Editor’s Note — This story was originally published on Dec. 28, 2018, when the ISS became the first orbiting lab to have people regularly consuming produce
(CNN) — Mission Specialist Nick Hague’s space suit isn’t the only thing that’s different when you’re in orbit. So too are some of the things you can eat aboard the International Space Station, like pepper jelly and halibut.
Hague and his Russian colleague Alexey Ovchinin have helped make these milestones possible since being cleared to join the US-Russian crew of Expedition 55 in November 2017.
They logged 167 hours and 15 minutes in space during that period — that’s three hours and 40 minutes over their entire crew’s average duration of about 188 hours.
Hague tweeted a screenshot of the two crew members eating for the first time at the ISS in January, with the caption: “Third crew on the space station is packing lunches for the first time in space. Mission Successful!”
The lunches for Expedition 55 are a first for ISS astronauts. Expedition 56 — NASA Astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer — will head to space in August.
The new foods — protein packs and assorted peppers — were selected after preliminary experiments that all three astronauts participated in to determine whether different foods can withstand long-term isolation.
Here are the first food samples to be eaten in space.