File:KSC-05-S-00187 (ksc 071005 114 hire-8).webm

English: MS. STILSON: Great. Well, Jeff from Smyrna states, my son, Grant, wants to know what the astronauts eat and drink on a Shuttle flight. MS. HIRE: Well, that's a very good question, because if you think about it, without the effects of gravity, eating and drinking is actually quite a challenge. And I brought a little bit with me. If you think about, without gravity, you can't just pour a drink into a glass. So this is -- we drink from something like this. This is tea with lemon. You see the bag. And the tea is down here. On this end, we add water to it and it has a little valve so it only lets the water in and it doesn't just leak out, until we put in a special straw. And the straw has its own clamp. Because if we left the straw unclamped, the fluid would just spray out much like a water gun. And although that sounds fun, it would make quite a mess onboard Space Shuttle or the Space Station, because it floats all over the place, it doesn't just dropdown with gravity. And for the food, it's actually very similar to food on Earth. We do have some food that is just prepackaged exactly the way it is. But a lot of our food, to save on the weight and the space that all this takes up when we launch, we dehydrate our food and put it in packages like this. This particular package is rice and chicken. And it looks very strange, but it's also very much like camping food, if you're familiar with any type of camping food, that would be dehydrated. We add the water in this end and let it heat up and rehydrate it. It will expand and then we use a pair of scissors to cut this open. And since it's a little bit sticky, it doesn't just immediately fly out. So we're able to use a spoon or a fork to just kind of dig in there and eat it normally. And the one other thing you'll notice, these blue dots on here are the hook and loop, or Velcro type of fasteners, because you can't just set it down. If I were to let go of this in space, it would just float. Or if I bumped it, it would bump it away. So in order to fasten this somewhere, you kind of use the fasteners there and hook it wherever you want. You could even hook it right to your space suit, your flight suit.