If you are going to travel in space, wouldn’t it be great to have fresh baked cookies ?

Fresh baked cookies – in space

You know that chocolate chip cookie the desk clerk hands you when you check in at a DoubleTree by Hilton property?

It’s a nice reward for making it through a long day of traveling. And soon – perhaps by October – astronauts heading to the International Space Station (ISS) will be rewarded with fresh baked cookies as well.

Plans are in place to launch Doubletree cookie dough into space as part of a payload heading for the International Space Station. The dough will then baked on route inside a special prototype oven created by Zero G Kitchen, a company determined to create kitchen appliances for use in space.

Why cookies? Well, it seems scientists were looking for way to make space more welcoming and realized Doubletree’s cookies are something that already connotes ‘welcome’ to millions of travelers here on the ground.

Zero G Kitchen and NanoRacks, a company that provides commercial access to space, have worked up a cooking technology that adheres to NASA safety standards. The test oven is fully built, it has passed all three phases of the rigorous NASA safety review and has been handed over to NASA for launch.

Transportation for the cookies and the test oven will be aboard one of cargo flights that regularly supply the International Space Station, either on a SpaceX Dragon or a Northrop Grumman Cygnus.

Zero G Kitchen chefs aren’t completely sure what temperature the dough will need to be heated to, and for how long, once it’s in space. But the chefs say they’ll be in contact with the astronauts throughout the process for feedback on baking time and temperature,

No official launch date has been set yet, but the team is working with NASA to confirm the exact ISS payload it will be a part of – possibly in October.

Sounds right that chocolate chip cookies should be the first things baked space. Once they have the technology down, though, what should they cook next?

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