Chef José Andrés is sending paella to Earth’s orbit with Axiom Space’s private astronauts

Axiom president Michael López-Alegría will command the company’s first spaceflight, and he isn’t going alone. The former NASA astronaut will visit Earth’s orbit with Axiom’s first customers, Larry Connor, Mark Pathy, and Eytan Stibbe.

Suppose the business people get hungry while one space; they don’t have to eat astronauts‘ go-to freeze-dried meals. Chef José Andrés is sending paella after he and López-Alegría came up with the idea to take some of their favorite dishes on the trip and share them with other astronauts from NASA and Europe.

© GettyImages

“I wanted to provide an homage for traditional cooking around the world,” Andrés said in a video reposted by Lauren Sanchez. To create the out-of-this-world menu, the philanthropist and celebrity chef brought ThinkFoodGroup Director of Research and Development Charisse Grey Dickens to help him meet palate expectations while following food guidelines.

“Food scientists think a lot about calories and nutrition. As a chef, my goal is to meet your palette’s expectations for food,” Charisse explained.

According to Chef José Andrés the menu includes paella, pisto con cerdo, jamón ibérico, marcona almonds and more. The paella was selected as the main dish to follow Spain’s tradition of eating it as a family meal. “I’m so proud because it’s going to be eaten, I’m told, for the first time ever by astronauts from different counties and nationalities and backgrounds, and they are all going to be eating at once, Paella Valenciana, and this makes me so very proud,” Andrés said.

The chef took a small break from his efforts in Ukraine to jump on this idea. “Some people are going to be saying before we send people to the stars, we should be fixing every problem on planet Earth. I think it’s the contrary. I think by dreaming that we can be sending humans to far beyond the stars one day is also what can help us solve many of the problems that we see on Earth today,” Andrés said in the video.

As we previously reported, Jeff Bezos granted the Spanish chef $100 million to expand his philanthropy efforts. The 52-year-old restaurateur would be taking 5 million dollars from the grant to helping out the people in Ukraine.

José Andrés flew to the European country with his World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that delivers food relief to areas that need most, whether they were affected by a natural disaster or are facing a humanitarian crisis, offering freshly made meals and ingredients, including flour to a bakery run by Caritas Internationalis, a Catholic charity partnering with the nongovernmental organization.