Category: Blog

Geeking Science: N is for Noms

Erin Penn 4 Comments


ID 303497299 | Nasa Food © Stockvectorwin | Dreamstime.com

What is one thing all humans have in common?

We eat. Nom, nom, nom.

We need food at home, we need food at work, we need food at school, we need food at play, we need food on Earth…

We need food in space!

Most of us are familiar with the story of Tang (Cordell). And astronaut ice cream, a freeze-dried delight. Many of the modern hiking food packaging has come from innovations of getting food from here to orbit. Food weighs a lot, and humans, especially active humans executing space walks in Earth’s orbit, need a lot of food.

At this time, humanity has a good handle on getting take-out for field trips into orbit – from tubular scrambled eggs to three-D printing pizza.

Next problem to crack for the noming of noms in space: long-distance food. What happens when a quick resupply with a dip down into the gravity well of humanity’s crib isn’t available? What happens when we set up shop on the moon or maybe even take a road trip to Mars? Toward this end hydroponics and aeroponics have been tested on the International Space Station (ISS), the science of feeding all of humanity and feeding the distant humanity pushing innovation on both fronts. Doing it for an isolated spaceship alone in the dark is going to required next-level food innovations for space, and the resulting science will also help feeding people whose feet stay on the ground.

To that end, NASA is in the hosting a Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table.  This isn’t just recipes like they did for the 2021-2024 challenge; things that can be cooked in the particular conditions of no gravity, limited machines, air restrictions (think of all those Earth recipes with high altitude adjustments and multiple the tweaks needed by a thousand), etc. This is a full design challenge of a food system: things packed, things grown, things reused; a food system nutritious enough to prevent vitamin deficiencies and other health issues (scurvy anyone?) while not taking up too much duty time because during the long round trip everything outside the ship is going to try to kill the humans within the ship a lot, like a lot a lot.

“The challenge will officially conclude in September 2026 and has a total prize purse of $750,000.” Registration deadline is July 31, 2026. (NASA Mars to Table)

Interested in knowing even more? A small bibliography is below. I have also previously written about space food under Geeking Science: Do You Want Fries in Space and Geeking Science: In space they can’t hear you burp.

 

Bibliography

Cordell, Lyndsay. “Tang: The Orange Drink That Got Its Start From NASA.” Wide Open Country. 18 February 2021. (https://www.wideopencountry.com/tang-drink/ – last viewed 11/14/2023)

Hall, Loura. “NASA Back for Seconds with New Food System Design Challenge.” NASA. 13 January 2026. https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/nasa-back-for-seconds-with-new-food-system-design-challenge/ – last viewed 1/16/2026.

Jones, Paul. “Aeroponics vs Hydroponics: In-Depth Comparison.” Seeds and Spades. 30 August 2023. https://www.seedsandspades.com/aeroponics-vs-hydroponics/ – last viewed 1/16/2026.

NASA. “Deep Space Food Challenge (2021-2024).” (undated). https://www.nasa.gov/prizes-challenges-and-crowdsourcing/centennial-challenges/deep-space-food-challenge/ – last viewed 1/16/2026.

NASA. “Mars to Table Challenge.” (undated). https://www.nasa.gov/prizes-challenges-and-crowdsourcing/marstotable/ – last viewed 1/16/2026.

NASA Space Tech. “Introducing NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table.” 13 January 2026. (available on YouTube, embedded in article above)

Editing Rant: L is for Likeable

Erin Penn 5 Comments

Photo by Ekaterina Shakharova on Unsplash

Hey y’all visiting for the A-to-Z challenge, welcome and salutations. One of my jobs is being an editor of genre fiction, both a developmental editor and a copy editor. Once a month in this blog, I go off on rants about what I see a lot of – so writers know what editors see a lot of and know to NOT DO THAT.

Today’s rant: Likeability.

Your characters need to be likeable or at least sympathetic.

If you are writing a romance, the romantic leads NEED to be likeable. Mysteries can break the likeability rule as it helps reader think anyone could have been the killer, but please, for romances, at the very least, make the leads likeable.

And to pull likeability off, some of the following things need to happen:

One: The First Impression cannot be a negative one. Just like meeting people in real life, first impressions with fictional characters need to be positive. Don’t have your character kick a puppy, or whine, or betray their friends or any of that before we see something we like about them first. Strangely, you can have the positive first interaction, and then do a flashback where they kick the puppy, and the reader will be more likely to forgive them or make excuses because they know the person is a “good guy”. Do likeable things first.

Two: For a Point of View character that will be around for a while (like in a series), make sure they are entertaining enough that the audience wants to hang with them for multiple books. Do they make a reader laugh, make them think, or make them feel comfortable? No one wants to hang with people they don’t like.

Three: Create a connection (empathy) with the reader (before anything bad happens) in two of the following five ways: Likeable, Sympathy, Jeopardy, Power, or Humor (this list  was suggested by Darynda Jones way back in 2014 on Magical Words). Likeable is not telling us everyone likes them, it is showing us people like them. Make them a nice character. Sympathy is a understanding what the character is going through, stuff like a parent recently died or getting yelled at by the boss. Jeopardy is something is a problem, they are late with their rent (through no fault of their own), they just got kidnapped. Power can be used to make a bad guy more connectable; everyone loves a person with power. Humor – snark is a wonderful thing.

Make your characters someone that people want to spend time with.

AVOID THE FOLLOWING (ALL EXAMPLES FROM BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS)

  1. Don’t have the character be an impulsive, lazy, backstabbing thief to friends and family, before they are exiled. The developmental recommendation is start with the exile (jeopardy) and their skill at breaking into buildings outside the community to get the food needed (power), THEN backtrack to them stealing from family and friends, lying about the stealing, stealing impulsively when they decide they are hungry. I hated that main character so much for all the damage they did in that first chapter before their exile. The author needed to switch the first two chapters. Yes, the main character was a teenager learning how to be a better person as the character growth arc for the book, but the reader needed the YA protagonist to not need a slapping when they first meet them.
  2. Don’t treat profanity and vulgarity as humor. Unrelenting cursing is not witty dialog; Reservoir Dogs worked because of the meaning of what they said, not the words used. Shock-value is a power-play, not humor. Witty dialog takes work. Humor isn’t easy. Yes, profanity and vulgarity can be used in a humorous way, but focus on the HUMOR, not the expletives. If you want to be funny, be fucking funny not just fucked up.
  3. Don’t have us meet our anti-hero while he is being more anti- than hero. Don’t have us meet him promising to kill someone after bribing someone else, then blowing up the bar which the other characters we have already met are performing at, before we see the first little bit of the hero side. Once the impression of “a-hole” has been set, it isn’t going anywhere.

Don’t have a reader read the chapter title of “Ask Me If I Care” and have them answer “You know, I don’t” and close the book.

Make your characters likeable.

Comment below on a book where the likability of the characters made you either (1) stop reading or (2) keep reading even though you didn’t enjoy the plot, you just like the characters.