The food on Artemis II is surprisingly tasty—but it still won’t be good enough for Mars

Inside a kitchen at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Xulei Wu has prepared a multicourse meal for my visit. There’s barbecued beef brisket, as well as chicken in salsa, with a tortilla on the side. Creamy macaroni and cheese and braised red cabbage. Cherry and blueberry cobbler for dessert, and hot coffee. The food is artfully arranged on dinnerware bearing the space agency’s famous logo. It’s an appetizing spread, but the dining experience is not quite what the chef intended. “They don’t really have plates in microgravity,” Wu says.

This is 21st-century astronaut food, and it is best enjoyed while levitating in a spaceship, hurtling at thousands of miles an hour, with glorious, otherworldly views. Wu is the manager of NASA’s Space Food Systems lab, which provides catering for cosmic endeavors. Fifteen minutes ago, this meal was sealed in an assortment of airtight pouches, freeze-dried and preserved to perfection. Wu reanimated the contents by adding water and heat, careful not to tear the tops of the packaging all the way off—an astronaut custom, to prevent pieces of trash from floating away.

We’re sitting at the same table where the Artemis II astronauts sampled space-ready dishes, picking favorites to take with them on their historic lunar journey—the first mission of its kind in more than 50 years. They blasted off last week for a 10-day expedition around the moon and back, in the style of the early Apollo missions that preceded the triumphant 1969 moon landing. A high-stakes operation, Artemis II involves new spacecraft and rocket technology that had never carried a human crew before and that required enormous technical preparation and training. And what’s on the menu matters too.

Astronaut food has been a serious subject since the beginning of the space age, due in part to the obvious keeping-people-alive-and-well reasons. One of the first things that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did after touching down on the lunar surface was eat (a meal that included cubed bacon and coffee). “Ground Control permitted the lunar explorers to forego the scheduled rest period, but not that meal,” NASA food scientists wrote in the journal Nutrition Today in 1969. “To walk on the moon, the astronauts needed the energy the food supplied.” Those scientists also understood, as scientists today do, that a variety of flavorful dishes can nourish not only astronauts’ bodies but their minds too, creating a sense of normalcy in conditions that are positively unearthly.

Space fare has improved significantly in the past few decades; no one has to squeeze lukewarm, pureed meat into their mouths from aluminum tubes. “We do have to eat our vegetables even in space, but don't worry, they do give us mac and cheese,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II,  told a group of Canadian children on day four of the mission. Indeed, the Artemis II crew set off with the latest dishes on the space food menu and a new kitchen gadget designed to heat their meals.

But beyond the first Artemis missions, scientists and engineers at NASA and other institutions are still experimenting with cosmic cuisine, pushing foods to last longer and laying the groundwork for extraterrestrial farming. They’ll need to whip up new ideas to meet the needs of a grander space vision: a permanent base on the moon, a months-long journey to Mars, a habitat on the red planet. Future astronauts may 3D-print snacks, grow produce in AI-powered greenhouses, and haul buckets of extraterrestrial soil into their indoor farms. Humankind is leaping into what may be the most delicious era in its spacefaring history.

Back at Johnson, I dig in. The mac and cheese in question tastes like the comforting boxed stuff, though much less salty. (Astronauts eat low-sodium diets to protect bone health in microgravity.) I’m most impressed by the instant coffee, which I expected to taste like stale diner coffee, with notes of burnt rubber and disappointment. Instead, it’s smooth and kind of delicious. For a spacefaring civilization with big dreams, coffee is probably going to be important, even mission critical.

What’s on the menu in space?

On Christmas Day in 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts, on their way back to Earth after circling the moon, gently knocked their in-flight menu during a live broadcast for all the world to hear. “The food is varied, generally pretty good. If that doesn’t sound like a rousing endorsement, it isn’t,” Mission Commander Frank Borman said. They’d been eating mostly lukewarm compressed cubes of meat, bread, and fruit that, after being rehydrated, tended to taste more like the wrapping than the food. But when the crew opened their holiday dinners, they found a delightful surprise spread of real turkey, brown gravy, and cranberry applesauce—a meal that suggested a tastier future was possible.

