An optimized 4-day diet meal plan for 'Lunar Palace 1'

Bioregenerative life support systems (BLSS) provide self-sufficient food ingredients to support long-term manned missions. It is crucial to transform raw food ingredients that are regenerated in situ in BLSS into nutritional and delectable meals for spacecraft crews. It is in our interest to develop a dietary menu with Chinese characteristics that comprises biomass produced in situ with BLSS regenerated ingredients.

Here we report an optimized Chinese 4-day diet meal plan for 'Lunar Palace 1' that is nutritionally balanced and highly acceptable. The 2900 cal diet menu not only meets the requirements of a balanced diet for crews but also exceeds the recommended levels for most nutrients. Specifically, daily fresh food consumption in our meal plan is 1267 g day^-1 , of which 78% is provided by crops and insects regenerated in situ in the BLSS. The meal plan is highly favored by Chinese crews, with acceptability as high as 7.8-8.2 on a 9-point hedonic scale. We further confirmed that our meal plan satisfies crews' basic nutritional needs through a 105-day closed habitation experiment.

In brief, the findings provide new insights for dietary meal plan design in future long-term manned missions. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry.