Every Nasa astronaut considering that Alan Shepard in 1961 has been given a hearty breakfast before blast-off. All the pre-flight Apollo meals had been mainly prepared for nutrients, energy and – crucially – have been what docs check with as “low residue”. In other phrases, low-fiber meals that wouldn’t have astronauts desiring the toilet too quickly after carry-off.
Early missions also confined coffee consumption before launch, because of its diuretic residences. Shepard’s Mercury flight, for instance, was simplest 15 minutes so docs figured that he could avoid urinating until splashdown. Unfortunately, they did no longer account for countdown delays.
“They positioned Alan Shepard on the pinnacle of his rocket without a manner to take a leak,” says reporter Jay Barbree, who was commentating on the mission for US TV channel NBC. “After hours, he begins complaining and desperately asks for permission to moist his healthy – ultimately they gave him permission.” The astronaut is relieved but the clinical sensors move loopy.
Astronauts flying in the Apollo spacecraft used non-public urine series devices – like condoms – which have been related to a disposal device, which ejected the waste from a port at the facet of the spacecraft.
The solid waste involved the use of plastic baggage and most astronauts tried to keep away from going to the rest room for as long as possible. The first to crack all through Apollo 7 changed into Walt Cunningham.
“It turned into difficult to get the entirety working just proper,” he tells me. “You can catch the whole thing however after which you had the get a few capsules loose from inside the bag and you spend it slow blending the drugs up with something you had there – it turned into no longer extraordinarily amusing.”
2,800: Daily calories intake
The first American to eat a meal in space was John Glenn. During his five-hour flight, he tested out a tube – a bit like a toothpaste tube – of apple puree, proving that human beings should swallow and digest meals in weightlessness.
For the two-guy Gemini missions of the mid-Nineteen Sixties, astronauts have been allocated 2,500 energy an afternoon and fed on plastic packs of freeze-dried foods produced by way of the Whirlpool Corporation (the house equipment employer). Freeze-drying involved cooking the meals, quickly freezing them and then slowly warming them in a vacuum chamber to cast off the ice crystals fashioned by means of the freezing method.
The astronauts squirted water through a nozzle to rehydrate the ingredients and kneaded the ensuing paste into some kind of gloop. The food was tastier than the tube meals on Mercury and protected such delights as red meat and gravy, but the water becomes cold, which made them often less than appetizing.
During the first Gemini task – Gemini 3 in 1965 – John Young created a minor scandal and the handiest blemish on his exemplary astronaut profession, via smuggling a corned red meat sandwich on board. What started as a funny story threatened to purpose extreme trouble with the spacecraft, with fears that crumbs could intrude with the spacecraft circuitry.
During the Apollo missions – whilst the astronauts may want to do some confined exercising within the pill and were exerting themselves on the Moon – Nasa nutritionists upped the calorie intake to two,800.
Not simplest have been the meals tastier, the water gun – furnished from the spacecraft fuel cells – ran hot as well as cold. And the food didn’t handiest must be sucked thru a straw, the astronauts ought to even eat a number of them with a spoon.
6: Packs of pineapple fruit cake
The pantry of the Apollo spacecraft was jammed with snacks. Along with six portions of pineapple fruit cake, there were packs of muffins, chocolate cake and jellied fruit sweet. For the savory palate, there were cheese crackers and BBQ red meat bites. Apollo astronauts were even allotted 15 packs of chewing gum, containing 4 sticks in every.
A normal dinner in the course of Apollo 17 consisted of a prime of chook and rice, followed by means of butterscotch pudding and ‘Graham Cracker cubes’. They could wash this all down with instantaneous coffee, tea, cocoa or lemonade.
