Einstein once claimed that he had no special talents, that he was only passionately curious. And when you see it like that, hasn’t this curiosity made all the difference? Curiosity has fueled humanity’s growth in every age, and brought us to a point in our evolution where we’re so close to decoding the secrets of the final frontier. And this very curiosity about what lies out there in space has given us some major food for thought. In this particular case, quite literally.
YouTuber Tom Scott brought together a couple of experts to conduct what might sound like an absolutely insane and yet weirdly important taste test. What were they tasting? Nothing major, just some garlic bread that had been sent up into space. No biggie.
Scott, along with chef Barry Lewis and Steve Randall, managing director of Random Aerospace, decided to embark on this curiosity-fueled taste comparison test.
Isn’t that pretty cool?
But hey, why garlic bread in particular? Why not something else?
Well, Scott seems to have a legit justification for that, which a lot of garlic bread lovers will agree with.
“Because it’s delicious and because someone already sent pizza up in a balloon a few years ago.”
For a garlic bread to qualify for this mission, it had to be—wait for it—completely out of this world, right? #SorryNotSorry
Half of that delicious garlic bread loaf will be sent skywards, while the other half will be saved for the ultimate comparison taste test!
If you’re wondering about the ‘how’ and the ‘in what’ about this experiment, these three guys have it all set up.
The box designed for this purpose is fitted with GPS, and the balloon also has radio trackers that can transmit the location of the bread. A piece of string secures the loaf to the box. Springs have been used to devise a servo cover that will remain open while in the stratosphere, but will shut when the bread comes within 1000 m of the ground.
Okay, so we have an idea, we have a garlic bread loaf, and we have the apparatus. Now for the science!
For starters, let’s clarify what they mean by ‘space’ here. According to Scott, most standard organisations agree that space officially starts at the completely arbitrary Kármán Line, 100 km above Earth’s sea level. Which means, they’re not sending the bread into the orbit, but rather just to the edge of space.
“We’re not saying space. We’re saying ‘the edge of space’ which is basically just a marketing term. The atmosphere is so thin up there, about 1% of the pressure at ground level, that it’s close enough.”
And what happens once it gets there?
Alright then! Let’s do this!
Did they or didn’t they? Yes, they did! Scott, Randall, and Lewis had a piece of that space bread! And the verdict?
“We send home-made garlic bread skyward on a balloon; exposed it to the stratosphere, 35km up; successfully returned it to earth in a protective box; and then ate it. It tasted… cold.”
You can check out the entire experiment and their reactions here!
All I can say right now is, as long as you’ve got a microwave up there to reheat your food, we’re good with food delivery up in space! Is Elon Musk listening?