Making a pizza in outer space looks like it would be a rather difficult task. For one thing you’d have to make certain that your ingredients don’t go floating around, and then you’d have to make sure that they adhere to the dough in order to keep them from flying around the module. Then it seems like they might not get to cook them since fire or too much heat inside this space seems like it wouldn’t be a good idea. After that realization is the fact that everything on the pizza would need to be glued down by sauce in some fashion. Otherwise the small aerial maneuvers that they’re putting the pizza through don’t seem like they would work all that well. There would be pepperoni and sardines flying every which way with olives and other toppings bouncing off the walls.
Getting back to the cooking idea however it does look like they have a briefcase-sized oven contraption that can cook them so they don’t have to eat everything cold, which is nice since some of those ingredients might not taste as good without being heated up at least. One of the best ideas is that they’re using Boboli pre-made pizza crusts so it’s a lot easier to think that they COULD eat cold pizza if they wanted, but now all they have to do is make them and heat them up without waiting a long time for the dough to rise. That takes a lot of stress from the prep for this meal.
It’s interesting to see astronauts eating regular food up in space since a lot of us probably have the notion that astronauts only eat protein pack and dehydrated foods that are easy to pack and store for long periods of time. This seems to state that astronauts do in fact consume other foods aside from those that people know about. Of course the only problem after food prep would be stowing the garbage, so it’s easy to assume that the astronauts wouldn’t be carrying an entire freezer or storage locker filled with these type of goodies. It would no doubt require a lot more space that they might not have to store the garbage that was produced. This is a time when you would be better off eating absolutely everything that was in front of you so as to reduce the amount of waste produced.
Still, it seems like the astronauts of today have come a long way from those of before, and in more ways than one. Growing up I heard about “astronaut food” more than once from my parents and elders as something that was dehydrated and had just the barest hint of flavor to it. Dehydrated ice cream was the one that I remember the most since it was fairly sweet but still had a rather odd consistency to it that I couldn’t get around.
It’s nice to see that they get to eat something that they can fully enjoy and not have to suck through a straw.
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