Today the pantry on the International Space Station (ISS) is sourced from 200 food and beverage options designed to stay palatable, safe, and nutritious for one to three years. Some cosmic travelers have reported that food tastes different in space; researchers have posited that microgravity can mess with an astronaut’s sense of smell—a key component in perceiving flavor—when bodily fluids float toward the head and cause congestion. Wu’s team surveys all astronauts upon their return about what foods they liked and didn’t like. (It recently discontinued cheese grits after poor reviews.) “It’s mission impossible to establish a standard menu that everybody would love, but there’s always room to improve,” Wu says.

(What toll does spaceflight take on astronauts?)

Bread remains an uncrackable recipe; floating crumbs could mess with spacecraft gadgetry, so astronauts eat tortillas and flatbreads instead. When NASA chefs recently tried to make beef teriyaki, they found that one of their usual preservation processes—thermostabilization, or subjecting food to high heat—turned the meat tough. So they decided to zap the dish with gamma rays, a common technique for killing spoilage-causing microorganisms. But the dish had pineapple, which contains a particular enzyme that the radiation didn’t touch. “The finished product tastes amazing, but two years into shelf life, that enzyme just continues to break down the meat texture,” Wu says. “The beef texture eventually becomes so horrible and disgusting.”

Even though the Artemis II mission is just 10 days, the astronauts sampled all 200 offerings, spread out over four one-hour sessions before their flight, Wu says. Escaping Earth’s gravity demands packing light, and Wu didn’t want to send anything the crewmembers wouldn’t eat on the flight. (Any vegetarians should shoot for the moon instead of the space station; while Artemis astronauts can customize their inventory, ISS residents can’t hoard all the veggie courses.)

Space living doesn’t allow for cooking over an open flame, so the crew will heat up their meals using a new device custom-made for Orion, their tiny, gumdrop-shaped spacecraft. I’m inside the Orion flight simulator at Johnson when Wyeth McKinley, an Artemis crew instructor, arrives with a mock-up version of the food warmer. McKinley looks as if he’s just swiped it from James Bond; from the outside, the food warmer resembles a top-secret briefcase, silver and sleek.

McKinley clicks open the latches to reveal a metallic plate crossed with springy straps on either side. He slips an assortment of packets beneath the straps: tomato basil soup, split pea soup, Indian fish curry, bread pudding. The plate reaches 185 degrees Fahrenheit, and heats food and drink items to 155 to 175 degrees Fahrenheit—a nice upgrade from the Apollo days, when astronauts reheated foods with hot-water guns. Toasty provisions can be ready within 15 minutes, or under an hour if the warmer is stuffed to the max capacity of 12 packets.

When NASA began developing the device in 2018, Orion managers planned for the crew to turn on the food warmer for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and keep it stowed the rest of the time, says Paul Boehm, the crew systems manager for Orion. The astronauts, however, wanted snacks whenever the cravings hit. This presented an operational challenge: A perpetually plugged-in warmer eats into the capsule’s power supply, Boehm says, and “when the crew opens it up every time, they introduce heat into the cabin, and we have to cool the cabin.” But engineers made the necessary recalculations, and the crew can fire up the food warmer first thing in the morning and leave it running until lights-out.

Earlier in the mission prep, planners had also suggested, with mass limits for what Orion can carry in mind, that the crew could subsist mostly on food bars that contained a meal’s worth of calories and nutrients, Boehm says. Wu’s team developed bars in several flavors, including ginger vanilla, honey nut, and banana nut, and invited Johnson staff to try them. Taste testers liked them enough but balked at the thought of replacing entire meals with them, Wu says. “Most people would still prefer real foods.”

That will be a prime challenge for deep-space journeys to Mars, which will require shelf stability of five to seven years, says Suresh Pillai, a microbiology professor and director of the National Center for Electron Beam Research at Texas A&M University, which produces thermostabilized foods for NASA. Researchers here are experimenting with another method to preserve taste and quality using beams of electrons. While I’m touring his lab on A&M’s campus, Pillai leads me down to a winding cellar enclosed with cement walls, where fast-moving electrons rush out from a big metal hood in the low ceiling and sterilize food products as they pass on a conveyor belt below. “When you prevent microbial proliferation, you automatically extend the shelf life,” Pillai says. So far, in preliminary experiments, the technique seems to preserve food samples for four years, but more formal experiments will try to push that maximum to seven years.

Back upstairs, the air is scented with something delicious. In an industrial kitchen, undergraduate food-science students, dressed in lab coats and hairnets, weigh portions of hot space food. “Indian fish curry,” one of them explains. In the next decade, lunar explorers might inhale the same aroma inside a cozy moon base. At first, they’ll be out of reach of resupply missions that deliver fresh fruits and vegetables, which space station dwellers say provide “profound psychological benefits.” Eventually, these astronauts will have to live off the land.

