The flight had been chartered by Ariel Ekblaw, the intimidatingly accomplished founder of the MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative. Ekblaw has a round face, long curls, and the earnest demeanor that comes with being a Girl Scout Gold Award winner and high school valedictorian. Her mother set the bar for overachievement in a male-dominated field: She was a reservist instructor in the US Air Force back when female trainers were unheard of, and she would have flown fighter jets if women had been allowed to at the time. But it was Ekblaw's father, a fighter pilot himself, who kindled her obsession with space. He was a sci-fi buff, and Ekblaw grew up devouring his paperback copies of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. She also watched Star Trek: The Next Generation at a formative age, imprinting on its impossibly optimistic vision of the future. After majoring in physics, math, and philosophy as an undergrad, she earned a master's degree in blockchain research. Then, four years ago, at the age of 23, she decided to return to her first love.

The Space Exploration Initiative's goal is to bring together “artists, scientists, engineers, and designers to build a real-life Starfleet Academy.” Ekblaw and her expanding team of more than 50 collaborators are getting ready for the day when humanity becomes a space-native civilization, as comfortable in the cosmos as we have been on Earth. “People say we're putting the cart before the horse,” Ekblaw concedes. “But the complexities of space are such that we really should be at least designing the cart while the horse is being prepared.”

As the billionaire rocket bros never tire of reminding us, we stand on the cusp of a new era of space travel. In the coming decades, there will be celestial cruises aboard Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. There may be off-world factories and lunar mining operations, courtesy of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. There will probably be hydroponic grow houses at Elon Musk's SpaceX colony on Mars. Even the bureaucrats at NASA have grand plans for the future. But while a new generation of aerospace engineers toils over the tech that will get us into orbit and beyond—reusable launch vehicles, rocket-bearing planes—an important question remains unanswered, Ekblaw says: “What will delight humans in space?”

Even in the near term, this is not a frivolous concern. A one-way trip to Mars will take about nine months, which is a long time to spend inside a hermetically sealed tube hurtling through a cold, dark void. Like all animals, humans require stimulation; without something to break the monotony, most of us end up like a tiger pacing its cage—stressed, depressed, and prone to problematic behaviors. Indeed, many scientists believe that boredom is one of the most serious challenges facing future spacefarers.

Until now, design for space has focused on survival. But Ekblaw thinks it's possible, even essential, to imagine an entirely new microgravitational culture, one that doesn't simply adapt Earth products and technologies but instead conceives them anew. Cady Coleman amused herself by playing her flute on the International Space Station—another astronaut brought his bagpipes—but future travelers might instead pick up a Telemetron. They might wear clothes spun of special zero-g silk, or sculpt delicate forms that couldn't exist on Earth, or choreograph new forms of dance, assisted by their robot tails. They might, in other words, stop seeing themselves as homesick earthlings and begin to feel like stimulated, satisfied spacelings.

Whatever else they do, they'll require nourishment, which is why food is a central focus of the MIT program. NASA and other government space agencies have traditionally treated food as a practical challenge—an extreme version of provisioning for an outback camping trip. But while a highly trained astronaut might be able to subsist on space gorp without losing her mind, what about a civilian with a one-way ticket to Mars? Coblentz, who is leading the Space Exploration Initiative's gastronomic research, argues that, as much as art or music or movement, good food will enable us to thrive as we leave Earth behind. It has always been the glue that connects us to each other and to the environment around us. Our pursuit of food has shaped the evolution of our sensory apparatus—the very tools through which we, as a species, perceive the world. The choices we make every day about food selection, preparation, and consumption lie at the foundation of our identities and relationships and affinities. As the Italian historian Massimo Montanari succinctly put it, food is culture.