The key facts

  • Roscosmos and Logika Moloka signed an agreement on food for cosmonauts
  • Long-shelf-life developments are also planned to be offered to ordinary customers
  • Earlier, Kononenko named coffee, steaks and sweets as lacking in the diet

Agreement on space food

Roscosmos and the company Logika Moloka (Milk Logic) have signed a cooperation agreement under which long-shelf-life dairy products will be developed for cosmonauts and then offered for commercial sale. The document was signed on Thursday by the state corporation's Director General Dmitry Bakanov and the company's Chairman of the Board of Directors Ruslan Alisultanov, reports Gazeta.Ru citing RIA Novosti.

What the parties said

“Our main task is to ensure healthy nutrition for our cosmonauts in orbit, so that they consume the most beneficial products and take care of their health. Moreover, in the future these space developments will also be very useful on Earth for ordinary citizens who will buy Logika Moloka products, including our children,” Bakanov said. Thus, the signed agreement is an arrangement for joint work, not a launch of finished products: the message does not specify timelines for development or when the products will go on sale.

Context: what cosmonauts lack

The news adds to an earlier statement by the commander of the cosmonaut corps, deputy head of the Yuri A. Gagarin Research Institute of the Cosmonaut Training Center, Oleg Kononenko: at the international BioProm forum, he said that Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS lack coffee and steaks. According to him, the cosmonauts consider the available food assortment sufficient, but they feel a need for meat steaks, coffee and sweets; he estimated the diet of a Russian cosmonaut at 3.2 kilocalories. The signed agreement on dairy products does not directly address the wishes named by Kononenko — it concerns a different category of products, and no connection between these reports is asserted in the publications. It was separately noted that a space garden had earlier begun to be grown aboard the ISS started growing a space vegetable garden.