Growing Pizza Ingredients in Space

What if you made a pizza up on the International Space Station (ISS)? Wouldn’t that be cool? But what if you also grew the ingredients in space? That would be a bit harder. That would mean operating farms, or at least mini ones, but in space.

Growing Wheat

In order to make the dough you need flour, so you need to bring wheat (or barley) to grow with soil. In zero gravity the wheat doesn’t know which way to grow. Adding in an artificial day and night system with LEDs would help it to grow right. But this will be more expensive because you’d have to pay millions to buy and send solar panels up to space.

Yeast for Dough

Yeast can pretty easily be grown by giving it sugar, warmth, and a sealed container because it multiplies normally in space just as on the Earth. The kneading is the hard part where it can be sent to the other side of the room just from a little push. Air filters will probably end up clogged from the flour. You will end up needing a special place to knead it where it won’t float away.

Tomato Plants

Without tomatoes you can’t have true pizza. You need to put up the day-night system with LEDs, but you also need pollinators. You need to bring bees up to space! Or just use compost and add pollen. Now you get tomatoes that taste like home (if home were floating 250 miles above the ground orbiting the Earth at 17,500 mph).

Real Cheese

You can’t call it pizza without cheese. You could bring up a cow or two, or just bring up powdered milk. You could also bring up ultra-pasteurized milk then use enzymes such as rennet to form curds. You’ll then have to use a fine mesh to capture the curds because there’s no gravity.

Baking With Ovens

Good ol’ pizza ovens won’t work in space because the fire and its heat along with the crumbs won’t make a good day with a spacecraft’s electronics. NASA has made space ovens that are electrically heated sealed boxes that aren’t really hazardous. The astronauts then just slide the pizza in and cook it like a microwave, except it’s electric. It still cooks a pizza.

Pizza on the ISS

Pizza has already made it to the ISS. The first time was in 2001 when Pizza Hut sent a vacuum-sealed box of pizza to the astronauts. But the pizza was made on ground. Imagine the first true space-pizza. Wheat and tomatoes grown under an artificial day-night system with LEDs, yeast raised in the middle of space, cheese crafted 250 miles above sea level, and all of that made in a NASA space oven on the ISS. The first bite would be a whole new milestone in the conquering of space. You can make just about anything up there if you can make a pizza.