DoubleTree Hotels Wants The ISS Astronauts To Bake Cookies (theatlantic.com) 88
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
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 a long line of attempts to promote a company's product, from Tang to KFC sandwiches, against the dreamy backdrop of outer space...
Charles Bourland, a retired NASA scientist, says the agency never tried to develop a space-friendly oven, because it was just too risky. Bourland spent 30 years developing food for astronauts, starting with the Apollo program, before retiring in 1999. "If something catches on fire and starts burning, you're going to have to have some way of overcoming that," Bourland says. "You can't just open the window and let the smoke out." But as I spoke with astronauts and others in the space community, my skepticism about the space cookies softened. Bourland says that many astronauts he worked with liked cooking. And that they missed doing it in space...
Those hotel chocolate-chip cookies will be the closest astronauts have come to truly baking something in their high-flying kitchens. NASA says astronauts won't actually eat the cookies, because they are, technically, a science experiment. The treats will be returned home for examination... For the chocolate-chip cookies, astronauts will receive detailed instructions for using the experimental oven, built by NanoRacks, a space company that helps develop experiments for the ISS. They'll also get a heavy-duty oven mitt. "It looks like something you get at a hardware store for welders," says Ian Fichtenbaum, a co-founder of Zero G Kitchen, which paid NanoRacks to develop its oven concept.
A payloads manager at NanoRacks predicts that the cookies will be spherical, reports the Atlantic, which adds "Fingers crossed that they don't shed too many crumbs, which are free-floating nuisances on the space station, liable to get swept into air filters and even the crew's lungs....
"The oven cleared NASA safety reviews in the spring and could hitch a ride to the space station on a resupply mission in October."
Charles Bourland, a retired NASA scientist, says the agency never tried to develop a space-friendly oven, because it was just too risky. Bourland spent 30 years developing food for astronauts, starting with the Apollo program, before retiring in 1999. "If something catches on fire and starts burning, you're going to have to have some way of overcoming that," Bourland says. "You can't just open the window and let the smoke out." But as I spoke with astronauts and others in the space community, my skepticism about the space cookies softened. Bourland says that many astronauts he worked with liked cooking. And that they missed doing it in space...
Those hotel chocolate-chip cookies will be the closest astronauts have come to truly baking something in their high-flying kitchens. NASA says astronauts won't actually eat the cookies, because they are, technically, a science experiment. The treats will be returned home for examination... For the chocolate-chip cookies, astronauts will receive detailed instructions for using the experimental oven, built by NanoRacks, a space company that helps develop experiments for the ISS. They'll also get a heavy-duty oven mitt. "It looks like something you get at a hardware store for welders," says Ian Fichtenbaum, a co-founder of Zero G Kitchen, which paid NanoRacks to develop its oven concept.
A payloads manager at NanoRacks predicts that the cookies will be spherical, reports the Atlantic, which adds "Fingers crossed that they don't shed too many crumbs, which are free-floating nuisances on the space station, liable to get swept into air filters and even the crew's lungs....
"The oven cleared NASA safety reviews in the spring and could hitch a ride to the space station on a resupply mission in October."
Ah yes, excellent idea! (Score:2, Funny)
Lets get a lot of unwanted cookie crumbs in the space station, what could POSSIBLY go wrong!
Re: Ah yes, excellent idea! (Score:1)
Fuck yeah! Start with the just add water stuff. How long does it take to bake cookies in space? What will we do while they cool down? Or the little tube with the cookies you peel off a stack.
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"Cookies on Earth are flat due to gravity"
no it's so they bake properly
It depends on the type of cookie. A sugar cookie is rolled flat and punched out with a cookie cutter.
But chocolate chip cookies start out as a spoonful of dough on the cookie pan. As they heat up, the lipids in the mound of dough become less viscous, and the dough melts and flattens out ... due to gravity.
Sugar cookies should bake fine in space. Chocolate chip dough will need to be manually flattened prior to baking.
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I would recommend sous vide up to x temp, then in the oven for crisping up.
And really, going to all this trouble and not sending a second batch for the astronauts to eat? Gonna smell up the place with baking cooking and can't have any, that's BS.
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An oven in a centrifuge will also make flat cookies, lol.
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First of all, cookies in space should look the part, i.e. spheroid.
All the astrophysicists will love the spherical cookies, right alongside the spaceburgers made from spherical cows.
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Well, to me it seems that sous-vide [wikipedia.org] would be a natural for the space station!
Cringe if you must (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stopped reading right there.
