The Future of Cooking (and Eating) in Space

AirSpace Season 11, Episode 5 - AirSpace Live! Cooking in Space

View the transcript as a PDF.

Emily: Are you gonna start? Do you want me to start? Usually we're on Zoom and we make awkward eye contact to figure out who's gonna talk first. 

Matt: laughs

AirSpace theme up and under

Matt: Welcome to AirSpace Live. We're recording tonight at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. I'm Matt. 

Emily: And I'm Emily. Since astronauts started going into space, we have had to solve the problem of what they should eat. 

Matt: Things in tubes, rehydrated foods, both cold and warm, fresh food deliveries, lettuce that they grow, tortillas instead of bread, and maybe in the future, cylindrical pizza? 

Emily: Today we're talking about dining a la astronaut on AirSpace sponsored by Lockheed Martin.

AirSpace Theme up and out

Matt: So tonight we have some guests with us on stage and we want to introduce them to you. Uh, first we have Dr. Margaret Weitekamp, who is the chair of the Space History Department here at the National Air and Space Museum,

Margaret: Delighted to be here 

Emily: Next we have Jim Sears, CEO, and founder of SATED Space, which has patented a very interesting cylindrical space oven that we'll dig into just in a minute.

Jim: Thank you so much. Yeah, it's a, it's an honor to be here. Quite exciting. 

Matt: And last but not least, chef Charisse Grey, who is head of Research and Development from the José Andrés Group.

Charisse: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Matt: So food, it's not just something we need, it's something we enjoy. Um, you know, food we like helps to make us feel happy.

So it's, it's not such a surprise that for astronauts, food is also very important, right? They're, they need things to eat and they also need to be fulfilled in their, um, jobs up in space

Emily: Right? We have to nourish astronauts’ bodies as well as their hearts and their minds, and food is a really important way in which we can do that.

And so I would kind of love to throw this to all of our panelists and maybe start with you, Margaret, a little bit about from a historian's perspective, how important the tie and the link between food and morale and mental health is for astronauts. 

Margaret: I think it's absolutely vital. So for the very first flights, with the Mercury flights, they were so short they didn't bring food.

And with the Gemini program, when they started with two different astronauts, um, flying together at the same time, those were longer flights. And so they started experimenting with, can you eat in space? Will you get stuck in your esophagus if you don't have the gravity? Things like that. By Apollo, they knew they needed to be able to eat meals in order to be able to go to the Moon and back.

Um, but it's really later when you get into Skylab, things like that, that they start thinking about not just sustaining the astronauts but also actually enjoying the food. And that's, food is social, it's one of the ways that we connect with each other. It's one of the ways that you have downtime, a chance to talk.

Um, and so it's really been important with the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station that's gotten very sophisticated in thinking not just about sustenance, but also about society, about culture. 

Matt: One of the things I think is interesting about those early years of the Mercury and Gemini program is that astronauts actually tended to avoid meals because the food wasn't always that appealing. And you know, I can't imagine doing a high stress job or even a job where you're working on the Moon and expending a lot of calories in the course of that, and then not feeling hungry when you get back. But on an earlier episode of this podcast, we did interview Harrison Schmidt about working on the moon, and he said it was really difficult for them in the morning to actually work up an appetite before they went out to work on the Moon, but that they needed, they knew they needed to because they were going to be out there expending, you know, all of that energy and calories. 

But you know, it seems like one of the big challenges has been not just providing nutrition. But providing food that astronauts want to eat, that actually, you know, gets the appetite going, you know, as, you know, folks who are inventing technologies for making space food and also coming up with recipes for space food. I mean, you know, what are the big challenges there? Or, or, you know, how, how important is that thinking about, you know, the, the appetite of the astronaut? 

Charisse: I mean, I, I think it's really clear that, you know, food is really important, right? Um, food is, you know, food can just be nutrition, it can just be calories. But what we really have to reel it back into is like, how, you know, how is it that we bring culture with us as we do these long missions and, you know, whatever it is that we design and whatever food that we provide for these crew members, um, have to really stand the test against their mental resilience.

