* What kinds of food do you have on the ship? Hannah – Cancer 23, 0025 (03-27-2006)
We have a pretty good selection of food to choose from. There are most of the usual things you might have in your cupboards at home, like pasta, crackers, canned soups, tuna, canned meats, peanut butter, salt & pepper, hot sauce, salsa, and many more pre-packaged things. From our hydroponic and traditional gardens we will be harvesting a lot of fresh vegetables and some fruit. We have strawberries, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet peppers, jalapenos, cucumbers, radishes, turnips, leaf lettuce, and spinach. To keep the food from getting boring, we brought along a variety of dried spices.
I like to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, but we didn’t bring a cow along with us to give us milk. So, we had to improvise. When planning for this trip we contacted a cereal company in Battle Creek, Michigan and asked them to make us a special kind of cereal – one that has powdered milk stuck right on the cereal. That way, all we need to do is add water and it becomes milky again. And, we have several varieties: plain and sugar-frosted flakes, cocoa flavored puffed cereal, something like granola or muesli, and an o-shaped oat cereal with freeze-dried bananas and blueberries mixed into it. We also have raisins to mix in with the flakes, my favorite!
* Are you floating around all the time? Jacob – Scorpio 38, 0025 (12-29-2006)
No, that’s not necessary. On this trip, we are using centrifugal force to simulate Earth-normal gravity, so we don’t feel the effects of zero gravity. We have separated our habitat from our burnt-out primary booster rocket engine, by a long tether. By rotating these two parts around the center of gravity along the tether, at different speeds, we can make the artificial gravity as strong or as weak as we want it to be. When we come home from Mars we will start out at 38% of Earth’s gravity (about the same as Mars’s gravity) and gradually build back up to Earth-normal gravity. That way we won’t be fighting the sudden change of Mars gravity versus Earth gravity.