You seem to be lost; here, let me help you get back on track: https://theflatearthsociety.or... [theflatearthsociety.org]
Or perhaps: https://www.meetup.com/New-Yor... [meetup.com]
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Frequents a 'nerd news' website
Complains about/insults 'nerds'
Hello pot, meet kettle.
Keep assuming your lack of imagination and creativity somehow makes you more intelligent and 'mature' than everyone else, and we'll keep laughing at you.
Do it for science and money! (Score:2)
Yeah. Have the companies pay enough money for NASA to accept and use for science, fun, etc. I don't see this a problem.
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Maybe you'll get foam cookies. You know, like foam steel, but with more chocolate chips.
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The more time you spend flame warring with APK, the more you look like one person having an argument with themselves in order to troll the rest of us. HTH, HAND
Alexander Peter Kowalski lost APK Hosts File brand (Score:1)
After more than 2 decades of trying to create APK Hosts File as a personal brand to shill his crap shareware, the Internet routed around his damage. Searches for APK Hosts File return software for Android developer Nilhcem.
Decades of spamming has resulted in him creating awareness for a competitor who offers it on Android, the #1 personal computing platform on the planet.
Will Alexander Peter Kowalski threaten to sue Nilhcem for trade appropriation? Kind of hard to see how, since APK is much more broadl
Who's voting against chocolate chip cookies? (Score:1)
Space food is not know to be gourmet - I bet astronauts would give up quite a bit for freshly baked chocolate cookies, just like mom's.
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big cookie balls (Score:2)
I imagine space cookies would also be a lot bigger because they don't have gravity keeping them mostly flat and the air pressure being lower than on Earth. I also imagine that you would have a higher danger of the cookies burning on the outside before the center was fully baked.
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And you definitely need to follow the high altitude instructions...
Torture (Score:2)
That would suck to bake delicious-smelling cookies that are a science experiment and then not be able to eat them. That's pure torture right there.
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I will be offended if they don't include at least a couple extra tubes of dough (I assume?) for "initial calibration purposes"
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Less than a billiionth (that's 1 in 1000000000) of the human race is in space. Anything and everything they do on the ISS is an experiment. As much as you might think figuring out if baking in space is doable is useless I'm quite sure serving them cookies is even more useless.
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... and waste valuable science-doing time baking fucking cookies in orbit...
Yeah. Baking cookies will cut into that valuable time that otherwise could have been spent doing Bowie covers or playing ping-pong with droplets of water.
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$1250 per pound on a Falcon 9. Based on the numbers on their website. Note that that's not to ISS, but just to loft a satellite to LEO.
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If we want to get serious about putting people in space, making food is going to be an important early step - it's one of those things that can be done relatively easily using abundant resources, and dramatically lowers the expensive mass-flow from Earth required just for maintenance. Even if all you're growing is algae in giant plastic bag "fields", that provides a steady supply of oxygen and algae flour as a staple food. Not to mention as a fuel, fertilizer, animal-feed, etc. And quite probably as fe
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Hardly. We were serious about putting people on the moon, putting the first person there 8 years after making the decision, and making 5 more landings over the next three years. Then our pissing contest with the Russians petered out course and we hadn't found any economic reason to go back. Research and lofty ideals are great an all, but under a capitalist government, profitability is what ultimately decides priorities - and the only profit to be made was in government pork. Asteroid mining is likely to
Yummy money cookies (Score:2)
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$10,000 cookies. Each. Also, never start a sentence with a number.
10,000 Maniacs' publicity manager disagrees.
In case any proof was needed (Score:1)
Moderators and editors donâ(TM)t read what they post, or if they do, they don't understand it, case in point:
NASA says astronauts won't actually eat the cookies, because they are, technically, a science experiment. The treats will be returned home for examination...
And later, in same paragraph:
A payloads manager at NanoRacks predicts that the cookies will be spherical, reports the Atlantic, which adds "Fingers crossed that they don't shed too many crumbs, which are free-floating nuisances on the space station, liable to get swept into air filters and even the crew's lungs...."
Got that? Astronauts can't eat them, but guy worred about crumbs.
Tang (Score:1)
Call me a grump, but the endeavor felt gimmicky, the latest in a long line of attempts to promote a company's product, from Tang to KFC sandwiches, against the dreamy backdrop of outer space...
Prety sure Tang was developed for space, THEN turned into a consumer poduct.
Win-win (Score:1)
Even if the cooking experiment fails, at least the astronauts will get to eat raw dough in space.