A cup of Joe makes it to the moon 

Believe it or not, Apollo 11 was the first NASA flight in which astronauts brought coffee into space. Which, of course, begs the questions of 1) how they endured space travel untill then and 2) whether the mission’s signature giant leap for mankind might have ended up a mere tiny hop otherwise.

“I found an old inventory sheet which lists what was sent and what came back on Apollo 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11,” said Dr. Charles Bourland, a retired NASA food scientist we had enlisted to do a little digging. “The first coffee was on Apollo 11,” he confirmed confidently. Wonderfully anticipating our next question — how did they take it? Bourland crunched a few numbers, discovering that Messrs. Armstrong et al. left Earth with 45 cups of java-to-go — 15 black, 15 black-with-sugar, 15 cream-and-sugar — and returned with 10, 1 and 6 cups, respectively. Make of that what you will.

What else was new in the Apollo 11 pantry when the ship was launched on July 16, 1969? “Thermostabilized cheddar cheese spread, thermostabilized frankfurters,” Bourland informed us, “which is just a fancy term for heat-processed.” Were these bits of Americana NASA’s nod to a post-Fourth of July space mission, we wondered? “I doubt that had anything to do with it,” came the curt reply.

Moving on, we asked Bourland to confirm the presence of a few other items rumored to be on the flight. Breakfasts of sausage patties, cornflakes and cinnamon-toasted bread cubes? Yes. Shrimp cocktail and salmon salad sandwiches at lunchtime? Indeed. Spaghetti with meat sauce, pork and scalloped potatoes, cream of chicken soup, meat with vegetables, brownies, pineapple cake? Yup, that, too. NASA’s hope was that a menu of such variety might help combat homesickness and low morale, both of which had begun to plague astronauts as space missions got ever longer. Similarly, the introduction of pouches of food that could be eaten with spoons, first deployed with Apollo 10, worked to create a semblance of normal eating. “It still wasn’t very convenient, because you still had to eat with two hands,” said Bourland, “but at least you weren’t sucking something out of a bag on the moon.”

Speaking of which, what was the first thing the astronauts ate on the lunar surface? At this, our food scientist sounded an uncharacteristic note of uncertainty. “The first scheduled meal contained bacon squares, rehydratable peaches, sugar cookie cubes, coffee, and pineapple-grapefruit drink.” By all accounts, Meal A, as it was known, was indeed what Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate during the six-hour period between their Sea of Tranquility landing and Armstrong’s historic first walk. 

But that wasn't the first food. Unknown to most of the public — and many at NASA — Aldrin had brought something he called a “Communion kit” to the moon, a small white bag containing a silver chalice, a vial of wine and a wafer symbolizing the body of Christ. Not long after the lunar module landed, Aldrin, who was also a Presbyterian elder, requested a moment of silence before pouring wine into the chalice. In conditions of one-sixth gravity, the liquid “curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” the astronaut recalled in a later account, although he did manage to drink it. As Armstrong looked on silently, Aldrin also swallowed the Communion wafer after reading a Bible verse. It wasn’t your typical meal, of course, and it got little attention at the time. (NASA was squeamish about religious observances, having recently been sued by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the high-profile atheist, after Apollo 8 astronauts read Genesis passages while orbiting the moon during a Christmas Eve broadcast.) Nonetheless, technically at least, bread and wine were the first foods consumed on the moon.

Aldrin and Armstrong ate four NASA meals during the 21-plus hours they were on the moon, and there as here, then as now, bacon was a hands-down favorite. “It was nothing but bacon fried and then run through a press, but people really liked the taste,” Bourland said, laughing. Contrary to popular belief and the Smithsonian gift shop, astronaut ice cream was not consumed. Indeed, Bourland was able to find just a single mention of that dessert in all of NASA’s logs, and that was for Apollo 7.

The exact nature of the astronauts’ lunar repasts will probably remain a matter of speculation, if only because “we didn’t get an inventory back,” as Bourland put it. A lot of what the spacemen ate during the mission was discarded in the lunar module, and the module itself was discarded on the moon, where it sits to this day.

Still, we were able to clear up one lingering controversy.

Yes, the Apollo 11 astronauts actually drank Tang, just as General Foods, the powdered drink’s manufacturer, always told us they did. For years, Aldrin maintained that it hadn’t even been offered on the flight. In “First Man,” James R. Hansen’s biography of Armstrong, Aldrin recalled that he and the other astronauts had vastly preferred a “grapefruit-orange mixture” over Tang during a preflight taste test arranged by NASA. And his opinion has remained remarkably consistent over the years. During a TV appearance in 2013, Aldrin had just two words to say: “Tang sucks.”

What he didn’t know, said Bourland, was that the grapefruit-orange drink he liked, “and also the pineapple-grapefruit one they had on board, were both Tang products.”

By Scott Vogel

scott.vogel@newsday.com

Newsday writer and restaurant critic Scott Vogel aims for a refreshing, gimlet-eyed take on the Long Island food scene, often while drinking a refreshing gimlet.