It has been almost four and a half years since it was made in outer space, but if you could smell it today, you'd find it still retains the distinctive whiff of a DoubleTree Cookie.
The world's first food item baked in space, the cookie debuted on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia on Wednesday (May 8). Made from a similar recipe to the chocolate chip treats given to guests staying at DoubleTree by Hilton hotels, the cookie has been preserved as close to the condition it was in when it came out of a specially designed microgravity oven on the International Space Station in November 2019.
"I can tell you it does still smell like a baked cookie," Jennifer Levasseur, museum curator in the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "I wish that the smell test could be available to everybody."
To do so, though, would risk introducing moisture and then mold. To preserve the cookie on display, it is exhibited within a custom-built enclosure that holds it and its original silicon sleeve within a pure nitrogen environment. Otherwise, just like any other baked good, it would not have nearly as long a shelf life.
"Because it's in this special enclosure, nobody can smell the cookie now, which is probably for the cookie's benefit because if you were able to smell it that would mean that there might potentially be oxygen penetrating it, and then we'd be going in a direction we don't want to go," said Levasseur.
