According to the National Air and Space Museum and NASA astronauts, there is no dessert of this kind on their space food menu.
Many people dream of traveling to space and experiencing the zero-gravity life of astronauts, especially tasting the meals prepared for them. Among these, freeze-dried ice cream is perhaps the item that raises the most curious questions, as it is intriguing how a food that melts into liquid could exist in a space station.
This dessert is packaged in freeze-dried form, usually flavored with strawberry, vanilla…
According to readily available information on the internet, this dessert is packaged in freeze-dried form, typically flavored with strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, or a Neapolitan mix, providing a crunchy texture that melts in the mouth. This food can be found in science museums, retail stores, or online. However, the National Air and Space Museum of the United States states that it has never been used in any space missions.
This revelation has surprised many space science enthusiasts. However, they also acknowledge that no sample of freeze-dried ice cream for astronauts can be found in the museum. According to Jennifer Levasseur, the museum’s curator, it is likely that this food item was never sent to space.
So why is it called astronaut ice cream if astronauts have never eaten it in space?
Ice cream has never been used in any space missions.
Initially, astronaut ice cream was assigned to Whirlpool for research and development under a contract with NASA, aimed at serving space missions conducted by the Apollo spacecraft. However, there is not much definitive information on the presence of this food item in the food sent to space.
Since some reports from 1968 mentioned the Apollo missions referencing vanilla ice cream, Vox reached out to Walt Cunningham, the only surviving astronaut from this mission, to confirm the information. Cunningham stated that he and his colleagues never saw this item during their mission.
This seemingly simple food poses many dangers and complications for astronauts.
Reports from Apollo 7 confirmed that the astronaut crew ate chocolate pudding, but there was no mention of freeze-dried ice cream. Cunningham further shared that he thought it would not be good at all for astronauts to consume freeze-dried ice cream, especially when the astronaut ice cream was first introduced.
In fact, this seemingly simple food poses many dangers and complications for astronauts. First, freeze-dried ice cream can break into small pieces in a zero-gravity environment and float around. These fragments could get into the controls or machinery on the spacecraft. More dangerously, ice cream debris could get into an astronaut’s eyes or be inhaled, making the working environment inside the spacecraft messy with floating ice cream particles.
Due to these unnecessary complications, Chad Hadfield, an astronaut working at NASA, shared in a 2013 video that there is very little chance they would eat astronaut ice cream in space.
Thus, the astronaut ice cream that we can find in many places today is not the type that astronauts actually consumed. Instead, it is a marketing gimmick by food companies to encourage consumers to purchase their products.
