Space History: Corned Beef on High

When I was a kid, Wolfie’s in Cocoa Beach was one of my Dad’s favorites to take me out to eat, It was kid-friendly, unlike a place like The Mousetrap or other infamous and legendary Cocoa Beach haunts. They’re all long gone now, as is the nature of restaurants in a resort town. One that is especially missed by many is Wolfie’s, a place that not only had a great lunch but also a side-note in space history that is definitely funny today but was not at all amusing in the mid-1960’s.

Wolfie’s had a great kid’s menu, and they let you keep the menu if you cleaned your plate. I never had a problem with that (unless it was something I didn’t like, liver for example), so I had several of these. If you look closely, you can see the lines where you could punch out the nose and eye to make a mask. All of the kids’ menus I ever owned were worn out just that way.

Wearing one of course made you a steely-eyed astronaut ready for anything. Such was a kid’s imagination, especially one living on the Space Coast. After all, we saw rockets launching all the time, and many of us had parents and/or grandparents who worked “on the base” or “out at the Cape” in various space-related jobs.

At the time, I didn’t know that Wolfie’s was a place where an episode of “much ado about nothing” had blasted off. Knowing my Dad, it was his way of giving a nod to Wally Schirra, whom he was working with about the time he was taking me there for lunch.

Wolfie’s Really Was Out of This World

This was the same place where Wally Schirra picked up the infamous corned beef sandwich for John Young on Young’s Gemini-3 flight in 1965.

The story goes like this: Wally Schirra, an inveterate prankster (and one of my Dad’s buddies), was eating at Wolfie’s one day when he and the manager got into a discussion got into a discussion about how terrible the food sent up with the astronauts was. At the time, on-orbit meals were a pasty emulsion that had to be reconstituted with water, after which the astronauts could eat it. To say that those meals were not popular would be a terrible understatement.

Schirra and the manager, Carl Ransom, then got a brilliant idea — they would send up a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s on the next crewed mission, Gemini 3, to be flown by John Young and Gus Grissom. They made some drop tests to see if the bread could survive the G-forces of ascent, which were successful.

When it came time to ready for the launch on March 23, 1965, Schirra gave Young a wrapped corn beef sandwich, which Young hid in his spacesuit and smuggled it aboard the flight. Later, in orbit, he pulled it out and shared it with Gus Grissom — something he no doubt enjoyed more than the toothpaste-like official meals.

Problem was, Grissom was supposed to be the “control” half of a food experiment where he didn’t eat. Grissom instead enjoyed a bite out of a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s.

Aboard Gemini

01 52 26 Gus Grissom: “What is it?”

01 52 27 John Young:”Corn beef sandwich.””

01 52 28 Gus Grissom: “Where did that come from?”

01 52 30 John Young: “I brought it with me. Let’s see how it tastes. Smells, doesn’t it?”

01 52 41 Gus Grissom: “Yes, it’s breaking up. I’m going to stick it in my pocket.”

01 52 43 John Young: “Is it?“

01 52 49 John Young: “It was a thought, anyways.”

01 52 51 Gus Grissom: “Yep.””

01 52 52 John Young: “Not a very good one.”

01 52 54 Gus Grissom: “Pretty good, though, if it would just hold together.”

01 53 13 John Young: “Want some chicken leg?”

01 53 15 Gus Grissom: “No, you can handle that.”
From the Gemini 3 Transcript

They might have gotten away with it, but Schirra and Ransom didn’t account for crumbs in a microgravity environment, and apparently, Young and Grissom didn’t know any better. After a very short time, caraway seeds and breadcrumbs floated everywhere in the capsule.

Somehow, pictures of crumbs on the Gemini capsule control panel made their way back to Earth, where they caught the eye of the flight controllers and a space-fascinated public.

NASA administrator James E. Webb was “not amused.” Much concern was raised about safety — the greasy bread crumbs were a severe threat to the safe operation of the spacecraft, according to some. The press had a field day.

That in turn got the attention of Congress. Politicians being what they are got upset that “millions of dollars were being wasted” by the astronauts ignoring the space food that had been sent up, and it even got to the point where the the House of Representatives appropriations committee convened a meeting to discuss the entire “incident.”

“Today the theater that took place inside the meeting room that day strikes me as totally comic, but I can assure you that those testifying for NASA at the time were not smiling.”
John Young, in “Forever Young”
(University Press of Florida, 2012)

In the hearing, Grissom and Young’s boss, Bob Gilruth, told the panel that the whole stunt “was a foolish thing to do.” Gilruth did add that “these little things do help break up the strain [on the astronauts.]” NASA also promised this would never happen again.

Later, in the official history of the Gemini program, NASA noted: “What was not made clear, apparent to either the legislators or the press was that the official food was only there for evaluation of its taste, convenience, and reconstitution properties and had nothing to do with any scientific or medical objectives of the mission. No one expected to learn very much about the effects of space food on so short a flight.”

NASA specifically banned any outside food from being brought aboard one of their spacecraft. “Unauthorized sandwiches” were explicitly banned. No more corned beef for lunch, toothpaste is back on the menu, boys. A spokesman said at the time that “NASA is not trying to crack down on humor or crack down on gaiety or quench anyone’s high spirits. We just want to stop, once and for all, any practices which might get out of hand and cause harm.”

I’ll leave it to you to precisely interpret what harm may have arisen, but it’s probably reasonable to think that the danger was just as high in Congress as aboard any spacecraft in orbit.

Afterwards

It didn’t take long for the Gemini 3 controversy to settle, but be sure that the Sandwich had left a rash on a few rear ends inside NASA. The extent of that, who’s to say, but for a while some would try to fan the dying embers.