The Artemis II crew was about halfway between the moon and Earth on Saturday, with a lunar flyby on Monday still coming up fast. Inside that timeline, one thing stays surprisingly practical: what they’ll eat, and how it has to work when there’s no resupply.
The four-person team is carrying enough food to sustain the mission’s 10 days in space, but the menu differs from other missions. Artemis II astronauts dine from a fixed, preselected menu designed for a self-contained spacecraft with no resupply — unlike the International Space Station, which receives regular deliveries and can offer fresh food.
On earlier flights, the tradeoffs were even tougher. During Apollo missions, astronauts relied on lightweight, rehydrated meals. Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman once called the food “unappetizing.” Misryoum newsroom reported that history still hangs around in how NASA thinks about taste now, even if they’re also thinking about weight, storage, and crumbs.
For Artemis meals, shelf life comes first. While NASA must still consider space limitations when developing Artemis meals, astronauts now have a broader selection. The one requirement: food must be shelf-stable and require no refrigeration. There’s also microgravity to deal with — meals must be easy to consume and minimize crumbs, because everything floating is basically a small mess waiting to happen.
Beverages have their own constraints too. Astronauts can choose only two flavored drinks per day — options include coffee, green tea and various juices — because of weight limits. NASA said the Orion spacecraft carries 189 unique food items, including tortillas, flatbread, quiche, brisket, cauliflower macaroni and cheese, and almonds.
During preflight, the crew isn’t just reading a menu like passengers. “The Artemis II crew has direct input into menu selection,” NASA said. “Crew members sample, evaluate and rate all foods on the standard menu during preflight testing, and their preferences are balanced with nutritional requirements and what Orion can accommodate. Final, crew-specific menus are set well before launch. Two to three days’ worth of food for each crew member is packed together in a single container, providing flexibility for meal selection during the mission.”
By the time the spacecraft had been underway for several days, the menu’s biggest surprise might be how normal it seems. “For me so far, I haven’t really noticed much change, although I was expecting to notice it more,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said. When asked if he brought any Canadian dishes aboard, Hansen said he enjoyed maple biscuits during the crew’s first day in space. “It was something fun at the end of a long day,” he said. The kitchen on Earth, for all its chaos, still doesn’t smell the same as rehydrated stuff or packaged treats — but at least, in orbit, he’s not grimacing at every bite. And maybe that’s the real point: not perfect flavor, exactly, but something they can stick with for a full stretch, even when the mission clock keeps moving.