A future experiment on the International Space Station is taking the recipe instruction “allow the dough to rise” to all new heights. Scheduled to launch in 2018 during “Horizons,” Alexander Gerst’s second science mission as a European Space Agency astronaut, “Bake in Space” will experiment with a specialty bread dough in a microgravity oven to bake in orbit for the first time ever.
“Baking where nobody baked before,” said the team behind Bake In Space. “Bake In Space seeks to address the scientific and technical challenges relating to the production of fresh bread in space.” The Bake in Space team behind the experiment is compromised of former shuttle astronaut Gerhard Thiele, German scientists, and engineers but it’s not about augmenting the current station crew’s diet. Instead, researchers are exploring options for future space travel, when spaceflight is available for private tours.
“As space tourism takes off and people spend more time in space, we need to allow bread to be made from scratch,” said Sebastian Marcu, CEO, and founder of Bake In Space, based in Bremen Germany. The main difficulty with bread in space and the driving force behind the experiment is the tiny, innocuous breadcrumb. While perfectly innocent on Earth, in the microgravity of space, they can cause a laundry list of issues including complications with ventilation filters or electrical system failures. A breadcrumb could even cause health problems if inhaled by an astronaut or space tourist.
In past missions, crumb-less bread solutions, as developed by NASA, have been unappetizing, to say the least. After crews on the Mercury and Gemini missions snuck sandwiches on board, astronaut food supplies included pre-cut bread cubes coated in gelatin to encapsulate the crumbs. Eventually, bread was removed from the equation entirely and replaced with tortillas space shuttle era missions.
Bake in Space will attempt to make a type of German bread roll using a unique dough and a small convection or vacuum oven that requires little power. In a video recorded earlier this year, astronaut Shane Kimbrough explained from aboard the space station, “The first thing we need for a sandwich is a piece of bread. Well, up here, we don’t have bread like you have on Earth, but we have tortillas. So we use tortillas a lot for our sandwiches.”
However, breadcrumbs alone are not the only difficulties Bake in Space will face in testing their new bread dough. The dough must produce a bread that is not only nutritious but also enjoyable to consume and emotionally satisfying, emitting the warm and pleasant smell of freshly baked bread. A goal described on the company’s website: “Besides [being] a source for nutrition, the smell of fresh bread evokes memories of general happiness and is an important psychological factor. It is a symbol of recreational time and procedure down on Earth.”
“This is the biggest challenge,” agreed Florian Stukenborg with the research firm TTZ Bremerhaven. Similar food-based experiments have already been performed previously for fresh produce grown in a plant chamber called Veggie, and a microgravity coffee makes called ISSPresso. Besides baking bread, Bake in Space also hopes to form a sourdough batter in space, which will later be baked on Earth and become the first space-born loaf sold on the planet.
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