Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have a degree in astrophysics and you know how to fly a jet. You've endured years of preparation and training, logged thousands of hours of flight time and even survived NASA's terrifying "vomit comet" weightlessness test. Now you're up in space for the very first time, floating around the shuttle's cabin, and as you look out of the window, you realize something: you're hungry. What are you going to eat? (See pictures of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon...
...zero gravity? Would he choke? Would crumbs float into the shuttle's instruments and break something? To keep things simple, astronauts on the Project Mercury and Gemini missions ate pureed foods squeezed out of tubes. "It was like serving them baby food in a toothpaste container," explains Vickie Kloeris, NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory manager. John Glenn was the first person to eat in space; in 1962 he ingested applesauce and reported relatively easy digestion...
...these early tube meals were unappetizing, and astronauts dropped too many pounds. "We know that astronauts have lost weight in every American and Russian manned flight," wrote NASA scientists Malcolm Smith and Charles Berry in a 1969 Nutrition Today article. "We don't know why." Feeding people in space was not as easy as it looked. (Watch TIME's video "Why America Hasn't Gone Back to the Moon...
...Apollo missions, NASA had developed a nutritionally balanced menu with a wide variety of options ranging from tuna salad to corn chowder. Of course, all the items were freeze-dried, dehydrated or "thermo-stabilized" (heat-treated to kill bacteria), and they didn't look like regular food. Meals were rehydrated and served in a pouch, allowing them to be eaten with a spoon. The Apollo 8 crew celebrated Christmas Day 1968 by eating thermo-stabilized turkey, gravy and cranberry sauce. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to eat on the moon when they consumed ham-salad sandwiches...
...NASA • original Apollo 11 moonwalk footage was accidentally erased...