Astronaut ice cream...is not something we eat because it tastes good.
“Oh, I think I broke a tooth!” “Very chalky.”
“Some kind of flavored medicine.” “It’s the marshmallow bits in Lucky Charms.”
We do it because “it’s what the astronauts eat.”
But here’s the problem. “Is that what this video’s about? Do they
not actually eat space ice cream in space?” Astronaut ice cream is a lie. A crumbly, chalky
lie.
This is the National Air and Space Museum’s Storage Facility. It really looks like something
from Indiana Jones. And they have a lot of space food.
Stuff like John Glenn’s feeding tube, Apollo era chocolate cubes
and the solar system’s greatest cookie feeder. “The dispenser on the tube here is very
much like what you would think of as a Pez dispenser.”
But when you ask to see the astronaut ice cream:
“We don’t have any.” It’s surprisingly hard to track down the
truth about the stuff. The only original info we have is a press
release from NASA and a newspaper clipping from 1968 suggesting that vanilla ice cream
might have gone up on Apollo 7. The people who make astronaut ice cream can’t
confirm it either. “Right now I’m going to be calling the
people who make this.” “I can not verify one way or the other.
I wasn’t with the company then.” So I called an astronaut who was actually
there. “I’m Walter Cunningham, I flew on Apollo
7, October 11th through 22nd, 1968.” It was the first manned mission after a deadly
cabin fire on Apollo 1, and Cunningham, Wally Schirra, and Donn Eisele had big worries.
“Meals were scheduled and we put up with them — we put up with them because we were
really there to test the spacecraft and we were busy all the time.”
But I asked about astronaut ice cream anyway. “The only citation I’ve found is people
saying it flew on Apollo 7. Is that true?” “No, they don’t know their ass, obviously.
We never had that.” Cunningham says it was one of many myths that
just got repeated by the press. Like the legendary cold that all the crew members had?
“Pure bullshit. I never had a cold, I think Donn thought he might be getting one, but
Wally’s the one that had a cold.” And the transcripts don’t show ice cream
either — there was a lot of chatter about other foods like the many puddings on board.
The Apollo list was primarily rehydratable foods — like salmon salad, not ice cream.
And for the most part, astronauts hated sweet foods. They traded a lot of food on board,
and sweet stuff was awful. They tried to get rid of their puddings. Donn Eisele said:
“Wally and I want to give away our butterscotch pudding, but nobody will take it.”
But even out of the hated sweet foods, Cunningham says astronaut ice cream was not one of the
options. “After it came out, and I was long gone
from NASA, I remember thinking, gee, wouldn’t it have been nice if we had that.”
And it makes sense if you know about space travel, too.
“Plus it’s super crumbly, so I just imagine all these particles floating through…”
“Flying into the controls...” “These bite-sized objects were designed
to remove the problem of having so many crumbs floating around the cabin.”
Look at Neil Armstrong’s fruitcake. See how it has a gelatin layer on it? That helped
reduce crumbling in early missions. And food just got better anyway. By Skylab’s
launching in 1973, they had a freezer on board. Today, astronaut ice cream is...normal ice
cream. But that didn’t stop NASA, museums, and
space camps from selling the imaginary “space food” to generations of kids.
There is a better way. Sell kids astronaut peach ambrosia, astronaut shrimp cocktail,
or astronaut crawfish etouffee. Or sell the thing that Walt Cunningham loved
so much he smuggled it in his suit in case Apollo 7 was marooned.
“Before launch, we put a few things in our pockets in case we aborted during launch and
would be out at sea some place. We wanted to have a little food with us in case we needed
it.
“And I had those bacon squares down in the pocket down in the bottom of my suit.”
Teach the children about astronaut bacon. But let the ice cream go.