Surely I’m not the only one whose primary memory of childhood trips to Washington, D.C. focuses less on my exposure to the splendid pageant of democracy, or soaking in the accumulated treasure of America’s cultural history but, rather, on a 3- by 3-inch foil-wrapped block of something called astronaut ice cream. This was before freeze-dried ice cream had become standard museum gift-shop fare—obviously way before the advent of www.astronauticecreamshop.com. The highlight of a weekend in the nation’s capital was unwrapping that weirdly light packet, revealing the tricolored brick within. It had the consistency of Styrofoam and left a strange, slick film on the back of your teeth; even at that age, if pressed, I would have had to admit that regular, frozen Earth ice cream was in every way superior. But astronaut ice cream came with the ultimate value-added, better than hot fudge or peanuts: I was eating what astronauts ate!
As it turns out, I wasn’t. Or, rather, I was eating what only very few astronauts ever ate (unless, of course, they too grew up visiting the museum gift shop). Freeze-dried ice cream did make an appearance on the Apollo 7 mission, in 1968, but was scratched from the space program soon after. The astronauts, it seems, didn’t like the stuff. The good news is that, as the Smithsonian’s collection amply demonstrates, the history of feeding men and women in space is plenty fascinating without it.
The first thing you have to realize about space, says Jennifer Levasseur, who curates the some-485 items of space food at the National Air and Space Museum, is that it changes everything about what you can and cannot eat. Knives, for instance, pose a hazard; an accidental puncture of equipment could be catastrophic. In the highly flammable, oxygen-rich environment of a space ship, no packaging or utensils can run the risk of creating a spark. Famously, a corned-beef sandwich was smuggled aboard Gemini 3 by pilot John W. Young. This may have been seen as a triumph for devotees of delicatessen, but it was seriously frowned upon by the NASA powers that be.
Like a kid’s lunchbox at the end of the school day, the collection Levasseur administers is in some ways a barometer of failed foods. That is, leftovers—freeze-dried packets returned to Earth, unopened and summarily rejected. (Three signature NASM examples are on offer here : beef-barbecue cubes, fruitcake and coffee with cream—unused from Neil Armstrong’s meal allotments, avoided during the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon he commanded in 1969.) “We have a lot of instant breakfasts,” she says. “I get the feeling these were the kinds of guys who just woke up and drank coffee.” Foods transformed into totally unrecognizable forms also fared poorly—which may explain the failure of astronaut ice cream. “There was a ‘bacon bar’ that looks something like a granola bar,” adds Levasseur. “We have quite a lot of those.”
