Astronaut Brings Lunch for Long Trip, Almost Costs Him His Career
Famed Navy pilot and astronaut John Young recently passed away at the age of 87 after a bout of pneumonia, according to his NASA profile.
“Today, NASA and the world have lost a pioneer,” stated acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot following Young’s death on Jan 5. “Astronaut John Young’s storied career spanned three generations of spaceflight; we will stand on his shoulders as we look toward the next human frontier.”
Young’s career began as a Navy fighter pilot in the 1950s prior to his joining NASA in the 1960s, and included the first manned flight of the Gemini missions, walking on the moon as part of the Apollo program and commanding the Columbia in the shuttle program’s maiden flight in 1981.
But the stellar career of the astronaut who ultimately received more than 80 special honors and prestigious awards over the years was almost over soon after it began, all because of a practical joke involving a corned beef on rye sandwich, according to Atlas Obscura.
As Young prepared to board the capsule of the Gemini 3 mission for his first space flight in 1965, he was handed a corned beef sandwich as a joke by fellow astronaut Wally Schirra, which Schirra had purchased two days earlier at a local deli. Thinking little of it, Young stuffed the sandwich inside of his space suit and proceeded with the mission.
Later on during the two-man flight, Young pulled out the sandwich and offered part of it to his commander, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, who took a bite, noticed it was crumbling and put it away in his pocket for later, as revealed by audio logs of their mission.
Grissom asked, “Where did that come from?” in regard to the sandwich, to which Young replied, “I brought it with me. Let’s see how it tastes. Smells, doesn’t it?”
After Grissom put away the crumbling sandwich, Young stated, “It was a thought, anyways … Not a very good one,” to which Grissom said, “Pretty good though, if it would just hold together.”
Unfortunately, the sandwich was not an approved part of the mission — part of which was to test new dehydrated space food — and crumbs floating around in zero-gravity could have presented a major hazard to both the ship and the crew, which resulted in a bit of consternation after the fact toward NASA and Young from members of Congress, according to Collect Space.
“A couple of congressmen became upset, thinking that, by smuggling in the sandwich and eating part of it, Gus and I had ignored the actual space food that we were up there to evaluate, costing the country millions of dollars,” recalled Young in his 2012 memoirs, “Forever Young.”
NASA officials heard all about it from the House Appropriations Committee, as Illinois Rep. George Shipley, a Democrat, admonished, “My thought is that … to have one of the astronauts slip a sandwich aboard the vehicle, frankly, is just a little bit disgusting.”
One of the NASA officials simply replied, “We have taken steps … to prevent recurrence of corned beef sandwiches in future flights.”
Atlas Obscura noted that Young received a reprimand for his actions, the first ever for a member of a flight crew, a rather dubious addition to Young’s many other “firsts.”
Though Young eventually stated in later years that he regretted bringing the sandwich aboard the Gemini capsule, and became a staunch advocate of astronaut safety, Grissom recalled the sandwich incident being “one of the highlights of the flight.”
Interestingly, a replica of the infamous corned beef sandwich has been forever preserved in resin and is on display in the Grissom Memorial Museum in Mitchell, Indiana. Collect Space reported that the local deli near the Cape Canaveral launch pad in Florida closed its doors for the last time in 2002.
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