You know, as we start looking into the future, we really need to our guiding light to be as like, you know, can we survive versus, you know, really can we thrive? Like can we really make this something that we can all be proud and the crew members can take with them as they are, you know, leaving their loved ones, families, and cultures behind.

Emily: Well, so my follow up question to this is, is for Jim, 'cause this is sort of the, it's not just nutrition, right? And, and thriving is really important in how you, these recipes are developing. How is solving the problem of helping to nourish astronauts, sort of holistically gone into how you've thought about the kinds of problems you need to solve in producing that cooking technology.

Jim: Sure. You know, it, it's really exciting. So for much of my career I've had a human factors. I'm, I'm an electrical engineer, but I'm a human factors engineer almost first. And, you know, this is, this is the opportunity to create a machine that allows people themselves to be creative in space when everything else is a built environment around them.

But when it gets time to dinner, they'll be perhaps a, a crew chef. And the crew chef will, you know, look at the different folks and say, I can use these ingredients and this machine and these new techniques, you know, make something just for Joe. You know, or just for the rest of the crew. And, and for me it's a, it's a great gift, you know, to be able to work on something that, that's gonna be so meaningful for folks and to create that creative instrument that Charisse and, and the other folks can use.

Matt: So, you know, thinking about the history, Margaret, um, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, there weren't a lot of options when, uh, the, the crews went on those missions and, you know, as, as we were saying before, sometimes they didn't find the food, really all that appetizing and so sometimes skipped meals. When we fast forward then to the Skylab missions, this was the first time where the sort of social experience of eating was, was attempted to be reproduced on board the station.

Tell us a little bit about that, you know, attempt to assert or insert that cultural dimension of eating into space. 

Margaret: I have to say, I think some of those Apollo guys were folks who woke up, had a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and got to work. Um, and so I think that was sometimes a hard habit to break, but it was something that they were really thinking about with Skylab and they actually invented a kind of little TV tray, a little kind of school tray that would then have spots that you could put the various cans. 'cause all of the food got sent up with the station and then the astronauts went and met it. So they weren't bringing new things. 

Um, and they were really thinking about, um, a very honestly like floor oriented sense of eating. They had little ways to lock their feet into the floor and a little table in the middle with the idea that they would have these trays. And they would be able to sit and eat together. So there was a way in which they could be social, but they hadn't broken out of that sense of earthbound-ness. 

Um, and one of the things, I talked to Sandy Magnus years ago and she was saying one of the first things she did when she was on shuttle is, um, sit on the ceiling. And eat in the galley. And everybody else was used to sitting in the galley the way that they had been trained, um, in the simulators, um, and she immediately realized, no, wait a minute, we have this whole space that we can use. So it really changes, um, how you think about it when you get a chance to have enough experience to break out of that kind of floor oriented sense of sitting around a little table with your tray.

Emily: I love that. I mean, I think I, I've been trying to put myself in the position of an astronaut, which we all know that's not gonna happen, but I think about like, what can you tolerate for a couple of days, right? Versus what can you tolerate as technologies change, especially in space flight. 

And I think about, you know, how many days can you live off peanut butter and jelly? Or how many days can you live off protein bars? And like, you can probably squeak out a couple of days, especially if you're like backpacking and there's, you know, some, something else you're trying to achieve. But after, after that you start like, I really, really could use a, a burger, like something that's been like freshly cooked and you know, has that kind of hot and juicy component.

And I feel like as we have kind of gone through a little bit of the history of space food so far, we're kind of approaching this Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, which are separate but similar related moments, um, where things really take off. (pause for laugh)

Matt: Ooh. 

Emily: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I just came up with that one.

There was a question in there, Matt. What was my question? 

Matt: Well, maybe as the missions are getting longer, what goes into long term sort of menu planning, uh, for a crew or even for just an individual astronaut? 

Charisse: I guess that's me. Um, so, you know, I've been of course had the pleasure to meet with Jim, um, a little over a year ago.

And, you know, in this collaboration with him, it really got me and my team into thinking is like, how are we gonna create the ecosystem for this? Like, how do we create the ecosystem of food, um, you know, looking into, you know, right now the current technology and um, and I know this, um, very personally because I made a, a retort meal that went to the ISS.

