Here's Everything Artemis II NASA Astronauts Eat on the Way to the Moon

When you picture astronaut food, you probably picture something sad. Freeze-dried paste squeezed from a tube. Flavorless cubes. Like a downgraded MRE.

The reality aboard NASA's Artemis II mission, currently on a roughly 10-day journey around the Moon and back, is considerably more interesting.

The four-person crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — has access to 189 unique menu items during the mission. One hundred and eighty-nine. That's more options than a lot of sit-down restaurants.

What's on the Artemis II Menu

The Artemis II menu includes BBQ beef brisket, macaroni and cheese, butternut squash, cauliflower, tortillas, nuts, cookies, and chocolate. On the beverage side, the crew has 10 options including coffee and smoothies. These aren't emergency rations — they're meals developed collaboratively with space food experts and the crew themselves, designed to be genuinely appealing while meeting the nutritional demands of deep space travel.

The reasoning is practical as much as it is humane. Food in space serves a function beyond calories. It supports crew morale during long, isolated missions (like snacks on a cross-country road trip ... on a significantly bigger scale), provides structure to the day, and ensures astronauts are getting the hydration and nutrients their bodies need to perform at their best in an environment that puts constant stress on the human system.

Tortillas, a staple of spaceflight since the shuttle era, remain on the menu for a simple reason: they don't produce crumbs. In microgravity, a floating bread crumb can find its way into equipment, eyes, or lungs. Tortillas wrap cleanly and eat neatly.

Why Deep Space Nutrition Is Different

Feeding astronauts in deep space presents challenges that don't exist on the International Space Station, where resupply missions can deliver fresh food every few months. On the way to the Moon and back, the crew is entirely dependent on what they launched with. Every item on the Artemis II menu had to survive launch forces, remain stable in the spacecraft's environment, and be edible — ideally enjoyable — at the moment the crew reaches for it.

NASA's space food team works with each crew before launch to customize menus around individual preferences, dietary needs, and caloric requirements. An astronaut burning more calories during physically demanding operations will need a different menu than one spending a shift at a workstation. The goal is to make sure no one is under-fueled when it matters most, and that nobody is quietly dreading mealtime.

Artemis II is Paving the Way for Artemis III

Artemis II is a roughly 10-day mission. Artemis III, the planned Moon landing, will be significantly longer and more demanding. Every meal the current crew eats, every note about what worked and what didn't, feeds into the food systems that will sustain the first humans to walk on the Moon since 1972.

Artemis II launched April 1 from Kennedy Space Center and is scheduled to splashdown off the coast of San Diego at approximately 8:07 p.m. ET on Friday, April 10. You can track the mission in real time at nasa.gov/trackartemis.