Chili can be easily found on Earth. But in space, these appetite-boosting plants are rare. Therefore, the astronauts were so happy when they could harvest peppers in space.
NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, one of a crew of seven currently living and working on the International Space Station (ISS), makes these tacos using chili peppers.
McArthur and other astronauts celebrate a successful chili harvest by eating well. "This is the best space taco I've ever made," McArthur said.
In a Twitter post, McArthur said astronauts should eat some red and green peppers for surveys of appetite and future scientific research. It is also part of the testing of foodstuffs for long-term missions to the Moon and Mars.
Fortunately, the harvest continued as some peppers produced the flowers needed to grow other crops. The crew of the space station are pollinating some of the flowers to help with the next harvest that may occur this month.
"Studies of fruit development in microgravity are limited, and NASA researchers have noted lower fruit development in these experiments for reasons that we don't fully understand at this time," NASA said.
The "chili picking day" for the first harvest on the ISS takes place on October 29. After that, the astronauts had a taco party. The plants added to the tacos come from the Planet Habitat-04 study, which is an ongoing series of efforts to grow plants in space.
Previous crops that have been made in space have included Mizuna mustard, turnips, zinnias red lettuce, and two other types of lettuce. Chili peppers arrived at the ISS on June 5 on a logistics supply mission aboard the SpaceX Dragon CRS-22 rocket.
Incidentally, the SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts, including McArthur, were still on board. Whereas initially, they were supposed to return to Earth at the end of October, before the chilies were ready to be harvested.
Of course, this is a happy coincidence, because the bad weather that kept them back home turned out to be a blessing to be able to harvest and taste chili from space.