NASA History Community:
Below and attached is information about three upcoming events. Tomorrow night Mike Neufeld will give a talk entitled “Back to the Moon to Stay?” Next Wednesday, our office will sponsor a lunchtime
talk by Alwin Cubasch on “Space Food for the Elderly.” In June, the National Park Service and NASA Johnson Space Center will sponsor a conference entitled “Preserving the Race for Space 2024.”
Please feel free to forward this information to others who may be interested. Thanks and happy new year,
Steve
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NASA History Talk: “Space Food for the Elderly” by Alwin Cubasch
Time/Date/Location: noon - 1
pm ET, Wednesday 17 January, virtual via
MS Teams link (no prior registration necessary)
Contact:
Steve Garber (stephen.j.garber@nasa.gov)
Description:
When NASA came under pressure to transform space technology into spin-offs with a positive societal impact in the 1970s, the Food
and Nutrition Branch at NASA’s Johnson Space Center explored ways to put its space food technologies to use in American kitchens. One of the pressing concerns of the day was malnutrition and poverty among aging Americans in rural communities who could not
be reached by existing care programs.
Therefore, the Meal System for the Elderly aimed to provide elderly in remote areas with freeze-dehydrated easy-to-prepare space food rations that could be kept without
refrigeration and be cooked by just adding the right amount of water. After a field trial in Texas from 1975 to 1976, however, the program was discontinued. The presentation will look at the interplay between new technologies, political expectations and different
forms of nutritional knowledge, from which the this program emerged and the reasons for the somewhat unceremonious end of the program.
Alwin J. Cubasch is a research associate at Humboldt University in Berlin and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Innsbruck.
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On Friday, Jan. 12 at 8:00 PM ET, retired National Air and Space Museum Senior Curator Michael Neufeld will give the Presidents' Lecture of PSW Science, formerly
the Philosophical Society of Washington. He will speak on "Back to the Moon to Stay? The Artemis Program and the Past and Future of Human Lunar Exploration." The lecture will be held at the John Wesley Powell Auditorium of the Cosmos Club and will be streamed
online at https://pswscience.org/meeting/2488/.
The invitation was sparked by his recent article in Physics Today: Back
to the Moon ... to stay? | Physics Today | AIP Publishing.
Preserving the Race for Space 2024: From the Earth to the Moon and Beyond conference in Houston, June 11-13
Stephen Garber
(he/him)
NASA History Division
Office of Communications
NASA Headquarters
Mary W. Jackson Building, Room 5P25
Washington, DC 20546
202-358-0385
