What Astronauts Eat, Wear and Miss in Orbit

Ask an astronaut what they miss most about [Earth], and the answer is rarely the view; It is usually a smell, a texture, or a food they took for granted.

Life aboard the International Space Station reduces existence to three stubbornly ordinary questions: what to eat, what to wear, and what the body quietly refuses to forget.

Meals arrive freeze-dried or [thermostabilized], rehydrated with a squirt of hot water, since loose crumbs would drift free and lodge in delicate instruments.

Microgravity dulls both smell and taste by pooling fluid toward the head, which is why so many crew members smother their food in hot sauce.

[NASA] now designs menus around this blunted palate, favoring bold, well-seasoned dishes over the bland comfort food once assumed to suit a queasy stomach.

Clothing gets no such luxury of adaptation, since there is no washing machine on board, so shirts and socks are worn for days before being discarded.

Spacewalk suits demand a different kind of patience, requiring hours of [prebreathing] and fitting before an astronaut can even step outside.

Each suit is custom-tailored, partly because the spine lengthens by several centimeters in microgravity, leaving astronauts measurably taller until gravity reasserts itself.

That same fluid shift rounds out the face into what crew members wryly call moon face, a puffiness that takes weeks to settle after landing.

To offset the muscle and bone loss that weightlessness inflicts, astronauts exercise nearly two hours daily on equipment bolted to the walls and floor.

Astronauts consistently name rain, cut grass, and the smell of their own kitchen as the sensations they miss most acutely.

Some have admitted that gravity itself becomes an object of longing, that dull and unremarkable force that lets a cup simply sit on a table.

It is a strange kind of homesickness, one aimed less at a place than at the ordinary physics that place obeys.

Perhaps that is the quiet lesson orbit teaches: the things we barely notice are usually the things we would miss the most.