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These ISS Astronauts Just Made Pizza In Space And The Footage Is Positively Cosmic [Video]

By Alexandra Lozovschi
Published on: 02:29 PST, Dec 4, 2017

Being an astronaut just got a lot cooler, now that you can make your own pizza in space, as shown in the video below, posted by the European Space Agency (ESA). The footage documents the crew of NASA’s Expedition 53 having a blast while making pizza in microgravity conditions.

Five months into their mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the six astronauts that make up the crew of Expedition 53 — NASA’s Randy Bresnik (commander), Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei, ESA’s astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and Alexander Misurkin and Sergey Ryazanskiy of Roscosmos — got a hankering for pizza.

Judging by the limited food options available to astronauts during long missions, no one can really blame them. A typical menu in space usually consists of unappetizing food tubes stuffed with semiliquid paste and dry, bite-sized snacks coated with gelatin to prevent crumbs from floating around.

After months of squeezing tubes and munching on bite-sized cubes and freeze-dried powders, there’s no wonder the boys found themselves craving for some more delicious treats. After all, a few comforts of home can do wonders when you’re cooped up in space.

Pizza is love, pizza is life, even aboard the ISS. Therefore, the six astronauts decided to throw a pizza party in zero gravity.

During a previous live-stream event, Nespoli, who is the Expedition 53 flight engineer, “casually” brought up the topic of pizzas and told his boss he really missed the tasty snacks.

Much to their delight, the crew later received all the ingredients needed for making pizza when the Cygnus resupply spacecraft safely docked with the ISS on November 14. Along with scientific equipment, the cargo ship also hauled a delivery of sauce, cheese, pepperoni, anchovy paste, tomatoes, pesto, and olive oil for DIY flatbread pizzas, CBS News reported at the time.

On Saturday (December 2), Nespoli tweeted about the impromptu pizza party and graciously thanked his boss for the unexpected delivery.

Knowing full-well that everyone would be curious to see how one can make pizza in space, the crew decided to record the moment for posterity and filmed the entire thing.

The minute-long video shows the crewmen trying to assemble some personalized pizzas and then wrapping them in foil to heat them up. The zero-gravity environment adds choreography to the culinary space experiment, as the pizzas elegantly float around inside the spacecraft in a sinuous dance, before being divided among the six hungry astronauts.

In another tweet, expedition commander Bresnik, who incidentally uploaded the footage, described the cosmic pizzas as “flying saucers of the edible kind” and referred to his crew as the “Intergalactic Pizza Devouring Squad,” or IPDS.

The Huffington Post notes the six members of NASA’s Expedition 53 arrived aboard the ISS on two separate flights, dated July 28 and September 13, and are currently in orbit researching cosmic ray particles and studying the advantages of manufacturing fiber optic filaments in microgravity.

In addition, Expedition 53 is also tasked with investigating targeted therapies for muscle atrophy and exploring a potential new drug for bone repairing.

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