Um, José and I worked on something to do a family meal with the first private mission with Axiom that went to the ISS. And so we created like a little family meal. And so I had the distinct pleasure of going through this process. Which, um, I'm not sure, I am definitely not a scientist. That will say as much as that I can make food and I understand the chemistry behind why things happen, but um, as far as the outlook on how something is going to go into a pouch and cook it very blindly, um, was not something that I was prepared for.

Um, but all that being said, is that, you know, it was so bleak. Like when I first opened that pouch, I was like, man, like what is this? And uh, you know, it's hard to decipher when we got our first package, because Axiom was quite kind enough to send us some NASA meals that they were serving to the crew members at the time so that, you know, we could get a idea of what we were doing. I was in the military, so of course I've had MREs before, but this was not what I was prepared for. Um, you know, we should have taken a video of José and I opening these pouches and being like, what is this? You know? And um, you know, there was something that looked like a chicken breast and the questions that were like, do we just soak it in water? Do we add water? Like, how are we supposed to eat this? You know? 

So then he just took a bite of it, like just, *makes crunch motion* and I was like that doesn't taste good, like, you know, and so, um, but you know, as we start to work with this machine, we started to really think, well, hey, like how do we build a pantry? Right?

That's how we have to start this, is we have to say, ‘Hey, what are some ingredients that are going to either, they either come to us already shelf stable, or how do we shelf stabilize items?’ You know, we have a freeze dryer in our, in our, uh, kitchen that we have. And so we're like, yeah, let's just start freeze drying everything, you know?

And so we, we did a little bit of that. Um, you know, a lot of failures of course in this process. But, you know, if, if we start thinking about the solution representing itself in something that looks more like a standard pantry and finding the ingredients that can have multiple, um, applications for meals, like, that's just the very beginning. That's like, that is just like where we have to start. 

Jim: Yeah, I mean it’s really an exciting opportunity because what we've dealt with in the past is essentially backpacking food. It's almost exactly like backpacking food, but there's no pretty picture on the front and it's got 40% less salt. Uh, but the opportunity to actually make new dishes from ingredients changes just literally the math completely.

You know, we talked about if you had 20, if you were going to Mars, that's like a thousand days plus. And if you have 20 meals, meal selections, 20 different type of backpacking entrees, then you're going to eat each one of those, um, 50 times. And you know, maybe after time 15 you might not be as excited about it, but if you have 20 ingredients, you can literally make a thousand different menu items.

You can make more of those, but some of 'em won't taste good. But you can probably make a thousand things that taste good. And then you think, okay, what ingredients do I pick? And some will last a long time. And that's what we want is a long shelf life. And in our own calculus, like we're using things that are basically dry ingredients that, that you hydrate and you use. 

But there would be an assortment of ingredients. Some would be la long lasting, some not. So and so, you know, Charrise and I were talking about, it's like how would we kinda like move through the pantry to eat the, the ones that have the shortest lifetime first and the last, you know, longest lifetime last. And then, you know, be able to deal with targeted nutrition, giving a certain person what they need.

And it's like a perfect, I think it's like a perfect moment for a chef's creativity and artificial intelligence to actually work together to figure out how to apportion it all out.

Music button

Matt: So we wanna talk to you about the sort of technological challenges or physical challenges of, um, cooking in space. Um, because, you know, over the years there have been certain things that have been, you know, problem causing in, in space or, you know -- 

Emily: No crummies, Matt. No crummies! 

Matt: Yeah. You can't have crumbs in space, which is why – 

Emily: Or corned beef sandwiches. That's an Easter egg. Google it. You'll thank me later. 

Matt: That’s one reason why tortillas tend to be the, you know, uh, preferred mode of making any kind of sandwich rather than bread, because bread crumbs are a no-no. Um, you can't have too much salt, as you said, uh, Jim, that everything's a little bit less salty than it would be, and that's partly because salt can cause problems for the body.

In microgravity and, um, no alcohol, right? Not that you were going to put alcohol into your, you know –

Jim: We would never, we would never make alcohol – 

Emily: You forgot one of the most important things in the notes, Matt. 

