Food Supply Duration Calculator

This calculator scales NASA's standard food-mass planning figure — roughly 1.8 kg of freeze-dried food per person per day at a 2,500-calorie diet — up or down with your chosen daily caloric target, then multiplies by crew size and mission length to get a baseline provisioning mass. A safety buffer (0-50%) is added on top of that baseline to cover contingencies like extended missions or spoilage, since resupply isn't an option once a spacecraft is in transit. Packaging adds another 25% on top of total food mass, reflecting the overhead of individually sealed, freeze-dried pouches designed to survive vibration, vacuum, and years of shelf life.

If any of the diet is grown on board (the fresh food percentage), that portion is subtracted from what has to be launched, directly reducing launch mass — a small on-board garden pays for itself in reduced payload before it ever produces a single calorie of nutritional variety. Storage volume assumes about 0.003 cubic meters per kilogram of launched freeze-dried food, and food waste is assumed to run about 30% of total food mass once packaging, uneaten portions, and spoilage are accounted for. The biggest limitation is that this uses one blended density figure for all food types — a real menu (rehydratables, thermostabilized entrees, snacks) has meaningfully different mass and volume per calorie, so treat these numbers as a mission-planning first pass, not a final manifest.