By Denis Sheehan MIH
Catering News is sponsored by Two Services
Virgin Galactic’s first commercial space tourism flight took place last week seeing two pilots take three paying customers on a 90 minute suborbital journey that reached an altitude of 53 miles.
The flight marks a decisive moment for Virgin Galactic, a space tourism business created by Sir Richard Branson in 2004, this was the company’s sixth piloted sub-orbital space flight, and most notably it was the first carrying paying customers.
When the business first emerged many scoffed that it was an indulgence rather than a serious business. Last week’s achievement by the space entrepreneur, like many of his other endeavours however may make many of the scoffers recalibrate their thoughts.
Virgin Galactic has already sold 800 tickets for future trips on their current fleet of three spacecraft, with plans to build more enabling 400 journeys into space a year. The price per seat currently is circa £350,000.
Timelines
The first manned rocket to reach space was the Vostok 1, launched by the Soviet Union on April 12, 1961. The spacecraft was piloted by Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut, making him the first human to journey into outer space.
The first meal consumed in space
Yuri Gagarin also became the first person to eat and drink in space. Aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, Gagarin ate beef and liver paste from an aluminium tube by squeezing it into his mouth. For dessert he enjoyed a chocolate sauce, eating the food by the same method. Gagarin also sucked water from a bag through a straw.
The Vostok 1 mission demonstrated the feasibility of manned spaceflight and opened the door for further exploration of space by humans. His historic flight also paved the way for subsequent manned space missions, including longer-duration orbital flights and lunar missions.
That same year President John F. Kennedy set the goal of the USA landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. Again, many scoffed, yet Apollo 11 was launched from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on July 16, 1969, atop a Saturn V rocket.
Four days later, a lunar module named ‘Eagle’, with Armstrong and Aldrin aboard, separated from the command module (piloted by Collins) and descended toward the lunar surface.
On July 20, Armstrong piloted the lunar module to a safe landing site in the southwestern region of the Moon’s Sea of Tranquillity. As the world held its breath, Armstrong reported the now-famous words, “The Eagle has landed”. The first time a human being had landed on another celestial body.
Several hours later, on July 21, Armstrong became the first person to step onto the lunar surface. As he descended the ladder of the lunar module, he declared, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface shortly afterward.
The Apollo 11 mission achieved its primary objective of landing humans on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth. After spending about 2.5 hours on the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin re-entered the lunar module and eventually docked with Collins in the command module. They returned to Earth and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969.
The Apollo 11 mission was part of the Apollo program, conducted by NASA from 1961 to 1972. There were three primary types of Apollo rockets used throughout the program: Saturn I, Saturn IB, and the Saturn V, which to this day remains the most powerful rocket ever built.
In total, 13 Saturn V rockets were launched between 1967 and 1973, including the historic Apollo 11 mission.
Then followed the Space Shuttle Era: Space Shuttles were the first reusable spacecraft capable of launching payloads into orbit and returning to Earth, developed in the 1970s. The Space Shuttle program spanned from 1981 to 2011 and facilitated various scientific missions, satellite deployments, and the construction of the International Space Station (ISS).
23 years of full time catering in space
The ISS, a collaborative effort among multiple space agencies, including NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and CSA, has been continuously occupied since November 2000.
The menu aboard the International Space Station (ISS) includes more than a hundred items – from vegetables and fruit to pre-prepared meals and desserts. Even condiments such as ketchup and mustard are available. There are three meals per day, plus snacks that can be eaten at any time, ensuring astronauts receive at least 2,500 calories each day.
So, for more than 62 years people have been eating and drinking in space, and as of May 2022 that equated to 628 people. It is now many more of course.
Satellites have now reached outside of the heliosphere, the boundary where the influences outside our solar system are stronger than those from our Sun. Voyager 1, launched in 1977 was the first human-made object to do so and every day ventures further into interstellar space. However, if we define our solar system as the Sun and everything that primarily orbits the Sun, Voyager 1 will remain within the confines of the solar system until it emerges from the Oort cloud in another 14,000 to 28,000 years. Voyager 1 is currently circa 15 billion miles from Earth constantly traveling further at a speed of 35,000 mph.
Every planet in our solar system has been reached by satellite and data captured.
There have been exactly 50 missions to Mars, the most recent being Mars 2020. This latest mission after an eight month journey delivered a payload to the surface of Mars including a rover vehicle, and a drone helicopter on 18 February 2021. The helicopter took the first flight on another planet two months later. It has now completed 52 flights.
SpaceX business objective
Elon Musk’s SpaceX business objective is to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars. The plan involves sending multiple missions to transport infrastructure, supplies, and eventually, a significant number of people to the planet. The aim is to create a permanent settlement and make humans a multiplanetary species.
Throughout the 62 year history of manned space travel the next step has always seemed almost too ambitious, yet many steps have been taken, including 261 people from 22 different nations living, eating, and drinking, on the International Space Station over the past 22 years.
To meet the nutritional needs of further advances in space travel, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency created the Deep Space Food Challenge, to help bring innovative food production technologies to space, and that also offer benefits here on Earth. To date more than 300 teams from 32 countries have submitted innovative food system design entries.
So far, 18 US, 10 Canadian, and 10 international teams have each been awarded $25,000 from NASA for their work and are now invited to participate in the next phase of development.
A little more than 100 years
The first reported inflight meal was served at Handley Page Transport in England, on October 11th, 1919, on a flight from London to Paris. The company operated 9 outward and nine return flights per week carrying 6 passengers with a meal of a sandwich and some fruit, costing 3 shillings. A market in 1919 worth circa £842 and 5 shillings in pre-decimal pounds, shillings, and pence per annum.
The annual global inflight catering service market was valued at USD 9.6 billion in 2022 and projected to reach 16.3 billion by 2028, a CAGR of 9.2%.
There is of course a limit to inflight catering in geographic terms, there is no such limit to space tourism catering.