Matt: Oh, what's that? 

Charisse: We're definitely sending them with a recipe.

Matt: For alcohol? Fermentation?

Charisse: Fermentation. That's number one. 

Jim: It's, it's in a special envelope. Only, you know, open this up… 

Emily: But that's for the sourdough and the kombucha, I'm sure. 

Jim: Oh, yes. 

Emily: No. The crushing everybody's hopes and dreams that astronaut ice cream – 

Matt: Oh yes.

Emily: 'Cause of the crummies problem, it's definitely not gonna space.

Matt: It's not really going space.

Emily: No, I'm so sorry.

Matt: They do sometimes get real ice cream though, right? 

Margaret: Every once in a while. Sneak it into the bottom of a freezer that's coming up otherwise for an experiment, little treat. Yeah, 

Matt: Yeah. 

Emily: But go back, going back to the challenges, Matt, right, because. As Margaret's kind of taken us through some of the changes in technology with time, right?

It's still kind of centered around freeze dried, pre-tinned, and so it's a lot of rehydration and maybe heating it up if you're lucky, which you know has a lot of, you know ick to it after a while, especially if you eat some of those MREs over time many, many times. 

But going, I think you did a good job of taking us back to the basics of like what it, what is the foundation of cooking and that's building a pantry, but the physical act of cooking also has to go back to basics, maybe. I mean, what are some of the challenges that you two have been thinking about? 

Matt: Well, on the very basic level, maybe you could start with just like boiling water in space. How does that happen? 

Jim: Well, first you set the pot on the stove and then you turn around and the pot flows, floats off the stove. Okay, so. Let's put the water in the pot. Uh, but the water comes out and it doesn't want to go anywhere except just in the air. I mean, gravity is, it's, it's an incredible organizing influence in our life.

It's like everything around us is basically down on the floor, you know, or bolted. So, but up there, if you have, if you want to get heat into something, you have to use forced convection, moving air. And/or you have to, uh, do what, or radiation, which is red hot elements. It's really dangerous to have red hot things in space. Or conduction, and that's, that's what we do. 

Our cooker uses a centrifugal principle so that it has a, a rotating cylinder with kind of a lid with a hole on it so that when the cylinder is rotating and the cylinder is made out of aluminum, it's got teflon on the inside, it's got heaters around the outside and it spins.

You know, like 300 revolutions per second, um, not as fast as a a, a dryer would spin, you know, slower than that, but still pretty fast. You put water in there and it goes to the inside of the, of the cylinder and it just forms like a, a smooth pool around the inside of the cylinder. You look inside there and the, so it's just kinda shiny now because it's a, it's like, it's, it's got a quarter inch or a half inch of water on it, and then you turn on the heat.

And it slowly gets hotter and starts to steam, and then it starts to boil. But it boils differently at different speeds. Like it's when it's, it's, oh, we've got it right up there when it's, you can see the bubbles boiling right now. But as the speed changes, as the speed goes up, we've got it four Gs, two Gs, big bubbles right now, because it's not, it, it's not the gravity level, but it's, it's actually some traject trajectories of of things as the speed goes faster and the bubble is trying to build up and go towards the surface, as the cylinder spins faster and faster, it's also going tangentially at the same time.

So it's kind of like the bubble goes up, but it's shoved sideways and it's inside a circular surface. And so it ends up just diving back into the water. And the, the fascinating thing is like the faster you turn the cylinder, the smaller the bubbles get until finally it's, it's smooth looking. 

But I look at the power meter, it's still boiling. You just, you just, it's just almost glassy smooth. So that, that's why I get pretty geek. 

Emily: I have so many follow up questions for later, but how do you take this kind of complexity? Of simplicity. 

Jen: Actually, can I break in here for just a second?

Emily: Oh my gosh, please do. Hey, Jen,

Jen: Before we get too much further, can we do a couple of definitions here because we've been talking about some things that we haven't explained.

Um, I would love to get a couple of definitions of, well, Charisse a while ago said the word ‘retort’ and I don't know what that means. Um, and then maybe someone can give us a basic thermodynamic lesson before we go into, into the oven. 

