NASA astronauts just ate food grown in space for the first time
For the first time in history, astronauts have eaten food grown in space.
As part of NASA's VEG-01 experiment (nicknamed "VEGGIE"
aboard the International Space Station, they sampled red romaine lettuce that's been growing in a specially designed chamber since early July, under the care of astronaut Scott Kelly. After Kjell Lindgren carefully cleaned the greens with sanitizing wipes to ensure they were clean, the duo and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui first tasted them around 12:45 ET on Monday — before trying them again with a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
The astronauts only get to eat half the lettuce; the other half will be frozen and sent back to Earth for scientific analysis. Long term, the goal of this sort of microgravity gardening is to add a bit of variety and nutrition to astronauts' heavily processed, thermostabilized diets — something that could be especially important for the multiyear journey it'd take to send people to Mars.
"The astronauts have a pretty amazing diet, with a lot of different foods," Gioia Massa, NASA's lead researcher on the project, told me last year, "but they don't get fresh vegetables often."
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http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9126949/nasa-food-space-station
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