There was cause to celebrate recently when the astronauts on the International Space Station began harvesting the most sumptuous looking chiles. Now that's something to celebrate when your diet for months on end consists of mostly bland packaged foods, much of it freeze-dried to reduce size and volume in such tight quarters.  While occasionally fresh produce is delivered to the station on routine supply missions, there has been nothing like these “homegrown” beauties—especially when “home” is 254 miles up in space!

Thinking ahead to the longer trips to Mars, which could take up to three years, receiving fresh groceries would be impossible.  The logistics of deliveries would be difficult even on shorter trips to the moon.  So growing crops in space is a critical challenge to overcome and necessary for astronauts to supplement their diets with all-important fresh produce.  Last year I wrote about the lettuce grown successfully on the station as they discovered that it was as safe and nutritious to eat as that grown on Earth.  But growing chiles have been more difficult.  NSAA described the experiment as “one of the most complex to date on the station because of the long germination and growing times.”

Why chiles? One of the benefits to growing them is that for astronauts who don't like the taste of their less than yummy packaged food, they often eat less which leads to potential health problems for them.  Adding some fresh spices helps solve that problem.  Because fluids flow to the head in a weightless environment, many astronauts become congested and crave spicy foods—and the fresher the better ‘tho some have thought to bring along hot sauce for the long trip!

NASA researchers spent two years finding the perfect pepper to grow and tested more than two dozen options.  They settled on the Hatch chile from Hatch, N.M., which has about the same level of spiciness and “heat” as Tabasco sauce.  For those purists reading this, like sparkling wine produced outside Champagne, France, the peppers grown on the space station are technically not Hatch peppers since they were grown way outside the Hatch Valley!

Astronauts have been growing plants in space for decades.  However, cultivating edible food without the benefits of gravity and natural light has been challenging.  Engineers and scientists have created a special chamber called, of course, “Veggie”.  It's been used to successfully grow lettuce and other plants on the space station since 2014 by nurturing the plants in a porous ceramic clay instead of soil and using wicks to guide water to the roots since there is no gravity to do that job.

For these much-celebrated peppers, an NSAA team planted 48 pepper seeds on Earth with a fertilizer especially created for peppers and sent them to the station on a SpaceX cargo resupply mission.  In July, the “space gardeners” began watering them and pollinating some of the flowers: a few of the plants developed fruit.  And the day that those peppers were fully grown, they were picked, photographed, measured, and then finally put into the most delicious tacos ever known in space—or even on Earth!