Charisse: I will go first with retort –

Jen: Perfect, love that. 

Charisse: and I will stop there. Um, so while I might not know the scientific definition of retort, I will tell you what I did, which is I took food and I put it into a pouch. It was, it is, um, basically it's uh, it's like metal. I don't know if it's aluminum or something. It's coated with that so it's airtight and light cannot possibly penetrate 'cause that, um, that, uh, speeds up, uh, spoilage of the food. Okay. 

Jim: Metalized Mylar barrier packaging 

Charisse: Him, um, what he said.

And then, um, I then sealed that and we put that into a thing that looks like a submarine. Um, that, um, then we closed this big front door on it and I was like, wow, that food's really going in there. Um, it's laid out all on a single tray and they basically commercially sterilize the food. They cook it till nothing else could possibly exist in it, in that pouch except for the ingredients that you put in there. So there's no chance of bacteria growth, no viral, nothing. 

So if you can imagine what eating something that has been commercially sterilized, what tastes like, um, that is every dream that you've thought of. 

Matt: So that is what you'd call thermal stabilization, yes?

Charisse: Yes.

Matt: Okay. 

Emily: Is there any, sorry, I have a follow up question.

Is there anything we have all likely eaten that has gone through this process that we could, like – 

Charisse: I mean, I mean a version of it, maybe not in the pouch, but if you ate like, you know, a canned soup. 

Emily: Okay. No, that's helpful. That's helpful. 

Charisse: You know Campbell's can soup, but I think they go through a very, very similar, it's not in this Mylar…. hit it

Jim: Yeah. Barrier packaging. Well, but if you go in the, uh, grocery store and you find food in the flexible packaging like tuna, the tuna, some fish often tuna. Yeah, that's thermo-stabilized. Okay.

Emily: Okay, so it's not awful.

Charisse: deep breath Not awful. Not awful, but you're asking the wrong person.

Emily: It's accessible and shelf stable.

Charisse: Yes. There we go.

Emily: Okay. 

Jim: But much of the texture is, is gone from food when you put it through that much of a temperature processing. 

Emily: I mean, if I went through that, I don't think I'd feel the same afterwords. 

Jim: No, you'd be a little mushy.

Emily: Sure. 

Charisse: I mean, you can definitely take a piece of, well, you can take something that looks like a piece of meat and spread it on a piece of bread, probably. 

Jim: Yeah. That's really, that's what they do now. It's really exciting.

Emily: So glad I had lentils for dinner

Jim: Yeah. 

Matt: So whether it's thermal stabilization or uh, freeze drying, the food doesn't come out the way that it started. You don't get as much of the original flavor of the food. And one of the things we've learned about microgravity and space flight is that you need strong flavors in space, right? Because you don't taste the same way. Uh, not you don't taste the same way, but your food does not taste – 

Jim: It depends how long the mission is.

Matt: –um, that it would on earth.

And, and you kind of crave the, um, stronger flavors of hot sauce and very sweet things. So, you know, we know that they take a lot of hot sauce up to the space station. 

Margaret: I'll just jump in to say that one of the things that happens to the body, right when you're in space right now, when you're sitting in gravity, your body's working very hard to push fluids up to your brain to keep you alive and to make sure that everything's working well. You get into space and your body keeps pushing fluid up into your head and you end up feeling puffy and like you've got a head cold. The body can react and remember a little bit how to, uh, react, but astronauts will talk about they have kind of skinny legs and puffy heads, uh, and they always feel a little bit like they're getting over a cold.

So that sense that you have, that you can't really taste very well, that you're a little stuffed up. Astronauts love spicy, and they love super sweet because those are the things that'll penetrate through that. So salsa, sriracha, um, M&Ms candies, those kinds of sweet things will cut through. 

Um, and so you've got, if I may, a recipe for really difficult cooking in that you have to get things to be safe enough to go into space, but at the same time, they're gonna be tasted by people who are having a hard time anyway, let alone once you bake or boil or you know, really make the thing safe for them.  

