The seemingly innocent decision by an astronaut that caused a huge problem for NASA
Sixty years ago, a NASA astronaut’s antics on a spaceflight into low-Earth orbit sparked a national controversy in the U.S.
Six decades ago this month, as the U.S. vied to win the race to land humans on the Moon, a simple snack was smuggled into low Earth orbit - and became a national controversy, sparking the ire of lawmakers and space-agency chiefs alike.
The contraband in question was a corned-beef sandwich, and the individual behind the spaceflight stunt was the late, legendary NASA astronaut John Young.
How did the space sandwich storm unfold?
On March 23, 1965, Young and Virgil “Gus” Grissom became the first Americans to fly together in space when they completed NASA’s Gemini 3 mission, travelling to a maximum altitude of 140 miles above the Earth.
It was the first crewed flight in the Project Gemini space exploration program, which had begun in 1961.
Gemini was the forerunner to the more-famous Apollo program - the series of missions which, later in the 1960s, ultimately saw the U.S. beat Cold War foe the Soviet Union to the Moon.
“You care for a corned beef sandwich, skipper?”
After launching from Cape Canaveral in Florida, the Gemini 3 astronauts completed three orbits of the Earth during a nearly five-hour mission on board their two-seater spacecraft, which they had nicknamed “Molly Brown”.
But it seems that Young and Grissom were less than enthused by the in-flight meals on offer as they zipped around the globe.
“[The meals] came in plastic bags,” Grissom explained in an interview with Life Magazine in April 1965, per the National Air and Space Museum. “We had to insert a water gun into the bag and squirt liquid inside to reconstitute them.”
Having seen his mission commander grow “bored” with this freeze-dried fare during pre-flight training, Young decided to take matters into his own hands. “I hid a sandwich in my spacesuit,” he revealed in the same sitdown with Life.
In the 1968 book Gemini: A Personal Account of Man’s Venture Into Space, Grissom - who died in the Apollo 1 fire two years after Gemini 3 - recalls the moment Young pulled the stowaway snack from his suit.
“I was concentrating on our spacecraft’s performance, when suddenly John asked me, ’You care for a corned beef sandwich, skipper?‘” Grissom said. “If I could have fallen out of my couch, I would have. Sure enough, he was holding an honest-to-John corned beef sandwich.”
It “seemed like a fun idea at the time”, Young told Life - but the, er, beef that followed left the astronaut in no doubt that not everyone was amused.
“Foolish”
According to NASA’s Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, Young’s sandwich drew angry, scathing criticism from legislators during a congressional hearing on the space agency’s budget for the following year.
Representative George E. Shipley, for example, branded Young’s actions “foolish”. Shipley pointed to the potentially dire consequences that would have ensued had errant bread crumbs interfered with the spacecraft’s instrumentation and caused a major malfunction.
Per Ross-Nazzal, Shipley was assured by George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for Manned Space Flight, that the agency had “taken steps, obviously, to prevent [a] recurrence” of Young’s antics.
However, Ross-Nazzal also notes that Robert R. Gilruth, the Manned Spacecraft Center’s director, sought to defend Young. Such hijinks, Gilruth explained, served to “break up the strain” of the high-pressure environment of spaceflight.
And in his autobiography, Forever Young: A Life of Adventure in Air and Space, Young appears wholly unapologetic about the incident. “In my view, the hubbub was completely unnecessary and blown totally out of proportion,” he declared.
Although he named no names, Young also claimed that he wasn’t the first astronaut to smuggle galactic grub on board a mission into space.
What happened to Young after Gemini 3?
In the years that followed the Gemini 3 mission, ‘sandwich-gate’ appears not to have hampered Young’s career in spaceflight. Indeed, he remained with NASA until his retirement in 2004 - 42 years after he was first hired by the agency, in its second intake of astronauts.
In April 1972, Young became one of the 12 people who have walked on the Moon so far, when he commanded the Apollo 16 mission to the Earth’s satellite.
Three years earlier, the California native was also among the Apollo 10 crew that flew into lunar orbit, as part of a flight that was a ‘dress rehearsal’ for July 1969’s historic Moon landing. Just two months after Apollo 10, the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface.
By the time he retired, Young had established himself as the first person to fly in space six times. He is also one of only two NASA astronauts - along with Ken Mattingly - who flew in both the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs.
When Young died in January 2018, at the age of 87, NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot lauded him as “in every way the ‘astronaut’s astronaut.‘“
“Astronaut John Young’s storied career spanned three generations of spaceflight,” Lightfoot said in a statement. “We will stand on his shoulders as we look toward the next human frontier.”
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