Ice cream space food12/17/2023 ![]() If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.Owner Ron Smith jumped at the chance but says the first versions of the now-famous treat definitely weren't what everyone has come to know and love. ![]() (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.) So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world - not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:įirst, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism? And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. ![]() There are other delicious and educational options (I share my favorite toward the end). There's also a smattering of technical documents that mention the development of some sort of ice cream in space - but none that can confirm the existence of ice cream on board.Īs the above video shows, debunking astronaut ice cream doesn't have to kill the fun of eating space food. The Apollo 7 press kit, released before the mission, does mention "vanilla ice cream," as does one 1968 UPI article. NASA provides some technical records of its missions, and a search turns up a few references to ice cream that might have fit the Apollo 7 mission. So is there any argument that astronaut ice cream did fly in space? The only hope for astronaut ice cream Phil Edwards/Vox If kids want to eat astronaut ice cream, they should just enjoy delicious, real ice cream, as real astronauts have many times since the 1970s, when refrigerators became available in space. That might be what makes astronaut ice cream so disconcerting - it teaches kids that something terrible for space travel is what astronauts eat. Even if astronaut ice cream were on Apollo 7, it would probably have been rehydratable food similar to most of the other food options on the flight, not the freeze-dried block we recognize today. That's the reason John Young was reprimanded for sneaking a corned beef sandwich on board during the Gemini program - bread crumbs could easily float into instruments. That fits with the technical obstacles to space ice cream - as Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield explained (along with Buzz Aldrin and many other astronauts), crumbly food like astronaut ice cream would be a major hazard in space. They do always get to try things in advance, and they probably thought it was as horrible as it actually is when you buy it in the gift shop." "It probably got made, tested on the ground, and rejected. "I think it’s very likely it never flew," she wrote me. Jennifer Levasseur, museum curator at the National Air and Space museum, said it's likely Cunningham remembers correctly. That matches with the complete absence of ice cream from mission transcripts as well. When I asked astronaut Walt Cunningham, the sole surviving member of the crew, about it, he said, "We never had that stuff." As you can hear above, he said that years later, when he first encountered the freeze-dried dessert, he wished they'd had it on Apollo 7 - but they never did. The case against astronaut ice cream Phil Edwards/VoxĪpollo 7 is identified by many online sources as the only flight to harbor the chalky ice cream. The only problem is that astronaut ice cream is a lie.Īs the above video shows, this legendary children's treat has a surprisingly murky history. Any space-enthused kid has endured the crumbly, chalky agglomeration of flavors known as "astronaut ice cream." We deal with it because of the supposed connection to the lives of real space explorers. ![]()
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