Discovery Space previously featured some of the best foods ever gobbled up in space. Yet it left readers asking: What are the worst space foods?
If anyone would know, it's Vickie Kloeris -- NASA's Johnson Space Center space food manager who has been whipping up zero-gravity recipes for 23 years.
Below are her most notorious space menu picks, some so bad that they never flew at all:
10. Freeze-Dried Ice Cream
Sold in space museum gift shops across the United States as "space ice cream" or "astronaut ice cream," this melt-in-your-mouth treat might seem like a staple item on orbit. But don't be tricked! Apollo 7 in 1968 was the first and last time freeze-dried ice cream ever left Earth. Why? Kloeris said that while kids may love it, "its not an adult thing, and nothing like real ice cream. It's really just a hard hard cotton candy that's extremely crumbly."
9. Graham Crackers
Joining the crumbly crowd are graham crackers. Their signature taste and texture survive in micro gravity, but the crumbs can be disastrous. "Air aboard spacecraft is recycled, and even though there are filters, crumbs lead to air pollution," Kloeris said. "It gets in your eyes and you breathe it in." Kloeris noted that space food chefs used to file down the edges of graham cracker "planks," but the commercial food industry eventually came up with a better solution without even knowing it: bite-size Teddy Grahams.
8. Chips
Who doesn't love a mouth-watering potato chip? Kloeris said she pleads with astronauts not to sneak their favorite crispy chips into space, but many insist on putting tubes of Pringles into their "bonus" container. "When they get back, they always tell me: 'Vickie, we should have listened to you,'" she said. Like space ice cream and graham crackers, chips are simply too messy to eat without dirtying the air.
7. Sliced Bread
In space, the best thing since sliced bread isn't sliced bread. This yeasty staple quickly dries out and turns into a mummified, crumb-generating nightmare, so it was only flown on shorter missions. What's a spaceflyer to do with their favorite sandwich filling? Since Mexican payload specialist Rodolfo Neri Vela flew aboard the space shuttle in 1985, everyone has been reaching for tortillas.
6. Tube & Cube Foods
Early space travel may have been glorious, but the astronaut menus definitely weren't. Throughout the Mercury, Gemini, and early Apollo missions, pureed food in a tube was one of the few options. "It was essentially baby food," Kloeris said. If mushy applesauce and carrots didn't satisfy, plenty of liquefied chicken, ham, beef and tuna was available. Aside from tube foods were similarly unappetizing cube foods. "They pressed things like cereal, cookies, and graham crackers into half-inch-by-half-inch cubes and coated them with starch," Kloeris said. "You'd just pop them in your mouth."
