The Great NASA Bake-Off
The sight of a cookie had never made me grimace until this one showed up in my email inbox.
DoubleTree by Hilton, the hotel chain, was announcing that it would soon send a little oven and a batch of cookie dough to the International Space Station so that astronauts could, for the first time, bake chocolate-chip cookies in space. The cookies, which the hotel gives guests for free when they check in, are “the perfect food to make the cosmos a more welcoming place,” DoubleTree said.
Call me a grump, but the endeavor felt gimmicky, the latest in to promote a company’s product, from to , against the dreamy backdrop of outer space. The plan reminded me most of the efforts by Coca-Cola and Pepsi to make for astronauts, in Pepsi’s case—but it wasn’t exactly successful; the cans leaked and sputtered, and the soda was . Carbonated drinks are lousy in space even without a special can; gas bubbles don’t float to the top and fizz out like they do on Earth, so astronauts consume more gas when they sip, which means they burp more. And without gravity to anchor the contents of their stomach, burping could .
