Clinical Reports Food, Nutrition and the Space Traveler

the near future presents striking challenges in the areas of protecting and sustaining man in a new and hostile environment. This paper will primarily consider the problems concerning food, but it will also touch on those problemn areas which are closely associated. What will travel, involving great distances in space, mean with respect to food? When planning a trip into space, we need to know how much time it will take. In our discussion of food, we can probably best examine the problems if we divide space feeding into three classes based on the length of flight. First, there will be short periods of space flight, lasting not more than two or three days. Second, there will be trips of intermediate dura-tion, i.e., those of more than two or three days, extending to several months. Third, there may be long flights or space voyages which may last for years and possibly even for generations sometime in the more distant future.’ Why should we consider time periods such as these? Each of these categories of flight involves specific problems of which food is but one. The problems connected with these three flight durations are related to weight. Many pounds of fuel and oxidizer are required to place a single pound of payload in orbit around the earth. It takes even more to effect a velocit