We don’t think of most government agencies as brands, but NASA is different. This year is the space agency’s 60th anniversary, so we’re diving into NASA’s brand history to bring you little-known stories about a meatball and a worm, some astronauts with gastrointestinal issues, and a middle schooler’s mission to send chickens into space.
Produced by Anna Mazarakis and Sarah Wyman, with Dan Bobkoff, Dave Mosher, and Amy Pedulla.
Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
ROBERT PEARLMAN: These boot labels literally just reads the manufacture, the date of manufacture and the size, but one of the astronauts that went on that very famous space walk to service what was called Solor Max, a very large satellite-
DREAM IS ALIVE: Don't drop anything on us, guys.
DAN BOBKOFF: Robert Pearlman lives near the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And calling him a space nerd doesn't do him justice. His home is like a museum to 60 years' worth of artifacts of space exploration.
RP: The IMAX movie The Dream is Alive captured that entire space walk and the efforts to save Solor Max. That movie was narrated by Walter Cronkite and every time I look at this piece, I can hear Walter Cronkite's voice.
WALTER CRONKITE: Even if they can't fix it here, they could take the sattelite back to Earth, repair it there...
RP: They wanted to repair it in space, but if they couldn't do that then they could bring him home. But then he goes- [in unison]
WC: But nobody wants to do that.
RP: (laughs) Other items in here are checklists, and cue cards that were used aboard the space shuttle. There's even a Sony speaker that was flown aboard the space shuttle. Asking me to pick a favorite item is like asking me to pick, you know, my favorite kid. If I had kids. (laughs)
DB: Each object here has a story. Like he has an entire hatch that was built to go on the international space station.
RP: It's the largest hatch created to ever be launched into space.
DB: It's 200 pounds, 4 feet, by 4 feet and it's just in his home. He has half of a bolt that held down the space shuttle that launched the Hubble space telescope. It's only 8 inches in diameter but it's pure titanium and weighs a ton.
RP: And 8 of those held down the space shuttle.
DB: Then there's this thing that just looks like a rubber eraser.
RP: It is solid rocket fuel as used in the sog rocket boosters.
DB: And then he showed us this thing called a valsalva device, which is basically a really high tech way to pop your ears in space.
RP: And you would stick your nose between those two squares, and it would pinch your nose so you could clear your ears. And this particular one was used by Jeffrey Hoffman on the first unplanned space walk of the space shuttle program.
DB: Robert wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, but he had some health problems, so instead, he just started collecting all this space stuff.
RP: I think I live a little bit vicariously through all these items.
DB: And when he looks at all these objects, each one of them has a story. So today, stories Robert told us about NASA and space that really surprised us.
From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name. Brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.
We don't always think of government agencies as brands, but there's one that certainly is: NASA.
Kids play with NASA Legos. Teens wear NASA t-shirts. And other brands want some of that NASA halo.
The space agency just celebrated its 60th birthday, so today on the show we have two stories about NASA and brands, and one about NASA the brand.
Plus, we'll check in with Robert again, and hear more stories from the Pearlman House of Outer Space Wonders.
Stay with us.
ACT I
DB: With us today on our journey of space exploration is Dave Mosher, who is Insider's, what? Space, space correspondent?
DAVE MOSHER: I think you can just call me the resident nerd at Insider, that'd be a good title.
DB: Dave Mosher, resident nerd at Insider.
DM: And today, I'll be talking about Tang and its association with NASA.
DB: Alright. And then we also have with us our producers Anna Mazarakis.
ANNA MAZARAKIS: Hello! And today I'm going to be talking about KFC and NASA.
DB: Mysterious. And Sarah Wyman.
SARAH WYMAN: Hi. I'm here to tell you a story about a worm and a meatball. Actually it's about NASA's logo and to help me tell the story, I called up a guy named Hamish Smyth.
Hamish is a graphic designer. He's worked on a ton of really cool projects in New York City… and also… he really likes NASA.
HAMISH SMYTH: I mean, it's NASA, like it's so cool. It's like you know, these - you're doing space stuff. That's awesome. Right?
SW: So Hamish explained to me that back when NASA was founded in 1958, people had bigger things to worry about than logos and graphics. Like Russia had just launched the satellite Sputnik.
ARCHIVAL: The soviet space satellite. Douglas Edwards reporting. Until 2 days ago, that sound had never been heard on this earth.
SW: Which really took the American populace by surprise.
ARCHIVAL: Well doctor Newell, what about the vital question that everyone is thinking about: why and how did the Russians beat us to the draw?
DM: It also freaked out the executive branch, like the president was losing his gourd.
