Space cuisine: the final frontier

Samantha Cristoforetti, the Italian ISS astronaut, watching her spoon float away with soup still in it. Photograph: ESA/Nasa

Spare a thought for those far from home this Christmas not least Italys first woman in space, Samantha Cristoforetti, one of the six astronauts orbiting the Earth at 17,200mph in the International Space Station (ISS).

While Cristoforetti will miss out on her traditional family meal, she will have the consolation of cutting-edge cuisine prepared especially for her in a pristine factory on the edge of Turin.

The pre-packed dishes were produced at a small aerospace engineering firm, Argotec , and have been the subject of almost as much experimentation as the spacecrafts pressurised modules, robotic arms and solar arrays.

The companys association with space food stems from its involvement in astronaut training, and began as a bit of joke, says the managing director, David Avino. His firm was helping to train Luca Parmitano, the Italian astronaut on the first mission to be run by the countrys space agency, ASI.

He wanted to take up some dishes that were typical of Italy, said Avino. It was only after Argotec embarked on their preparation that he realised what he had let himself in for.

Special meals could only justify their place in the payload if they helped to boost morale. To do that, they had to be significantly better than the standard astronauts fare produced by the US and Russian space agencies. But making luxury cuisine for astronauts is no easy matter.

Space travel, like air travel, robs food of its flavour. And dishes sent up to the ISS have to keep for long periods: Parmitano was away for five-and-a-half months while Nasa standards demand an eat by date at least 18 months after launch.

Some dishes can be sterilised by thermostabilisation, using heat under pressure. But the more liquid ones have to be freeze-dried, which takes away yet more flavour.

Stefano Polato, Argotecs 33-year-old chef, who also has a restaurant near Padua , said part of the solution lay in scrupulous selection of the ingredients. Take an apple, for example, he said. You can lower the temperature for sterilisation and avoiding killing off the nutrients if you pick one that has the right acidity level. A pH of 3.5 is ideal. You get fewer bacteria and longer conservation. It tastes good too.

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Space cuisine: the final frontier