Professor Suresh Pillai and his team are designing palatable and safe meals for astronauts. Thirty percent of the food sent to the International Space Station is from his lab. Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla will have better food options in space. NASA is upgrading space menus for tourists and deep-space explorers. ISRO is also providing home food options for Shukla.
Additional spices and seasonings—cumin, sugar, cayenne pepper, cashews, turmeric, black pepper, coriander, and freeze-dried cilantro flakes— make up less than 1% of weight each, yet they are measured with precise, decimal-point accuracy. This meticulously crafted ingredients list for an Indian fish curry recipe isn’t from the kitchens of celebrity chefs.
It’s one of the nearly five-dozen carefully engineered items on the menu developed for the astronauts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This culinary creation is documented by the US space agency in its technical paper from March 2024.
At the core of it is an Indian-origin American professor.
“Early space missions focused mainly on safe and nutritional food. Palatability was never a priority,” says Suresh Pillai, professor, department of food science and technology, Texas A&M University (TAMU). Pillai heads the state-of-the-art food R&D laboratory that has been designing meals for NASA astronauts since 2005. Today, approximately 30% of the food sent to the International Space Station (ISS) is designed and developed by Pillai and his team at the university.
“I can confidently say that Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla will enjoy a far more palatable meal in space than Rakesh Sharma did over four decades ago,” says Pillai, though he clarifies that he’s not privy to the exact menu planned for the upcoming Axiom Mission 4 (also called Ax-4) to the space station where Shukla is set to join as a pilot.
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MAN ON MISSION MODE At the Commander’s Cove bar in College Station, Texas, the nights come alive when a 63-year-old DJ—known to clubbers as Deep Spin Prof—takes control of the decks, unleashing a cocktail of electronic dance music, tech house, rap and hip-hop.
But as the sun rises, Deep Spin Prof morphs back into his other, more formal identity: Professor Suresh Pillai, a groundbreaking food scientist.
Born in Golden Rock, Tamil Nadu, Pillai’s roots trace back to Thrissur in Kerala, from where his parents hailed. With a bachelor’s degree in botany and master’s in industrial microbiology from Madras University, he ventured to US in 1986 to pursue a PhD in microbiology and immunology at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Since 2005, Pillai has been at the forefront of developing safe and nutritious space cuisine. Between 2014 and 2018, he also lent his expertise to the US Food and Drug Administration’s Science Advisory Board.
“If you are paying so many dollars to be a space tourist, you wouldn’t want to settle for just a pouch of food, would you?” asks Pillai. “Can we develop the next generation of space meals—dishes that rival the finest first-class airline cuisine — while still prioritising safety and nutrition? After all, we have to make sure a space tourist doesn’t end up with diarrhoea,” he says.
HEIGHTS OF GOURMET With the concept of space colonisation hitting a critical mass, it was only a matter of time the menu got an upgrade—chicken noodle soup, Indian fish curry, chocolate pudding and more.
As Pillai points out, now scientists have to think of not just seasoned astronauts but also future tourists and deep-space explorers bound for the Moon and Mars. Group Captain Shukla, an IAF fighter pilot deputed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for the Ax-4 mission — a private endeavour in collaboration with NASA — will become India’s second astronaut to venture into space after Rakesh Sharma’s historic 1984 flight. It is scheduled to launch on June 10 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Shukla will be the first Indian astronaut to board the ISS.
The ISS, a football field-sized orbiting laboratory, has hosted over 260 astronauts from 21 countries since Expedition 1 docked on November 2, 2000, according to NASA’s records as of May 2023. The station includes six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, a gym and a 360-degree-view bay window for stargazing.
The other three crew members of Ax-4 include Peggy Whitson, the American mission commander, Sławosz UznanskiWisniewski, a European Space Agency project astronaut from Poland, and Tibor Kapu from Hungary. The astronauts are slated to spend up to 14 days aboard the ISS, conducting a variety of scientific experiments.
Another Indian, Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, has been designated as a backup crew member for the mission.
According to Pillai, about 80% of the food in the ISS comes from a standard NASA-prepared menu, while the remaining 20% is tailored to each astronaut’s personal preferences. In a press interaction last month, DK Singh, director of ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre, noted that Shukla “will get ghar ka khana (home food)” and also have the option to choose from international cuisine, as approved by NASA.
