| In case you hadn't heard, civilization is going interplanetary. Sit tight just a decade or two, the billionaire rocket bros say, and there'll be celestial pleasure cruises, lunar mining operations, and permanent settlements on Mars. But while Bezos, Branson, and Musk spend their fortunes on the tech that will get us into orbit and beyond, one crucial question remains unanswered: What's for lunch? Until now, astronauts have mostly eaten like backcountry campers. But as we venture farther from Earth than ever before, we'll need more than just space gorp to keep hold of our humanity, not to mention our sanity. "A one-way trip to Mars will take about nine months, which is a long time to spend inside a hermetically sealed tube hurtling through a cold, dark void," Nicola Twilley writes in her first feature for WIRED. That's especially true when you're stuck slurping rehydrated shrimp cocktail from a plastic pouch. As one veteran astronaut puts it, "Nobody goes to space for the food." Not yet, anyway. But researchers at the MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative are busy testing recipes. Twilley follows along as they try to bring culinary sophistication and a sense of home to one of the strangest, most extreme environments humans have ever faced. The story unfurls with an unexpected mix of poetry and humor—the German aeromedical doctor who numbed his buttocks with novocain; the Italian astronaut who sees pizzas wherever he looks—and culminates with a flight aboard the "vomit comet," a specially outfitted airliner designed to simulate zero g. Bring your appetite, but pack a barf bag too. Anthony Lydgate | Senior Editor, WIRED |
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