GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Space travel might never be the same thanks to some students in West Michigan.
The NASA HUNCH program challenges students around the country to create innovative products for use in real life.
High schoolers Katie Bird and Devon Vanderwall, who are both part of Grand Rapids Community College’s Secchia Institute for Culinary Education, accepted the challenge.
“It’s amazing. Me and my partner that I work with are just so happy to be part of it,” Bird told FOX 17.
“Placing top ten, it was something that I really wanted to do, but it was not necessarily expected,” Vanderwall added.
Their goal is to prepare a meal astronauts can eat in space.
“We will be cooking the dish that we’ve been working on and perfecting all year, an astronaut stew,” Bird explained. “For astronauts, they have certain nutritional requirements that they need for any food that goes into space, so we had to really watch the sodium intake for a stew or soup…We really had to find ways to add in flavor and other elements of the dish, so we added in dill pickle to kind of bring out a more acidic flavor.”
“We were going through and cooking it. We talked a lot about the seasonality of also Michigan and using beef potatoes, all those things that kind of grow during the winter months in Michigan, so to also be able to relate that receipt back to, you know, comfort food here in the Midwest and be able to take that to NASA and hopefully win this recipe and get to send that into space,” Jennifer Struik, a program instructor for the GRCC Secchia Institute, added.
Only ten groups in the U.S. were selected for the finals.
Now, after spending seven months in the kitchen, the GRCC team will head to Houston.
“It’s still a little unfathomable that, like, actual astronauts, actual other, like, culinary experts will be eating food that I will be preparing,” Bird said.
The food they’re creating needs to be sealed in something safe for space—that’s where GRCC Launch U students Abby Tichelaar and Cole Herring come in.
“The interior has these honeycombed walls around it and this is meant so that these inner walls have the same structural stability, but they take up less material than if they were completely solid,” Herring explained. “Despite being in space, space is still a problem and if there’s an empty box, then they’ve got this whole empty box that takes up space. And so by breaking it down like that, now this box takes up a fraction of the amount of space it would have if it was just fully built and empty.”
The edible component comes from the material. It is a composite fiberglass resin. Broken down, it turns into lactic acid which can be used for things like sports drinks and gummy bears.
The idea—sending this team to Houston, as well.
The competition is April 20.