What is good: All about space food

At the moment my ideas are focused around using space food as my product to design packaging for to answer this brief. To understand what exactly I am designing for I have done more research to learn all about food in space. I will outline what I have found in this blog post.

'Being an astronaut is Good' was the starting point for this brief, but I have found quite a few reasons why space food itself could be considered 'good' even if consumed on earth;

• It is highly nutritious, certainly a space snack would be better for you than a typical chocolate bar.
• All food must have proven long shelf life (one year minimum for ISS food)
• The packaging is light-weight and designed to minimize waste, essential in space, ethical on earth.
• All packaging is tested to be non toxic, even in extreme conditions, including the glues and inks etc.

There are various pouches, packs and tins used for packaging space food, some are very different to typical supermarket food, but others are near identical, most notably the Capri Sun drinks pouches which NASA themselves use in a modified form. See this .pdf for an excellent summery of space food packaging by Dr Charles Bourland, a NASA space food consultant. Note there seems to a complete lack of graphic design in these example packages, clearly not a NASA priority.
Also see packaging brochure.pdf and this nice tongue in cheek history of space food well worth a read

NASA space food

Capri-Sun, this packaging is modified slightly and used by NASA for their own drinks.