Mission critical: Astronaut food that is nutritious, yummy, and easy to produce

On April 7, the crewmembers aboard NASA’s Artemis II spacecraft were minutes away from breaking the record for longest distance humans have traveled from Earth when, in a live broadcast, an unexpected item stole the show: a jar of Nutella hazelnut spread floating by in front of the camera.

The clip went viral and gave Nutella priceless advertising. It also highlighted a crucial need for human space travel—food that provides comfort in addition to calories. “Ultimately, the goal is to keep the astronauts healthy, both with the nutrition that’s provided to them but also the psychological aspects that food provides,” says Ralph Fritsche, an expert in space food systems and consultant to NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge. It is now in its second round, called Mars to Table.

Astronauts on space stations and on short missions currently rehydrate and reheat prepackaged food sent from Earth. But the monthslong voyages planned in the next decades will be game changing. It will become costly and impractical to send all the food astronauts need with them.

Much like terrestrial restaurants, future space-based systems will need to address food’s path from source to table, Fritsche says, but with far more stringent requirements (Acta Astronaut. 2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2026.02.021). This means meeting nutritional goals, easily producing food-safe ingredients in space, recycling inedible biomass and waste, and offering a culinarily delicious and culturally diverse menu. “And then all of this has to integrate with the habitat and the life-support systems of the habitat,” he says.

Researchers, companies, and space agencies are now putting on scientific and creative hats to address those requirements. “We’re really challenging people to think outside of their comfort zone . . . think of a holistic system,” Fritsche says.

Extending the shelf life of space food

Food for NASA’s Apollo missions was designed for calories, not a pleasant eating experience. Astronauts squeezed beef and vegetable paste from tubes and ate bite-size cereal cubes. Even though missions lasted 8–12 days, astronauts lost weight—probably in part because of the unappetizing food, says Ian Johnson, a human exploration sciences expert at the European Space Agency (ESA). “That’s not great when you need to do demanding work on the lunar surface. And on the moon or Mars, astronauts will be much more physically active, so their nutrition needs increase.”

Space menus have evolved since Apollo days along with the demographics of crew members, and the offerings now cater to multicultural palettes.

“Menu fatigue has always been a challenge in space,” Fritsche says. Strong, spicy flavors are now in demand because microgravity dulls tastebuds; the Artemis II crew members brought along five types of hot sauce.

Taking a first step for long-duration space travel, researchers at Texas A&M University (TAMU) are trying to make Earth-packaged foods stay safe, nutritious, and yummy longer. The NASA Space Food Research Facility on TAMU’s campus produces about a third of the food that astronauts eat on the International Space Station (ISS). Technicians at the facility heat already-cooked food to kill microbes.

The process alters texture. “There are astronauts who tell you that some of it tastes like cat food, the texture is like cat food,” says Suresh Pillai, a professor of food science and technology and head of the National Center for Electron Beam Research. In addition, nutritional value starts to degrade after about 18 months. “Deep space requires at least 7 years’ shelf life,” he says. “We are pushing that envelope using electron beam [e-beam] technology.”

Pillai and his students have found that using high-energy electrons to irradiate prepared meals and freeze-dried fruits and vegetables could be a viable alternative to heating for sterilizing food. E-beam irradiation better maintains food flavor and texture because it produces less heat.

And it works at a lower radiation dose. NASA’s current requirement of 44 kilograys to destroy food-borne pathogens was set in the 1960s and “is overkill,” Pillai says. His group has found that e-beam sterilization works at doses of just 15 kGy.

The TAMU team is in talks with private space companies to advance e-beam irradiation for food preservation. The technology is already widely used for sterilizing meat, spices, and pet foods on Earth and is fast and cost-effective at large scale. “You can do a whole semitruck in about an hour and a half. The technology is beautiful in the sense that as you scale . . . it’s maybe a penny or two a pound,” Pillai says.

Producing produce in cramped space

Astronauts would probably pay a pretty penny for fresh food while spending months away from Earth. For travel to a lunar base or Mars, cargo space comes at a premium. “For something like a 3year trip to Mars, you’re talking about several tons of food,” Johnson says, and you have to start thinking about producing food locally.

The problem is capturing sunlight. “All the food that you have ever eaten has come from photosynthesis,” says Robert Jinkerson, a chemist and biological engineer at the University of California, Riverside. “You’re either eating plants directly or eating animals that ate plants. The efficiency of converting the sun’s energy to biomass energy is only about 1% for most plants. On Earth you can grow bigger fields. In space, you don’t have that type of area.”

Jinkerson and his colleagues are trying to produce food without photosynthesis. Their team, Nolux, was one of the runners-up in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge in 2024. Typically, plants use sunlight to fix carbon dioxide, he explains. Nolux’s system fixes carbon via electrolysis.