ISRO has prepared an assortment of rice dishes, moong dal halwa and mango nectar, among other treats, to ensure that the astronaut can take the taste of India with him. The NASA-approved menu at the ISS offers a wide variety of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes. There are beef fajitas, grilled chicken, Indian fish curry and chicken with corn and black beans. There are also Italian green beans, brown rice, carrot coins, cheese tortellini with tomato sauce and curry sauce with vegetables.
For dessert, astronauts can indulge in chocolate pudding, tropical fruit salad and cranapple delicacy. As for beverages, a fruit cocktail is among the options. NC Bhat, a former ISRO scientist who trained with NASA in 1985 for a space shuttle mission, fondly remembers selecting suji halwa as his preferred dish for the journey. “We were taught how to sip tea and pour hot water in a zero-gravity environment,” he recalls with a chuckle over the phone.
Although Bhat and his colleague P Radhakrishnan were both shortlisted and trained for the flight, their dreams were dashed when NASA suspended its shuttle programme after the Challenger disaster in 1986, which claimed the lives of all seven astronauts on board.
“At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, we learned the art of galley management, a skill still considered critical for astronauts,” Bhat notes.
The galley — a modular unit comprising a water dispenser and an oven to heat precooked, thermostabilised meals—ensures that food stays in place rather than drift away mid-bite. Mastering galley management remains a very important part of astronaut training, ensuring that meal doesn’t become a floating mess in a zero-gravity environment.
“There’s a lot to learn from traditional food cultures when designing sustainable and enjoyable meals for longduration space travel, especially to combat menu fatigue — a phenomenon where astronauts lose interest in repetitive meals, ” says Priyanka D Rajkakati, an Indian-origin French aerospace engineer who participated in a mock Moon mission on a Hawaiian island. Her 15-day confinement in 2020 was part of research efforts geared toward the human exploration of the Moon and, eventually, Mars. She recalls how the six-member crew, including three women, focused on various investigations that contributed to a deeper understanding of human adaptation and operational strategies for future space expeditions.
“We quickly realised how crucial the interplay between food and daily rhythms was in the confined environment of the mission,” she explains, noting that the quality of meals significantly affected everyone’s mood, health, energy and overall morale.
Rajkakati recalls how the crew discovered about halfway through the mission that powdered onion wasn’t the best choice.
“It might even have been making us sick, so we gave it a red code: NONIONS,” she quips.
A MICHELIN IN MARS? Today, space food researchers are grappling with a dual challenge: crafting gourmetquality meals for short-term space tourists while simultaneously developing foods that can endure the five-year shelf life needed for deep-space missions to Mars.
India’s Gaganyaan project envisions sending a crew of three astronauts into a lowEarth orbit of 400 km for a three-day mission, before safely splashing down in Indian waters. Even short-term missions like these face significant challenges, such as limited water and the difficulties of preparing meals in a zero-gravity environment.
On the ISS, astronauts often spend months at a time in orbit, but they have never had to go hungry, thanks to regular resupply missions that deliver both packaged and fresh foods. Fresh fruits and vegetables, for instance, are typically enjoyed in the first few days after arrival. But the challenge of developing a food system for a Mars mission is far more complex.
A single journey from Earth to Mars is expected to take seven to 10 months, making the round trip one and half years in transit alone. Factoring in an estimated 18-month stay on the Red Planet — and additional months or years for unforeseen delays — astronauts could require food provisions for about five years.
Unlike the ISS, resupply missions to Mars won’t be easy. What’s more, adding refrigerators would significantly increase the spacecraft’s mass, volume and power demands.
According to NASA’s current plans, the first woman will set foot on the Moon this decade, paving the way for humans to venture to Mars in the following decade.
Pillai says he’s constantly consumed by a single challenge: how to develop space food that’s safe, nutritious and palatable — no matter how many years it needs to last.
“I am focusing on electron beam technology – eBeam —because that’s the key to sterilising future space foods,” he says, adding that several of his PhD students are now diving deep into this research.
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