas From Taco Bell — The Daily Meal
• Jellied Beef Tongue, Soviet Union — Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
• How to Drink Cognac in Space — Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine
• Alcohol and spaceflight — Wikipedia
• Space Food Facts — NASA
• Astronauts Harvest Space-Grown Lettuce — Space.com
• Space Lettuce, ISS — CNN
• Why Space Makes Food Smell and Taste Surprisingly Strange — SciTechDaily
• NASA Awards $1.25 Million to Three Teams at Deep Space Food Finale — NASA
• Centennial Challenges: Deep Space Food Challenge, Mars to Table Registration — Federal Register
• Feeding astronauts on the way to the Moon and Mars — Phys.org
• Artemis II: What’s on the Menu — NASA
• What Are NASA’s Artemis II Astronauts Eating? 58 Tortillas, 43 Cups of Coffee — Scientific American