It's not easy to get a corned beef sandwich off the planet, as Discovery reports today on a great bit of spaceflight history.
On March 23, 1965—50 years ago this week—astronaut John Young took Gemini 3 crewmate Gus Grissom by surprise by pulling out the sandwich, which he had purchased two days earlier at Wolfie's Restaurant and Sandwich Shop in Cocoa Beach, Florida, adjacent to a Ramada Inn. Walter Schirra, another astronaut, handed it off to Young as he entered the Gemini capsule.
It turned out that sandwiches were contraband for a reason. After Grissom took a bite, bread began to crumble. Gemini capsules were tiny, just enough room for the two astronauts—who then had to contend with a cabin full of rye bread crumbs.Also, as tends to happen in microgravity, the smell of the sandwich spread everywhere.
"It was a thought, anyway—not a very good one," Young would later say. The corned beef incident attracted the ire of Congress and led to a hearing on the matter.
By the way, corned beef finally turned up on NASA's menu in 1981, this time in an official capacity. Maybe they were having a laugh at Young: It was served on the first space shuttle mission in 1981, when Young commanded the Columbia mission to its first orbital flight. This time it was a NASA-approved corned beef sandwich, engineered so that bread crumbs didn't float everywhere.
The Grissom Memorial Museum in Indiana has a corned beef sandwich on display, but given that it's fully intact, it's pretty obvious that this is not the corned beef sandwich from the Gemini mission. The sandwich was purchased to honor the infamous in-flight meal. It is encased in acrylic to prevent decay.
These days, many astronauts eat their sandwiches in flour tortillas rather than slices of bread, since they produce fewer crumbs that way. And that's a wrap on the rise of the space wrap.
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