NASA feasts include quail, food in tubes

“The food that NASA’s early astronauts had to eat in space is a testament to their fortitude,” reads a NASA space-food synopsis that describes how Mercury astronauts had to consume unappetizing bite-sized cubes and semi-liquids, stuffed into aluminum tubes.

But this Thanksgiving, the multinational crew aboard the International Space Station will feast on a cornucopia of tasty meats, side dishes and desserts, courtesy of a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule resupply run to the orbiting outpost roughly 250 miles above sea level.

“Because we’re in the holiday season, we’ve got some fun holiday treats for the crew like chocolate, pumpkin spice cappuccino, rice cakes, turkey, duck, quail, seafood, cranberry sauce and mochi,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s International Space Station deputy program manager, said during a Nov. 8 media teleconference.

“We’ve also got some pizza kits – which are a favorite for our crew – some hummus, salsa and olives,” Weigel said.

The ISS astronauts’ Thanksgiving meal will mark NASA’s 50th year of celebrating the holiday in space, dating back to Skylab, America’s first space station.

Last fall, NASA astronaut Josh Cassada delivered Thanksgiving-week greetings back to Earth via video while floating inside the ISS.

“Up here, we’re on Greenwich Mean Time, which means that for half the planet we live in the future. So much so that we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving on Tuesday this year and working a bit on Thursday,” Cassada said to the camera.

“But I think we’ll still have some time to catch some football and eat some great Thanksgiving fare,” Cassada said.

This Thanksgiving season, Commander Andreas Mogensen of Denmark is leading Crew 70 at the space station, which includes six flight engineers: NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara; Satoshi Furukawa of Japan; and Konstantin Borisov, Nikolai Chub and Oleg Kononenko of Russia.