Maybe it’s not madness, maybe it’s body snatchers …it really could be a new ploy by body snatchers think about it
Primitive Earthling: are those the space cookies
Hipster Body Snatcher: why yes they are
Primitive Earthling: well what do they taste like?
Hipster body Snatcher : no one knows yet…would you like to try one?..
Primitive Earthling : puts on aviators, fade out
The worst part is the whole space station smelling like fresh baked cookies… and you don’t get to eat any til they are stale, after you get home.
I somehow feel that learning how to cook in space - as opposed to just heating up containers of pre-made food- would be a rather important skill for Humanity to understand when we look to start really exploring the solar system and beyond.
Past a certain point, we’ll need to switch to growing food on space ships and making meals from that source. You can’t eat electricity, but if you have grow lights and plants they can take that electricity and make sugars and carbohydrates which we can eat.
Artificial gravity is currently at the fantasy side of science fiction; even the rotational spin variety. Designing a ship to spin gravity while underway is not a trivial exercise; and it complicates everything else about the trip. We just don’t have anywhere near the tech yet.
Humans can survive zero-G fairly well for several years. We don’t know exactly where the limit is yet. It will be a sad day when we do find that limit because it will be discovered at great personal cost to some astronaut.
Besides… having fresh cookies (and other freshly baked bread products) every now and then would be a significant morale booster for the astronauts on mission.
Stephen Barns has some great books that talk about long term interplanetary travel and the issues inherent in it. One that comes to mind is called Titan where Nasa is being proxmired to death and the Air force is forcing the hand to keep LEO over exploration because LEO is great for weapons platforms. So basically they plan and execute a one way mission to Saturn’s Moon Titan using Apollo and Shuttle Technologies. It is really a great read
Easily solved by just cooking them in the space Maytag clothes dryer/oven.
Considering what the station normally smells like (BO and shit)
What’s the air pressure like in the space station? Under Earth sea-level conditions, I think you’d want at least 350F. Hm, perhaps Macaroons.
IIRC it’s very low pressure with a high % of oxygen to make up
That container could definitely be increasing the bake time. It looks like pretty thick plastic = good insulator.
Atmosphere aboard the ISS is almost identical in pressure and gas composition to earth-normal sea level atmosphere. Slightly higher CO2 levels, but otherwise, very nearly the same:
Total Pressure: 755 mmHg (14.7 psi)
ppO2: 170.99 mmHg: 22.64%
ppN2: 580.72 mmHg: 76.90%
ppCO2: 3.4 mmHg: 0.45%
(All figures taken from ISS Node 1 telemetry.)
My first thought. I suspect this could explain the whole thing. Interesting no one thought of it before the experiments.
What seems to be missing is did they do the same tests with an identical oven on the gound. I.E. the only variable is the enviornment of the ISS.
This bypasses the question that first hit me when I read the story. You see, a long time ago I was fresh out of school and hired by a company that makes appliance control assemblies. My project was to design an oven controller. I learned a lot of things about how ovens work–there’s a lot of word-of-mouth training secret sauce kind of stuff that takes place in businesses like that. One thing that surprised me was that ovens don’t regulate at a fixed temperature. They intentionally very the temperature over a range centered about the set point. If they didn’t do this, then baked goods wouldn’t brown as they require higher than average temperatures for that process to occur.
So, if you just set an oven at 350 degrees (F) and it stayed at exactly that temp, you wouldn’t get properly cooked cookies. You’d end up having to cook them at a much higher temperature–and then the texture wouldn’t come out right as the average temperature would have been too high. It’s quite a trick to get gas, electric, and radiant/forced air ovens to perform similarly at the same setting despite them all operating completely differently.
But, surely they took that into account or at least did a ground version of the experiment, no? I’d really like to hear a more detailed telling of this story.
The Verge tells the story:
For the holidays, astronauts baked cookies in space that they won’t actually eat (But don’t worry, they’ve got some pre-baked cookies on hand)
Tech details from ZeroG Kitchen:
The Zero G Kitchen Space Oven
Cooking is space is very tricksy.
But were they purple space cookies?
Then they’d get baked!
OMG heat does not rise in zero G, the heat will concentrate it self around the heating element, so you need more heat, or better yet a fan, how stupid are these people , all you need is an air fryer , they cost $50 add an extra piece to food wont hover and it will work just fine in space, also cookies need at least 375 to fry, i would put it far above 400, if these are our top scientists our future looks dim 
Not very, actually.
I mean, they’re not exactly “top scientists”; they’re just a couple of engineers trying to make a buck by tackling the problems of “zero-g” cooking.
Bright folks, no doubt. But hardly the stuff of the 'top scientist" hyperbole and doom-crying on exhibit here.
Your dismissive judgmentalism despite your obvious lack of topical expertise is quite impressive, though. Takes a really advanced sort of self-esteem to keep that up.
Yeah thats because the oven only goes to 160c. Nowhere near hot enough.
glen , common man , seriously all these morons had to do is google at what temperature a cookie suppose to fry , and as i said this is not rocket science, a smart 5 grader can design a better oven than that, so im not setting the bar high here, dont put myself on a pedestal. its a very SIMPLE issue with no gravity and air circulation, i dont have to be in space to know how to solve a BASIC problem like that… its the same issue when they could not imagine how people could have sex in zero G, or when they spent all that money to design a pen that works instead of just using a pencil (not even sure if that is not a myth), i mean seriously, what kinda people work there ?! o.O
Stephen Baxter?
edit: I don’t understand the argument about using the Apollo command modules to do the landing on Titan. The argument in the book is that their shuttle orbiter has to go down with no humans on board because it is not certified to land on Titan.
But if the orbiter crashes on landing, then the crew are dead even if they make it down alive, so why bother with the capsules?
