From: gherbert@retro.com
Derek Lyons wrote:
>Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:
>>To me it sounds like some at NASA is fishing for more money instead of
>>storing dehydrated at low temperatures.
>
>Right. And the only evidence introduced to date that NASA is wrong is
>the marketing hyperbole of survivalist websites.
Well, it's not all getting posted, but I spent a while looking into this
when I first did the One Way to Mars mission architecture back in 1996.
I have the actual DOD MRE lifetime specs somewhere. Below 60F,
they can be made to last arbitrarily long. Long before you get
to liquid nitrogen, MRE and equivalently well packed other
storable food will last longer than a human lifetime. Merely
keeping them within 5 degrees of freezing is plenty.
The specifics of why the DOD recommends you not eat MREs and only
MREs for several years have to do with the design of the MRE itself
not inherent to long term usage of stored food. The MRE is intended
to be a combat ration and to be blunt, grossly overnourishes troops
if they're eating the recommended quantity per day. US troops are
going into the field and getting fat *in combat* eating MREs these
days, a phenomenon previously unheard of in wartime logistics of
any era. Their specs for field food prep and environmental condition
survival are also extreme as are their ability to be produced by the
tens of millions of units.
People could theoretically survive adequately on beef jerky and
vitamin pills for some years. Though I am not volunteering to
be the guinea pig for that one, I think it illustrates the
magnitude of how well solved this problem is.
There is also a huge difference between needing to be able to
grow or have fresh supplies of *everything*, and having a few
fresh items which are supplements to a storable base diet.
For example, a few strawberries greatly liven up a breakfast
or lunch which otherwise is essentially infinitely storable.
Or a fresh tomato. Very small addons which are known to
be amenable to hydroponics and zero-G cultivation will
give taste and texture boosts and largely overcome stored
food monotony.
I did joke in my presentation at Case for Mars IV that one
of the reasons to leave the Lifetime expedition crew there
was that if they came back, they might track me down and
strangle me for having send them out there with stored
food for all that time. But all joking aside, this is
not nearly the problem that it's being made out to be.
I have never known an ECLSS nutritionist in the last
ten years who didn't believe that storable was an
entirely practical option. I have also never met an
astronaut or astronaut candidate who would seriously
reject going on a Mars mission just because the meals
for six years were going to be MRE quality.
I am wondering if we're seeing a partial repeat of the
Bush(41) NASA "all roads to doing anything on Mars
must pass through my personal fiefdom" problem.
The specifics of the claim on the roadmap presentation
defy extensive research and the community consensus
within the ECLSS community as far as I have been
able to ascertain, and this point directly bears
on the validity of One Way missions so I have been
asking around and researching it.
In my specifically fairly educated opinion, the statements
on pp 21 of the human studies powerpoint are not
well founded and should not be taken as accurate.
If the authors of that document would like to
back it up with some additional research which
contradicts the institutional assumptions which
have been in place for at least the last 10 years
then they should feel free to, but baldly asserting
that it's true is not reasonable.
-george william herbert
gherbert@ertro.com
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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