In order for Neil Armstrong to take that famous small step onto the surface of the moon, giant leaps had to be made in a whole host of fields, from the highly esoteric and technical to the fairly pedestrian.

"If you’re going to put people into space, they’re going to be there for hours and hours on end, and so you have to start thinking about what are all the components that go into daily life," said Jennifer Levasseur, curator for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "And a really important part of that is eating."

The space food experiments began during our earliest missions to space, with John Glenn squeezing apple sauce from what looked like a toothpaste tube when he became the first American to orbit the earth in 1962. But as space missions got more daring — and longer — the challenges of eating in space grew.

"How do we package these things to make them very light, very easily consumed, and hopefully a little bit tasty?" said Levasseur.

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At the center of the space food universe from the outset, including for John Glenn’s tube of applesauce, was the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center — also known as Natick Army Labs — right here in Natick.

Remarkably, the tube food program is still active today — mainly for Air Force U-2 plane pilots, who fly for up to 14 hours at a clip in pressurized suits at the very edge of space.

"We’ve actually upgraded how we do it," said Dan Nattres, who heads up the tube food program. "It used to be more pureed. Now you can actually chew it."

Natress has developed new flavors of space food, ranging from mac and cheese to hash browns and bacon. There are even caffeinated options, like chocolate pudding with as much pick-me-up as a large cup of coffee.

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An array of space food, past and present, produced at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick.
Edgar B. Herwick III WGBH News

But by the time Apollo 11 was whizzing toward the moon in 1969, tube food had been left behind in favor of a variety of new options, from corn chowder, to beef stew to pineapple fruitcake. The astronauts even had coffee. These foods were prepared and packaged utilizing a whole range of novel techniques developed by NASA, private industry and Natick Army Labs.

"They had different types of food forms," said Michelle Richardson, a food technologist at Natick Army Labs. "One was a rehydratable, which is a freeze-dried product. They also had bite-sized cubes, the spoon bowl — you can actually eat your product with a spoon — and they also had a lot of beverage powders."

Today, NASA has its own dedicated food program, but it still works hand and hand with the folks at Natick Army Labs on a variety of things, including food for the international space station. And it’s not just astronauts and fighter pilots who have benefited. Richardson says many of the advances that made food smaller, safer and longer lasting for the trip to the moon now help you get food that is quicker to prepare and fresher, including packaging options like the retortable pouch.

"Basically, what you do is you place products in a pouch [and] you place it in there," said Richardson, showing me a large retort machine in the lab's test kitchen. "It actually kind of pulls a vacuum and it heats the product up to a very high temperature to kill any bacteria. So it basically sterilizes a product."

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Today, you'll find everything from tuna, to rice to teriyaki stir fry in retortable pouches on grocery store shelves.

Another critical advancement made in Natick is irradiation, which once prevented germs from infiltrating the Apollo spacecraft in the food and now makes our staples like spices and fresh fruits and veggies safer and longer-lasting.

"Natick has done irradiation research [since] like the 60's," said Richardson. "They kind of pioneered that. And now foods are commercially available that are irradiated."

All food produced here — and by NASA — must be consumable for at least three years when stored at up to 85 degrees. But the new directive is to get that number up to five years. The reason for this push for five? It took Apollo 11 eight days to get to the moon and back safely. But NASA projects it will take five years for men and women to get to and from the next heavenly body in its sights: Mars.