The world’s first cookie baked in space, which reached Earth in 2020, still retains its freshness nearly four and a half years later. Created from a recipe similar to the DoubleTree by Hilton chocolate chip treats, this cosmic confection has defied the odds by maintaining its aroma even after nearly four and a half years in space.
Jennifer Levasseur, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, affirmed, “I can tell you it does still smell like a baked cookie.”
Preserving the cookie without compromising its quality presented a delicate challenge. Contained within a nitrogen-filled enclosure, the cookie remained protected from moisture and potential deterioration, ensuring its longevity. Levasseur explained, “Because it’s in this special enclosure, nobody can smell the cookie now, which is probably for the cookie’s benefit because if you were able to smell it that would mean that there might potentially be oxygen penetrating it, and then we’d be going in a direction we don’t want to go.”
The cookie’s journey commenced in 2019 through a collaborative effort between Nanoracks, Hilton, and Zero-G Kitchen
The cookie’s journey commenced in 2019 through a collaborative endeavor involving Nanoracks (now part of Voyager Space), Hilton, and Zero-G Kitchen to devise an oven suitable for microgravity environments. After numerous attempts, astronauts finally achieved the perfect cookie texture aboard the International Space Station. Upon returning to Earth in early 2020, the cookie underwent meticulous preservation procedures before finding its current abode at the Smithsonian.
“We needed to defrost it,” said Levasseur.
“So the conservation team did some experiments ahead of time, re-making the recipe and then testing for how long they would need to desiccate it and under what conditions we would need to store it so that we would never have to worry about mold becoming an issue.”
“It will reside next to other items related to food consumption inside our recreation of the [International Space Station’s] Destiny laboratory module,” Levasseur added.