The New York Times has broken open a scandal at NASA and other space agencies around the world. Have you ever eaten one of those sweetly-flavored food bars labelled in NASA gift shops as "astronaut ice cream"? Then you've accomplished something that no astronaut has done while in space:
With real ice cream available, there is no need in space for those blocks of chalky Neapolitan astronaut ice cream parents buy for their children at museum gift shops. Indeed, in the 60 years of the space age, no astronaut has ever eaten astronaut ice cream, at least not in space.
The freeze-dried ice cream was indeed developed in 1974 for NASA — for the gift shop in the agency’s Ames Research Center in California. The company that makes it, Outdoor Products of Boulder, Colo., now sells a couple million of them a year.
Sorry for linking to a paywalled article, but this is an important scandal for people to know about.
-via Super Punch | Photo: Ruth Hartnup
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tru tru
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That's it, when I get into the astronaut program and into space (it's bound to happen sometime soon, they've had decades to ask me, can't be long now!) I'll take that bullet and gladly consume some up there, from my own weight allowance. Gotta make it right for all the kids!
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While the ice cream may not be eaten in space there are other foods that are which were preserved using the process developed for preserving the ice cream. There are a lot of technologies that get developed by NASA but never find application in space but make life better on earth.
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this i never knew, dang, i used to like getting that stuff at the space museum
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