Apollo 8 Christmas Dinner Surprise: Turkey and Gravy Make Space History – NASA

On Christmas Day 1968, three Apollo 8 crew members, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, found a surprise in their pantry: a foil-wrapped and decorated Special Christmas dinner with red and green ribbons. Something as simple as a home-cooked meal, or as spaceflight as NASA could get at the time, went a long way to boosting crew morale and appetite. More importantly, the meal marked a turning point in the history of space food.

On their way to the moon, the crew of Apollo 8 weren’t very hungry. Food scientist Malcolm Smith later documented how little the crew ate. Borman ate the least of the three, taking in only 881 calories the next day, which worried flight surgeon Chuck Berry. Borman later explained that most of the food was unappetizing. The crew ate compressed, bite-sized portions of the food, and when they rehydrated their meals, the food took on the flavor of the wrapper rather than the actual food in the container. If that doesn’t sound like an exciting endorsement, it’s not, he told viewers watching the Apollo 8 astronauts before enjoying a surprise meal in space. As Anders demonstrated to television viewers how astronauts prepare and eat meals in space, Borman announced his wish that people on Earth would have a better Christmas dinner than what the crew had that day.¹

In the 1960s, astronauts and other staff at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now NASA’s Johnson Space Center) made numerous complaints about the food. After evaluating the food the Apollo 8 crew would consume on their upcoming flight, Apollo 9 astronaut Jim McDivitt wrote a note to the food lab documenting his in-flight preferences . Using the back of the Apollo 8 crew’s menu, he instructed them to reduce the number of compressed bite-sized portions to a minimum and add more meat and potato options. “I’m starving,” he wrote, “and I’m afraid I’m going to starve to death because of that menu.”²

In 1969, physiologist Rita Rapp, who led the Apollo food systems team, asked Mission Evaluation Office Director Donald Rabian to evaluate four days of food supplies for the Apollo missions. Arab considers himself a person who eats almost anything.you might say [I am] Kind of like a human trash can. But even he found the food lacking the flavour, aroma, appearance, texture and flavor he was used to. At the end of the four-day evaluation, he concluded that the pleasure of eating had been lost to the point that interest in eating had essentially been diminished.³

Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman agreed with the Arabs’ assessment of Apollo food. What is one of Borman’s favorite items? This is what Christmas dinner is wrapped in a ribbon: turkey and gravy. The Christmas dinner was so delicious that the staff contacted Houston to inform them of their good fortune. “It seems like we’ve done a huge injustice to the food community,” Lovell told CAPCOM’s Mike Collins. After the TV show, Santa brought us each a TV dinner; it was delicious. turkey and gravy, cranberry sauce, grape punch; [it was] outstanding. Collins said he was happy to hear the good news, but he also said the flight control team was not so lucky. Instead, they had cold coffee and abalone sandwiches.⁴

The Apollo 8 meals were a breakthrough. Before that mission, food options for Apollo astronauts were limited to freeze-dried foods that required adding water to eat, and ready-to-eat compressed foods that came in cubes. Most space food is highly processed. On this mission, NASA unveiled Wet Pack: a heat-stable turkey and gravy package that retains normal moisture content and can be eaten with a spoon. In the early 1960s, astronauts on the Mercury missions ate heat-stabilized pureed food, but never large pieces of meat such as turkey. During the Gemini program and Apollo 7 spaceflight, astronauts used their fingers to place bite-sized portions of food into their mouths and used zero-gravity feeding tubes to consume rehydrated food. Equipping the Apollo 8 crew with wet bags has been years in the making. The U.S. Army’s Natick Laboratory in Massachusetts developed the package, and the U.S. Air Force conducted a number of parabolic flights to test eating from the package with a spoon.⁵

Smith said the meal was a real morale booster. He pointed to several reasons for its appeal: The new packaging allows astronauts to see and smell the turkey and gravy; adding water from the spacecraft or the rehydration process does not change the texture and flavor of the meat; and finally, the job Personnel do not have to go through the process of adding water, kneading the package, and then waiting to eat. Smith concluded that Christmas dinner demonstrates the importance of how food is presented and served. Using spoons instead of zero-gravity feeders improves the in-flight feeding experience, mimicking the way people eat on Earth: using cutlery instead of squirting mushy food into your mouth from a bag. Using a spoon also simplifies eating and meal preparation. NASA added more wet packs to Apollo 9, and crew members tried eating other foods with spoons, including rehydrated foods.⁶

Food was one of the few creature comforts on Apollo 8, and this meal demonstrated the psychological importance of being able to smell, taste and see the turkey before eating, something that had not been possible on the previous four flights. Lack of flying days. Seeing appetizing food triggers hunger and encourages eating. In other words, if food looks and smells good, it must taste good, too. Small things like this improvement in the Apollo food system made a huge difference to astronauts who just wanted to have the same eating experience in orbit and on the moon as they do on Earth.

Footnote

[1] Apollo 8 Mission Commentary, December 25, 1968, p. 14,543, https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/mission_trans/AS08_PAO.PDF; Apollo 8 Technical Report, 1969 January 2, 078-15, Apollo Series, University of Texas at Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL); Malcolm C. Smith, Director of Medical Research and Operations, Nutritional Consumption of Apollo 7 and 8, January 13, 1969, Rita Rapp Papers, Box 1, UHCL.

[2] Jim McDivitt Food Evaluation Form, n.d., Box 17, Rapp Papers, UHCL.

[3] Donald Arabic on Rapp, An Assessment of a Four-Day Food Supply, 8 May 1969, Box 17, Rapp Papers, UHCL.

[4] Apollo 8 Mission Commentary, December 25, 1968, p. 14 545.

[5] Malcolm Smith, Apollo Food Program, in Aerospace Food TechnologyNASA SP-202 (Washington, DC: 1970), p. 58; Whirlpool Corporation, Space Food Systems: Mercury via Apollo, December 1970, Box 9, Rapp Papers, UHCL.

[6] Smith, Apollo Food Program, p. 78; Smith Records, Apollo 8 Christmas Dinner, January 10, 1969, col. 1, Rapp Papers, UHCL; Smith et al., Apollo Luo Food Technology Company, in Apollo Biomedical Results, NASA SP-368 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1975), p. 14. 456.