{
    "id": 1070917,
    "title": "Sweets in space",
    "slug": "sweets-in-space",
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    "url": "https://sweeties.net/wiki/sweets-in-space/",
    "modified": "2026-09-26T13:07:07+01:00",
    "excerpt": "Yuri Gagarin ate chocolate sauce from a tube in 1961, M&M's first flew on the shuttle in 1982, and President Reagan sent jelly beans into space in 1983.",
    "content_text": "People have eaten sweet things in space since the very first human spaceflight. Weight, crumbs and heat all make space a hard place for sweets, and the story of which ones flew first has a myth at its centre.\nGagarin's chocolate sauce\nIn 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, aboard Vostok 1. For lunch he ate from three 160 g toothpaste style tubes: two held puréed meat, and the third held chocolate sauce.\nEarly space food was not easy to eat. By the Gemini missions of 1965 and 1966, the heavy tubes had been dropped, and bite sized food cubes were given gelatine coatings to stop them crumbling.\nThe M&M's myth\nM&M's have a place in space history, and the story told about them is not quite right. Mars has said that M&M's have been part of every space shuttle mission since Columbia first launched on 12 April 1981. The space history site collectSPACE looked into it and found that the candy coated chocolates first flew on the third shuttle mission, STS 3, which launched on 22 March 1982 with Jack Lousma and Gordon Fullerton on board.\nNASA chose them for their thermal stability, since they could survive the shuttle's warm food storage. Those first four packs came back to Earth unopened, and M&M's were first eaten in space on the next mission, STS 4, later in 1982. Earlier crews, collectSPACE notes, had fudge and sweet desserts such as pudding, but M&M's were the first sugar confection to fly: see how Smarties inspired M&M's\nReagan's jelly beans\nPresident Ronald Reagan was a fan of Jelly Belly jelly beans, and the company supplied them throughout his presidency. In 1983 he made them the first jelly beans in space, sending them up on the Space Shuttle Challenger during the STS 7 mission to surprise the astronauts: see how are jelly beans made?\nSpace food on Earth\nSpace travel inspired sweets back on the ground. In the early 1970s, riding on the popularity of the Apollo missions, Pillsbury sold Space Food Sticks, with flavours including caramel and chocolate, and freeze dried ice cream is sold in NASA visitor centre gift shops and novelty shops.\nCloser to home\nFor a British sweet that climbed to the top of the world instead, see the sweet that went up Everest",
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