Space Station Pantry Gets Low

Food is running so low aboard the International Space Station that the two crewmen have been instructed to cut back on calories, at least until a Russian supply ship arrives in a little more than two weeks, NASA said Thursday.

If anything goes wrong with the Christmas Day delivery, the space agency will have no choice, given the grounding of its shuttle fleet, but to abandon the station and bring the men home in early January.

This cargo ship “is very critical, there’s no question about that,” said NASA space station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier. Supply runs to the space station have been conducted exclusively by the Russians since last year’s Columbia disaster.

Gerstenmaier estimated there was enough food to last seven to 14 days beyond Christmas Day, after which there would be nothing left if the supply ship did not arrive.

The food supply has never gotten this low before, and no mandatory dieting has been in effect in the four years that the station has been permanently occupied.

American astronaut Leroy Chiao and Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov are barely two months into their six-month stay aboard the space station.

Last week, after a pantry audit found supplies running low, they were put on rations in hopes of trimming as much as 10% of their daily intake of 3,000 calories.

There have been no complaints from the husky, healthy men, said Dr. Sean Roden, NASA flight surgeon. Last month, Chiao told Associated Press that he and Sharipov were eating a lot to keep up their weight and stay strong, and had warned Mission Control about it.

Roden said cutting out 300 or so calories a day was “really quite minimum,” and had not affected the crew’s rigorous daily exercise.

“These are consummate professionals, and they will do whatever is required and asked of them,” Roden said. “They’re in good spirits; they’re doing well. I am in no way, shape or form worried about their mental mood with this menu change.”

NASA and the Russian Space Agency were stunned to learn last week that the astronauts had begun digging into the 45-day food reserve -- which exists to protect against a delayed supply shipment -- in mid-November.

Flight controllers knew food and water were tight when the crew was launched from Kazakhstan on Oct. 13, but had not expected to dip into the reserves for another week.

Gerstenmaier said an independent team was looking into how the food inventory ended up being tracked so poorly and how it could be improved.

Meals and drinks are contained in pouches and scattered throughout the space station, so the crew had no idea the situation was getting bad until flight controllers requested three audits, Gerstenmaier said. He said it was not until the third audit that everyone realized: “This is very, very close.”

Some food had to be removed from a previous delivery because of the need to fly spare parts for a broken oxygen generator, and that aggravated the situation, Gerstenmaier said.