50th anniversary of the first corned beef sandwich smuggled into space

On the 23rd of March, NASA celebrated the 50 year anniversary commemorating the very first sandwich ever smuggled into space via someone’s pocket. As it turns out, that someone incidentally happens to be one of America’s pioneering astronaut, Mr. John Young. The story goes like this: two hours into the Gemini 3 mission, Young reached into his pocket and pulled out a corn beef. Gus Grissom, the mission commander at the time, gingerly asked, “where did that come from?” To which Young coolly replied “I brought it with me…let’s see how it tastes.”

The sandwich was intended as a joke, a very stupid one, thank you very much Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra, who purchased the sandwich a day earlier from the now defunct Wolfie’s Restaurant and slipped it into Young’s possession. This was a big mistake. Crumbs in space are far worse than sand in your bed or ants in your pants, because the weightless of zero gravity gives it the ability to float, increasing the likelihood of it lodging behind some electric component or an eye.

Young (left) and Grissom (right) sitting side by site

This is the precisely why today, most astronaut food is covered in a layer of gloppy, flavorless gelatin — to contain crumbs within a food itself. In fact, one of Gemini 3’s primary mission objectives was to test the new gelatin-covered space food, so when the appropriate House of Representatives’ committee caught wind of Young’s mischief, it was not amused. “A couple of congressmen became upset, thinking that, by smuggling in the sandwich and eating part of it, Gus and I had ignored the actual space food that we were up there to evaluate, costing the country millions of dollars,” Young wrote in his memoir.

Immediately after the Grissom scarfed down a bite of Young’s sandwich, he disposed of it chiming, “it's breaking up. I am going to stick it in my pocket.”

If there’s one take away from all this it’s that pockets make great sandwich storage facilities. Next time I hit the town, I gotta remember to slip one into my pocket; it’s far more sustainable than using a plastic sandwich bag. Right guys? Guys?

Today, a corned beef sandwich embedded in an acrylic mold sits at the Grissom Memorial Museum in Mitchell, Ind., eternally memorializing the first sandwich in space.

As for Grissom and Young, the pair made several more space trips in the course of their lives including Gemini 10, Apollo 10, and Apollo 16. Unfortunately, Gus Grissom perished on January 27, 1967 during a pre-launch test on Launch Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy. Had Grissom survive, he would have been Chief astronaut Deke Slayton main candidate for the first moon walk.

Source: Space.com