(Everyone wants a piece of the moon. What could go wrong?)

Putting down roots on the moon

Anna-Lisa Paul and Rob Ferl’s biology lab at the University of Florida in Gainesville is sprinkled with tiny green plants with fuzzy leaves and angel-hair stems. They sprout in petri dishes, spin inside a slowly rotating chamber, and rise out of thimble-size pots, the tallest ones ending in delicate white blossoms. Arabidopsis thaliana is an unassuming-looking weed commonly used in plant biology research, but in 2022, the species accomplished a miraculous first for plant life on Earth: It took root in moon material collected during the Apollo missions and grew.

The rocky, dusty surface layer of the moon, known as regolith, is composed of exceptionally sharp and jagged bits of rock. Paul, Ferl, and their team had spent years practicing with artificial regolith designed to mimic its composition. But when they got a chance to use the real stuff—sourced from NASA’s Apollo 11, 12, and 17 mission collections—in 2022, it refused to soak up water. Droplets of liquid sat still on the surface, dusted with fine, extraterrestrial powder, so Paul and Ferl decided to try mixing the soil around.“It crawled up the surface of that stirrer, that little pipette tip, and it looked like something that was alive,” Paul recalls now. “It was very freaky.” Finally, when the regolithwas sufficiently moistened, the Arabidopsis seeds were tucked in.

Two days later, Paul and Ferl stepped through the door of their growing room and cracked open the universe. “To see all those little green shoots—every seed that we had put in there had grown, every one—that was like, OK, we’re going to Mars, we’re going to the moon,” Paul says. Here was proof that astronauts could take earthly flora into the solar system and start a garden.

Paul and Ferl had previously dispatched Arabidopsis on other cosmic adventures, on NASA space shuttles and the ISS. They learned, by studying its genetic material after it returned to Earth, that plants kind of hate outer space. In microgravity, Arabidopsis activates genes associated with repairing its cell walls, a response that, on the ground, kicks in when the plant is under threat from bacteria or fungi. “If you’re in an environment that is completely outside your experience, you might try things that you think are going to work to make you feel better,” Paul says.

Last year, Ferl made the trip skyward himself, flying on a suborbital Blue Origin mission with tiny greenhouses designed to snapshot the genetic activity of the Arabidopsis seedlings inside. The researchers found that “within minutes, plants are seriously adapting their metabolism,” Ferl says. They reacted differently during each phase of the experience, sensing the specific conditions of launch, weightlessness, and landing.

In the lunar regolith, Arabidopsis also detected the strangeness. “They were turning on all these genes that are just screaming, I don’t like what I’m growing in,” Paul says. They grew slower than they do in terrestrial soil, and some stayed small while others turned depressingly purple. The shoots growing in soil gathered during Apollo 11 struggled the most, perhaps because the terrain at that landing site was significantly older and more sunblasted than the locations of Apollo 12 and 17.

After removing and analyzing their first batch of moon plants, Paul and Ferl continued to plant seeds in the regolith. Each cycle of plants transformed the material, creating a more Earthlike soil. By the third round, Arabidopsis was nearly thriving. Regolith, it turns out, can become soil when “biology interacts with it,” Paul says. The research behind this discovery has not yet been published, but it has extraordinary implications: If future spacefaring botanists can mitigate the damaging aspects of the moon soil this way, “you can get plants to grow in lunar regolith just fine,” Paul says.

Arabidopsis itself isn’t particularly scrumptious or nutritious. Future space farmers will need to plant more substantial crops—and some labs are already taking steps toward cultivating the universe’s first extraterrestrial farm-to-table operation.

(Here’s how a lab in Antarctica is preparing to grow food on Mars.)

The seeds of space farming 

A small garden of sweet potato plants, their young leaves curling around wooden stakes in the soil, fills a refrigerator-size container in Carlos Hotta’s lab at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. One of the pots previously sat in a dark corner of a room for months before moving into the high-tech grow tent, with a shiny, silver interior meant to maximize artificial light, and the plant had seemed perfectly content. “Low light, high light, low water, high water—it’s always growing and trying to conquer everything,” Hotta says. “They’re going to be great for space.”

