It’s been almost four and a half years since it was made in space, but if you could smell it today, you’d see that the DoubleTree Cookie still retains its distinctive scent.
The cookie, the world’s first food item baked in space, went on display Wednesday, May 8, at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Prepared with a recipe similar to the chocolate treats given to guests staying at DoubleTree by Hilton hotels, the cookie was preserved in a state close to when it came out of the specially designed microgravity oven on the International Space Station in November. 2019.
“I can tell you it still smells like baking cookies,” Jennifer Levasseur, museum curator in the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview with CollectSPACE.com. “I wish smell testing was available to everyone.”
However, doing so runs the risk of moisture and subsequent mold formation. To preserve the cookie on display, it is displayed in a custom-made enclosure that keeps it and its original silicone casing in a pure nitrogen environment. Otherwise, like other baked goods, its shelf life would not be as long.
“Because inside this particular enclosure, no one can smell the cookie anymore, which is probably in the cookie’s best interest, because if you could smell it, that would mean potentially oxygen could get into it, and then we’d get in.” It’s a direction we don’t want to go,” Levasseur said.
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The cookie was donated by Hilton, along with space services company Nanoracks (now part of Voyager Space) and startup Zero-G Kitchen. In 2019, three organizations worked together to send an oven to the space station that could operate in a microgravity environment. Because hot air does not rise in space, the Zero G Oven worked using electric heating elements placed around a cylindrical chamber so that the pocket of heated air surrounds the food through its center.
The silicone pouch displayed with the cookie was originally used to hold the dough in place inside the oven and prevent the crumbs from loosening.
It took several tries for astronauts Christina Koch of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency (ESA) to find the right temperature and time for the best results.
“We baked a fifth of the cookies,” Levasseur told CollectSPACE. “This was the final version that they felt was closest to the actual texture you’d want to bake cookies with.”
The cookie returned to Earth in a freezer in early 2020 and remained frozen until it was delivered to the Smithsonian. (It was later sent to the museum on dry ice.)
“We had to defrost it,” Levasseur said. “So the preservation team did some experiments beforehand, remaking the recipe and then testing how long they should dry it and under what conditions we should store it so that we never have to worry about mold growth being a problem.”
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Beyond being an interesting example of artifact preservation, the baked cookie now represents work being done to make long-duration space missions more enjoyable and sustainable for future crews.
“Hospitality and innovation are two elements of Hilton’s DNA,” DoubleTree by Hilton brand leader Shawn McAteer said in a statement. “We are honored to be the first hospitality company to participate in historic research on the International Space Station and now have the DoubleTree cookie on display at the Smithsonian.”
“We hope that when people hear that the DoubleTree cookie is the first product to be successfully baked in space, they will not only celebrate the experiment, but also understand that DoubleTree is deeply committed to providing warm and attentive chocolate chip cookies,” McAteer said.
Visitors to the Udvar-Hazy Center can find the cookie in an exhibit near the entrance to the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar, displayed alongside other foods prepared for use in space. In a few years, the cookie will move to the National Air and Space Museum’s flagship building in Washington, D.C., where it will be part of the new “At Home in Space” gallery opening in 2026.
“It will be featured alongside other items related to food consumption in our recreation [International Space Station’s] Destiny laboratory module,” said Levasseur.
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