“We take CO₂, electricity, and water and put it through an electrolyzer, which converts that into acetate,” Jinkerson says. “Then we feed that acetate to food-producing organisms like yeast, algae, mushrooms, or even plants.”

On a lunar base, solar panels could power the electrolyzer. Plants need light, but yeast, algae, and mushrooms grow in the dark, Jinkerson says, and they are much more efficient to grow for calories. Mushrooms are high in vitamin D, a nutrient lacking in most diets and one that human bodies don’t produce in space because of ultraviolet shielding on spacecraft.

With 1,500 watts of power, “our system could produce about 4,250 calories per day worth of mushrooms,” Jinkerson says. “If instead you used electricity for [light-emitting diode] lights to grow plants and then grew mushrooms on those plants as a substrate, it would produce 700 calories.”

Growing plants will also be imperative, though. Astronauts will likely crave a bite of crisp lettuce or crunchy carrots after eating soft foods for weeks. And plants are a key source of vitamins and minerals.

One issue that crops up with agriculture in space is that plants don’t absorb water and nutrients well in microgravity, so they have lower vitamin and mineral content than they do on Earth. Fritsche says that genetic engineering could help modify these plants so that they can produce more of certain ingredients.

Space food scientists will also need to scout the globe to find “foods that are healthier and easier to grow and may have certain key ingredients,” Fritsche says. For instance, fermented foods like kombucha and kimchi are nutrient dense and could be a way to use “some of the plant matter that might otherwise go bad or be wasted,” he adds.

Space travel’s protein problem

Plants are good for vitamins and minerals, but many humans rely on animal sources for protein. And getting astronauts enough protein is going to be a huge challenge for long-term missions. Muscle atrophy in microgravity means that astronauts require on average twice the amount of protein per kilogram of body weight as people on Earth.

“In the future, I can anticipate shipping up primary proteins like chicken, beef, and fish [and] complementing them with plants or mushrooms that you’ve grown locally,” Fritsche says. Another futuristic option could be lab-grown meat, in which animal cells are cultivated in bioreactors.

The ESA is stealing a trick from nature to produce protein in space without the need for light or land. The agency is developing a fermentation system based on bacteria that extract energy from hydrogen instead of sunlight and use the energy to convert CO₂ and nitrogen to protein. The ESA launched the project, HOBI-WAN (Hydrogen Oxidizing Bacteria in Weightlessness as a Source of Nutrition), in November.

The bacterial cells are 80% protein and can be mixed into shakes, soups, and doughs. “They have extremely good protein content; [it] is like meat or whey protein,” says Claudio Moratto, a payload systems engineer for the ESA’s Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration Directorate. Importantly, the protein-rich cells have a mild, savory flavor, he says. “The taste is not bad. It’s an umami taste like mushrooms or [shellfish]. You can add it to anything.”

The protein source will have an earthly precedent. The Finnish company Solar Foods built the technology around a strain of ground-dwelling hydrogen-fueled bacteria its scientists discovered in the Nordic wilderness. The firm has secured food safety approval to sell the protein-rich powder in Singapore and the US and expects approval in the European Union this year.

On spaceships or a lunar base, the nitrogen and CO₂ for the fermentation reactors could be sourced from urea found in urine and from exhaled air, respectively, Moratto says. “So it’s not only food production, but it’s a process that’s intertwined with the complete life-support system in a space environment.”

Solar Foods carries out the fermentation in multistory-tall bioreactors at its commercial facility. The ESA is now trying to shrink the system to “the size of a normal drawer in a desk” so it can be tested aboard the ISS in 2 years, Moratto says. “To do this, there are challenges.”

The team first needs to ensure the bacteria thrive and behave the same in microgravity. It then must engineer safe, sealed reactors and a way to slowly provide hydrogen in limited quantities to avoid explosive reactions. The ultimate goal is to build a compact 10 L reactor that can produce enough protein for four astronauts.

Meanwhile, back on Earth

These food technologies not only might help feed space explorers one day but also could have an immediate impact on Earth. Pillai’s group at TAMU, for instance, has found that e-beam irradiation can preserve canned human and pet food for longer than the conventional method. It can also extend the shelf life of fresh produce by a few days, which could reduce food waste.

Nolux and Solar Food’s compact reactor–based systems could address global food insecurity by producing nutrients with minimal land and water. Solar Foods’ sustainable proteins could also reduce the ethical and environmental footprint of animal farming.

Jinkersen says the Gates Foundation is now funding further development of the Nolux technology because “they saw this as a potential vision for feeding people in areas of the world where it’s too hot and dry outdoors.” Nolux and other food production systems designed for space could also be the most energy-efficient way to grow food indoors right here on our planet.

Prachi Patel is a senior editor and physical sciences reporter at C&EN based in Pittsburgh.