Lobster bisque and onion soup on ISS menu for French astronaut
Chef with 10 Michelin stars has designed meals for Sophie Adenot’s trip to International Space Station next year
When the French astronaut Sophie Adenot travels to the International Space Station (ISS) next year, she will be heading for the stars – not quite in celestial but certainly in gastronomic terms.
Adenot
will dine on not just freeze-dried space food staples but also French
classics such as lobster bisque, foie gras and onion soup prepared
specially for her by a chef with 10 Michelin stars, the European Space Agency (Esa) announced on Wednesday.
Parsnip
and haddock velouté, chicken with tonka beans and creamy polenta, and
shredded braised beef with black garlic will also be on the menu, as
well as desserts of chocolate cream with hazelnut cazette flower,
coconut and smoked vanilla rice pudding, and coffee.
Food delivered to the ISS must meet strict specifications. “Any food delivered to the International Space
Station must be crumb-free, lightweight and keep for at least 24
months,” the agency said. Most meals are canned, vacuum-packed or
freeze-dried from a set of options provided by space agencies.
The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin holds the
record as the first person to eat in space. On his historic April 1961
mission, he sustained himself with a main course of beef and liver as
well as chocolate, all squeezed from a tube.
But
space food has come a long way since Gagarin’s Vostok 1 journey. Fresh
fruit and vegetables are available to modern cosmonauts, though only
when a new spacecraft arrives at the ISS with supplies.
For
the sake of variety, one out of every 10 meals is prepared for specific
crew members according to their personal tastes. Adenot’s menu was
developed by the French chef Anne-Sophie Pic, who holds 10 Michelin
stars and was named best female chef by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants
in 2011.
In France,
Pic is known for taking over the family restaurant, Maison Pic in
Valence, from her late father in spite of a lack of formal training, and
subsequently regaining the third Michelin star her grandfather had
first achieved in 1934.
Pic said it was an “exhilarating challenge” to develop the menu, which includes four starters, two mains and two desserts.
“Cooking for space means pushing the boundaries
of gastronomy,” Pic said. “With my team in my research and development
lab we embraced a thrilling challenge: preserving the emotion of taste
despite extreme technical constraints.”
Adenot
said: “During a mission, sharing our respective dishes is a way of
inviting crewmates to learn more about our culture. It’s a very powerful
bonding experience.”
Adenot, 42, a former
helicopter test pilot, is scheduled to begin her first tour on the ISS
in spring 2026. During a six-month mission called εpsilon, she will
carry out a range of tasks including European-led scientific
experiments, medical research and maintenance on the station.
Moving at a speed of 17,900mph (28,800 km/h)
approximately 250 miles (400km) above Earth, the ISS orbits the planet
roughly 16 times a day, which can make breakfast, lunch and dinner times
hard to keep apart.
Astronauts still
typically eat three meals a day, with a daily calories intake of 2,500
as a guidance. Due to the special requirements for keeping meals durable
and hygienic, feeding an astronaut can cost up to £20,000 a day.
Because body fluids behave differently at zero
gravity, cosmonauts often complain about food in space tasting bland and
request spicy flavours to tickle their tastebuds, such as horseradish
and wasabi.
A pair of Nasa astronauts returned to Earth in March after being unexpectedly stuck on the ISS for more than nine months because of problems with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
Regular
fine dining in space might not be the stuff only of science fiction in
perpetuity. In April this year, Esa announced a project to assess the
viability of producing lab-grown food in the low gravity and higher
radiation in orbit and on other planets.
The
team involved said the experiment was a first step to developing a small
pilot food production plant on the ISS in two years’ time, making
3D-printed bavette and lab-grown frites a possibility for French astronauts of the future