Hotta is a member of Brazil’s new project on space farming, funded in part by Brazil’s agricultural agency Embrapa and aimed at growing food in alien places and discovering new approaches to earthbound agriculture along the way. Plants have been cultivated in space for human consumption before, including lettuce, cabbage, and kale on the ISS. But the network of Brazilian researchers from more than a dozen institutions want to focus on heartier fare. Chickpeas are protein rich, and sweet potatoes are extremely versatile—every part of the plant is edible, from the leaves and stems to the tuberous roots.

Hotta studies the plant circadian clock, an internal mechanism that is synchronized with environmental changes and helps guide plant physiological responses. By tuning in to this invisible timer, future farmers could encourage productivity and stress tolerance in their crops; they can conduct horticultural care when plants will be most receptive to it, and adjust the artificial environment to better synchronize with those internal rhythms.

Scientists could even genetically modify the circadian clock itself, Hotta says. Plants rely on the mechanism to regulate systems that protect their DNA from the worst of the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun. Some plants, for example, absorb less light around noon to reduce their exposure. The sun is far dimmer on Mars, but the red planet lacks a protective ozone layer, which means that the surface is constantly slathered in harmful radiation. Earth plants cultivated on Mars will need to seriously shield themselves. "The idea is to keep systems like DNA repair working for the whole daytime, instead of having them show a peak of activity for a few hours in the day," Hotta says.

Last year, the Brazil researchers sent sweet potato seedlings and chickpea seeds to the edge of space with Blue Origin, exposing them to several minutes of microgravity (and Katy Perry’s singing). Paulo Hercílio Rodrigues, a professor of flowers at the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, has continued that research by conjuring his own pockets of outer space in his lab in Piracicaba, in southeast Brazil, using a machine called a clinostat. The clinostat keeps small growth chambers in a perpetual churn, simulating a microgravity environment for the captive plant tissue.

When Rodrigues and his colleagues subjected baby sweet potato plants to this experience for 30 days, they found that the plants grew thicker stems than their static counterparts. They weren’t more photosynthetically productive, though, which means that in the absence of the familiar pull of gravity, the sweet potatoes may have allocated more energy to fortifying their bodies than feeding themselves. The sweet potatoes also grew better under blue light, rather than a mixture of wavelengths, which suggests that the plants were less stressed out under that lighting, Rodrigues says.

Rodrigues’s lab is filled with dozens of plastic mason jars, foggy and flecked with condensation, containing seedlings of edible crops all growing happily on the only planet they’re supposed to experience. Cosmic farming will require a keen understanding of what crops might need to thrive in alien realms, whether they’re growing inside a fast-moving spaceship, a lunar greenhouse, or a Martian greenhouse. Rodrigues says that experimenting with chickpea and sweet potato seeds in different conditions now—tinkering not only with gravity but also with variables like light, water, nutrition, and humidity as the plants take root and grow—will help future astronauts know what to do to ease the biological homesickness of their crops.

Back in São Paulo, Hotta and I have dinner at A Casa Do Porco, where the head chef, Jefferson Rueda, has been tasked with developing space-friendly recipes using sweet potatoes and chickpeas. Last year, Rueda developed a space-friendly take on a sonho, a Portuguese fried, brioche-like pastry usually filled with cream or dulce de leche and coated with sugar. The experimental version featured sweet potato dough and silky chickpea cream—and, critically, minimal crumbs. Hotta and I feast on some less space-friendly dishes at the restaurant—tuna tartare in coconut milk, oysters in guava sauce, steamed buns with red cabbage and watercress, nettle sorbet with wasabi marshmallow, corn ice cream—that would be rather unwieldy in microgravity. And we discuss the deep future of space cuisine.

Hotta invokes the writer Douglas Adams’s philosophy on the progression of galactic civilizations: Simple survival will dictate food culture first, but eventually, “we will need something else, something that will bring people comfort or bring people together,” Hotta says. Every time a new course arrives, I can’t help picturing astronauts gathered around a table on another world, enjoying a banquet of their own, with some ingredients they carried there with them and others that they grew themselves, far from the warmth of their life-giving star. There won’t be a restaurant on Mars for some time, and that dreamy scene is even a huge leap from what the Artemis II crew are eating as they slingshot around the moon. But as they sit down for dinner in the dusky light of a blue-streaked Martian sunset—a quirk of sunlight filtering through atmospheric dust—those astronauts will probably enjoy some mac and cheese. A cosmic mission isn’t complete without a taste of home.