Why You Can’t Keep Kosher In Space
Kashrut-observant children who dream of becoming astronauts may have to rethink their plans.
NASA’s Space Food Systems Laboratory, which develops, produces, and packages food for every American astronaut, only has one packaging facility, the lab’s manager, Vickie Kloeris, explained to Space.com. This means that foods that may have otherwise been kosher would come in contact with impure equipment when it was being prepared for storage on spacecraft.
While Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon was able to bring some kosher food with him on the space shuttle Columbia as part of his allotment of personal effects, he was only scheduled to be in space for 15 days. Today’s astronauts stay on the International Space Station for six months or more.
So NASA “would have to be given a chunk of money to be able to go out and identify and procure and bring in commercial stuff that would support a crewmember in that situation,” Kloeris explained.
Even if no non-kosher food was brought onboard, ritually purifying the existing food equipment would be impossible, as the station lacks an oven that can boil water — which regardless would not be able to stay in place in the station’s zero-gravity atmosphere.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter at @aidenpink.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.