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. The plan reminded me most of the efforts by Coca-Cola and Pepsi to make space-travel-friendly soda cans for astronauts flying on the now-retired space shuttles. The companies poured a staggering amount of money into the design—millions, in Pepsi’s case—but it wasn’t exactly successful; the cans leaked and sputtered, and the soda was warm. 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 ..
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