Jim: Well that's a situation where you're trying to make it up with sauces. You have, you know, half a dozen sauces that you're trying to add that flavor. And the magical thing about cooking is that you can do, I don't know, toasted cheese.

I mean, what are the flavors? 

Charisse: You can do a lot, honestly. Um, you know, there's a lot of ways to manipulate ingredients so that they can, you know, present in a different, um, medium. Like, he mentions cheese as being like a crispy element, but, you know, knowing that crumbs are a big no-no in space, um, does anybody know? Can anybody guess why crumbs are a bad idea in space? 

Emily: Yeah. Shout it out really loud and then we'll repeat it on the mics. 

Audience One (off mic): Get in your eye

Audience Two (off mic): Stuck in things?

Matt: Yeah, it can get stuck in things

Charisse: Stuck. Yes. They get floating around and they get snatched into an air filter, or they get stuck in an equipment, and then it creates chaos on the, on the ISS or whatever vessel that they're on.

Um, but you know, it's like we take the cheese and then we kind of hold it together with a dough, right? We're talking about the pizza now. And, you know, it's, so, it's like you have to find ways to engineer these dishes and these foods so that, um, they can provide the crew members with what they're missing, like crunchy, like, you know, um, you know, strong flavors, um, that they're missing when on voyage. 

Jim: Yeah. Different, different textures that, that mouth feel, we call it, where, you know, a different part of the food feels differently on your, your tongue and, and tastes differently. And the way you masticate, the way you chew changes how the flavors, you know, this is all the art that the cooks are able to be put, put into a, a dish, which is why we'll never have an end to new cooking creations. It's, it's amazing the, the palette of what you can do.

Music button

Matt: Jim, we want to talk about the technological challenges and you know, when we think about what an oven does, the ovens that we have on earth work because hot air rises, right? A lot of ovens work with a heating element on the bottom and you know, your hot air gets less dense than the cooler air and it rises up.

And so your food is getting waves of heat coming from the bottom of the oven 

Emily: called convection. 

Matt: Yes, that is convection. I did it

Matt: but that doesn't work in space.

Jim:. Do you have any, uh, chalk and a chalkboard? So I, I get ready.

Emily: That's a different, that's a different program. 

Jim: Oh. Oh, okay. Uh, absolutely. So yes, convection is a real problem in space. Air, if you have something hot, air just gets hot around it. It doesn't move away. It doesn't move around the whole food, and it air is a horrible conductor of heat. We use ovens 'cause we put a lot of energy in it. 

What we're doing is we're heating things conductively, which means they're going right up against a hot surface. So the wonderful, the many, wonderful thermodynamic things about that is that it's, it's very efficient. So you're not the, you're, the heat is going directly from where the heat is generated into the food.

The other thing is, it's super accurate as far as the temperature you, you get to. And it doesn't seem like it, that's that important until you really understand the food science and what happens where caramelization happens, where the, uh, Maillard, you know, uh, reaction happens that once you, when you can actually use conduction well and, and change the temperatures, you can really program the trajectory of your ingredients moving into food.

And Charisse is the master at this. I mean, she, she sent me a, a, you know, some recipes of what she's doing. You've got like four different temperature stops. 

Charisse: Yeah. But that's just because we're, you know, in, in the process of testing things, you know, you wanna, we're testing time against temperature a lot of times and seeing what the results of that are and, um, you know, we've gotten great results, um, based upon that. 

But, you know, going back to what we had mentioned earlier, some of the challenges that we're facing, of course, you know, everything that we know to be true about cooking is terrestrial, right? It's like we rely on gravity so much. 

Like baking gravity, right? It's like we don't think about that. We take that for granted. Um, you know, it's, you know, it's the rule like what goes up must. S-stay, it stays there, you know, so it's like, um, so this idea that, you know, gravity is, is something that we are forced to go against, tied to that is product density, you know, um, there's somebody on my team that was working on a Shepherd's Pie 'cause we were really like leaning into like, what's really comfort food And Shepherd's Pie was one of them.

And so we began, you know, layering the food in and the, um, you know, the potatoes and the meat. And then as we started to like spin that machine up and increase the Gs, the potatoes and the meat rev reversed themselves in the, in the, in the canister. 

