Astronaut food and other unexpected links between the space program and Indiana

<p dir="ltr">Ever since the selection of the original <strong><a href= "https://www.nasa.gov/feature/60-years-ago-nasa-introduces-mercury-7-astronauts">Mercury 7 astronauts</a></strong> in 1959 marked the dawn of the U.S. space program, it's been well known that a significant percentage of <strong><a href= "https://www.nasa.gov/">NASA</a></strong> astronauts, mission specialists and engineers have spent portions of their lives in Indiana. After all, <strong><a href= "https://www.purdue.edu/">Purdue University</a></strong> has long been nicknamed "Mother of Astronauts."</p> <p dir="ltr">Less well known, however, is Indiana's connection to the dehydrated food that has been the chow for many of the U.S. space program's intrepid cosmic explorers.</p> <p dir="ltr">And then there's the Hoosier state's link to the physician who treated several astronauts who became household names during the 1960s, including <strong><a href= "https://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/grissom.html">Virgil "Gus" Grissom</a></strong>, <strong><a href= "https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/who-is-john-glenn-k4.html">John Glenn</a></strong> and <strong><a href= "https://www.nasa.gov/topics/people/features/armstrong_obit.html">Neil Armstrong</a></strong>.</p> <p dir="ltr"><img src= "http://hoosierhistorylive.org/images/John-Norberg.png" alt= "John Norberg" width="187" height="227" align="right" />Hoosier History Live will spotlight these unexpected links just as space travel is receiving renewed attention with the recent launch of a capsule by <strong><a href= "https://www.spacex.com/">SpaceX</a></strong>, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk that took two NASA astronauts to the <strong><a href= "https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html">International Space Station</a></strong>. The mission "ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA, the longest such hiatus in its history," according to a USA Today report. (NASA had been relying on Russian spaceships to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space stati