In 1960, the Whirlpool Corporation signed a contract with the United States Air Force to design and build the world’s first experimental space kitchen. It was a highly complex challenge: the integrated unit had to fit in a cylindrical space about 3 meters long by 2.2 meters in diameter, be extremely light, and provide food and drink for three astronauts during a 14-day mission.
In terms of appliances, it was to include a miniature thermoelectric refrigerator, a freezer, a three-cavity oven, a self-heating water system, storage space, a dispenser for dry waste and another for wet waste. The kitchen could store 126 full meals, plus snacks.
And, in addition to the problems of having a very small space, the kitchen and the appliances had to withstand extreme conditions of zero gravity, pressure … the engineers did not have it easy at all, but they were able to design innovations to achieve the objective of feeding the astronauts who would step on the Moon for the first time.
For example, they designed tubes that allowed American astronauts to inject food directly into their mouths, since food debris could damage the ship’s technology. They also developed two types of products that would be used in the Apollo mission: rehydratable food, which recovers its original properties by adding water, and solid food in the form of cubes, which was eaten directly from the packaging.
Whirlpool continued to work with the US government developing food and equipment for space travel until 1973, completing more than 300 contracts. At the height of the Space Cooking program, the company employed 60 people in the design, development, preparation and packaging of space food or other related tasks. In addition to the Apollo mission, its solutions were used in the Gemini and Skylab missions of NASA and the Mercury mission of the United States Armed Forces. When Whirlpool closed the Space Kitchen program, it donated samples of several of the products produced by the company to the Smithsonian Institution for display in the space museum.