So we're like, ‘oh, did not think about that.’ But it required us to take that exercise because we would've never discovered that had we not tried to embark upon that particular dish. But it opened our eyes. 

So now when we are looking at this device and cooking through with it. Density is something that we are thinking about, right? And if we wanna make cakes and we wanna make potentially breads, um, the amount of Gs that we're, um, putting into that, um, dough, right, it'll impact how it leavens.

So, you know, do we, we ask ourselves a question, do we need to increase our leavening? Do we need to decrease Gs? And, you know, do, should we need to, should we blast temperatures so we can get the leaven really quick? And then, you know, set it. And then start to increase the G so that we can add more items into the canisters, right?

So there's all these things that is floating around and you know,

Jim: it's a delicious challenge though, right? Figuring it out.  

Charisse: It is, it is. We eat a lot of mistakes. 

Matt: I love it. 

Music button

Emily: I think my parting question for you though is because I'm now rethinking everything I do in my kitchen and like what's easier and what's harder, but like what is it the, what is the thing that you are the most excited about, sort of looking forward, even if it's two or three or four steps down the road, the thing that you're really…’I cannot wait until that's the project I get to work on, or the problem I get to solve.’

Charisse: Man, that's a rabbit hole question.

Emily: Is it a crispy pizza with no crummies? 

Charisse: No, honestly, it's um, it's solving for the ecosystem to make cooking in space, really, not just, um, you know, a single um, answer, right? Like in your standard kitchens right now, you have multiple devices that are, that you use to achieve a recipe, right?

And so, to me, the exciting part of this whole endeavor is going to be having cooks and engineers have to come together to figure out like what are the solutions. And you know, how do we build a technology, the programs, um, you know, so that we can create this type of food and, you know, it's like, there's not gonna be a, there's no silver bullet for this, um, this particular problem, right?

And so that to me is the exciting part. It's going to be the actually, uh, the actual building of it, you know, and creating that ecosystem, um, with engineers and crew members because it's, you know, this is going to take everybody's input. You know, working with astronauts, working with crew members, working with engineers, working with people like Jim, um, in order to make that.

And then of course if we get a crunchy pizza on the other side, then that's just, you know. 

Jim: Oh, I still remember the day, you know, when I had my first unit and I was at my desk and I was making a pizza on my desk, my office desk. I said there, there is no better, you know, heaven for an engineer to be sitting at your desk making a pizza. Uh, yeah. Yeah, that's what we love. 

But I, I, I would just have thrown the delicious synergy that, that we have with, with José Andrés group and Charisse, because there's no more fun than enabling creativity. And there's no more fun than thinking about what the future's gonna be like, that someone is millions, literally, of miles from home, their kid’s having a birthday. They got this 20 minute delay of a video link. But there's something that they could do is they can make their own cake and they can eat their own cake while their kids eating their cake. 

And so it's, it is being able to have that close connection that you're not alone, even when you're way far away.

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Emily: AirSpace is from the National Air and Space Museum. It's produced by Jennifer Weingart and mixed by Tarek Fouda. 

AirSpace is hosted by Dr. Matt Shindell and me, Dr. Emily Martin. Our managing producer is Erika Novak. Our production coordinator is Joe Gurr, and our social media manager is Amy Stamm. 

A big thank you to our guests, Dr. Margaret Weitekamp of the National Air and Space Museum. Applause Jim Sears of SATED Space. Applause And Charisse Grey from the José Andrés group. Applause

And thank you to all of you, our fantastic in-person audience. We couldn't have done a live taping without you.

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Additional thanks to our stellar AV team over there in the back and downstairs in the cave. As well as our beloved facilities and securities team and all of the museum staff and crew who made this event possible tonight.

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Did you know the transcripts of our episodes include citations and extra fun facts? You can find them linked in the show notes. Along with the signup for our totally hilarious monthly newsletter. 

For additional content photos and more follow AirSpacePod on Instagram and X, we're also on YouTube shorts! Check us out on the museum's page. AirSpace is sponsored by Lockheed Martin and distributed by PRX.

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