Flour tortillas are an astronaut's favourite bread item (and only Nasa could call bread a bread item). I know this because www.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/factsheets/nasapubs/food.html reveals that "tortillas provide an easy and acceptable solution to the bread crumb and microgravity handling problem". They can go mouldy - there isn't a fridge on the orbiter - but fiendishly clever nutritional scientists at Nasa have developed a "shelf-stable" tortilla.
Beefsteak aboard the shuttle is irradiated to stop it going off. If you don't want to heat up your rehydratable freeze-dried food in the oven aboard the shuttle you can chew your tortilla with apples, bananas, oranges, and carrot and celery sticks from the fresh food locker.
A tray is advisable, attached to your lap by a strap. Salt cannot be shaken on to your celery, obviously: it is served in a little pouch, dissolved in water.
Food matters, especially on a long spaceflight, perhaps to any of the nine planets in the solar system sww pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets or to the growing number so far spotted outside the solar system (I refer you to the extrasolar planets encyclopaedia - www.spaceref.com/.
Although if you took off for a planet 50 or 70 light years away, you'd eventually get really sick of shelf-stable tortillas.
People could opt for the fast track to Alpha Centauri by developing one of the technologies proposed in the site charmingly labelled Warp Drive When? (www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm) which tackles head-on the handicap of not being as advanced as Captain Kirk, then identifies the whole problem of breakthrough propulsion physics at www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp, proposing (1) propulsion that requires no propellant mass, (2) propulsion that attains the maximum transit speeds physically possible, and (3) breakthrough methods of energy production to power such devices.
People who think old-fashioned fiction is less demanding could instead fashion a Star Trek universe in which such things might be possible, and then contemplate the materials they would need to make Spock, Bones and Beam-Me-Up Scottie feel at home, simply by clicking on www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9606/Bormanis-9606.html.
The thing about space, and in particular, the cluster of hyperlinks in and around Nasaspace (Nasa.gov) is that once you get up there, you need never come down. Forty years ago, rocket scientists began thinking about upward mobility, high finance and high society, and there are still dreams of a wheeling space settlement populated by 10,000 delightfully detached people hooked on artificial gravity, hydroponic cultivation, asteroid prospecting and a viable but very mobile society of others at www.permanent.com.
You get the picture: mundane websites enclose a little world, but Nasa cyberspace enfolds a universe. You look for one thing, and discover new worlds along the way.
Many of these can be found at the astrobiology web which takes you to authorities who can be remarkably helpful on life in extreme environments, the details of suiting up for an EVA or spacewalk or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Someone feeling entrepreneurial and anxious to make a buck in orbit could do worse than check out the Space Frontier Foundation (address: www.space-frontier.org and motto: "Space is a place, not a program") which links to a surprising number of commercial enterprises waiting to take off.
The foundation argues that it is human destiny to settle Mars, which means terraforming it, which of course means going to it.
And anyone who goes to Mars will be shut up in a little spacecraft for months, so the old recipes for shelf-stable flour tortillas simply won't do. Fortunately scientists at Cornell University have been working on the problem.
Their version of extraterrestrial nosh includes fresh melon, sweet potato pancakes or wheatberry and rice cereal with rice milk, and scrambled tofu for breakfast.
For elevenses, they propose pitta bread and peanut butter and carrot sticks; followed by lunch of tomato and lime soup, with a sweet potato and bean burrito with fresh salsa and a tofu miso dip with carrot sticks. Dinner would be a slap up affair of carrot drumsticks, tabouli salad, potato and fresh coriander stir-fry, a zucchini loaf cake.
The diet had to be low in salt, because the whole lot would be grown hydroponically and watered with astronaut's urine, which would of course get progressively saltier as the journey went on if you started shaking the iodised salt over your sweet potato chips every time.
A gang of volunteers at Cornell ate this stuff for 30 days. But Mars is only a skip and a jump compared to Saturn. Anybody who fancies riding along with the spacecraft Cassini-Huygens and touching down on Titan see www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini would have taken off years ago and wouldn't expect to arrive until 2004.
And what would you find on Titan? A thick atmosphere of ethane and methane, or to put it another way, awesome concentrations of flatulence, a condition which by the way causes great irritation in a small spaceship.
Tortilla, anybody?