SW: So they founded a new government agency: NASA. And they had one of their employees just draw up a logo. So this… is the meatball. You can see, it's the same Logo NASA has today, and you can see it's like a big blue circle...
DM: There's like an orbiting thing in the middle there, looks very space-age.
AM: There are lots of stars in the background.
DB: There's a lot going on in this logo. We have stars, you have lines, you have circles, you have. Yeah, it's a messy logo.
DM: It's very razzle-dazzle. If I could put it that way.
SW: It looks it looks like something maybe an engineer would have designed.
DB: Or third grader. [laughter]
DM: A third grade engineer.
SW: And it's kind of fun and whimsical, which I think was exciting for a lot of the people who worked there because they, as kids, had grown up kind of in love with the idea of space exploration and excited about the idea of exploring the universe and going up to space and rocket ships and this logo looks like all of that excitement like all of that childish glee. But as you pointed out like in terms of graphic design, it's not an awesome logo.
HS: You know, the old one consists of numerous colors, so it's very hard to print it accurately, especially using government printing technology at the time.
SW: Logos have to do all kinds of stuff. You have to put them on stationary, you put them on pens that you can hand out to people at conferences. In NASA's case, you have to stencil it onto rocket ships. And this logo is just not good for any of those things.
HS: You can't really see that very well at a mile out on an aircraft or something.
SW: And part of this logo's job is to be on rocket ships and satellites in space and like, it isn't super often that you're getting a nice close-up. You know, those are things that are meant to be seen from far away. Ideally, you know by Russian people, I guess, like also trying to fly into space were very far behind you.
DM: If you're a Soviet in space like you gotta know what spacecraft were dealing with and it just looks like kind of blobby.
SW: Blobby is not the message that the American government was trying to send out about their space force. [laughter] A graphic designer like Hamish Smyth would never have come up with anything that looked remotely like this.
HS: Like I would not try and design a rocket and they shouldn't try and design a logo, you know.
SW: So by the 1970s were like coming out of the Space Race. We've been to the moon. And then you know on the fiscal side of things, the US economy is taking its first big downturn since World War II. And so people are starting to question NASA's funding.
HS: The shuttle program was wildly over budget and they weren't launching nearly as many as they were planning on launching. People are saying like well, what's the point of funding this, you know things that we still hear today.
SW: And so in 1974, facing all this pressure from different directions, the US government decides to try kind of a soft relaunch. They're redesigning the graphics for a bunch of their departments to communicate that their agencies are forward looking, you know, they're not bureaucratic and mired in paperwork and inefficient. No, no, they are glitzy and modern and fancy just like their shiny new logos.
HS: And NASA was the first one that was sort of tackled, so they were looking for kind of like a big win there.
SW: And heeeeere is the logo they ended up with:
DB: It looks like the future.
HS: Oh, yeah. It's a stunning logo.
SW: It's bright red. It's just one color. And it's the word NASA.
HS: It feels high-tech. Like it actually looks like the logo for scientists at the cutting edge of technology.
DM: It reminds me of like, you know, like the nose cone of a rocket and then the s is like connected to the a...it's like it's like it's ready to take off or something.
SW: It's futuristic. It's kind of sexy. It's everything that NASA the agency wants to present as.
DM: And if you're a kid, it's easy to doodle everywhere. Or like put on your costume as an astronaut.
DB: Are you just speaking hypothetically?
DM: Maybe.
SW: So in 1975, NASA just sends out a bunch of stationary with this new logo on it to their engineers. No warning at all. And they hated it.
DB: Did they hate it just because people hate change?
DM: If there are two things that engineers don't like, they don't like changing stuff. And they also don't like surprises. So probably not the best communication strategy for NASA circa the 1970s.
SW: And this is also when people started calling this logo "the worm" which was not meant to be like a cute compliment, like they meant worm in its truly like grossest most insidious form. But there wasn't a ton they could do about it. So this stayed the logo until 1992 and before we get to 1992, you have to understand that like during this period, things got a lot worse at NASA. Like in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger had exploded and all seven of the crew onboard died. And the agency was grounded for two years after that. They weren't sending anybody into space. At this point, it had been 20 years since anybody had been to the moon, and all these people who'd signed up to be rocket scientists and astronauts were like… 'why are we not going to space? This sucks.'
DM: The shuttle era was a hard time for NASA for sure.
HS: And in 1992 a new director was instated, Dan Goldin.
DB: The Golden Era.
DM: Wow, that's a stellar joke, Dan.
DB: Interstellar?
DM: Mmm...wow.
HS: And the story goes that one day, I think it was, you know, one of his first days on the job. Dan Goldin was in the helicopter with a couple of you know, these old NASA guys. And they took off from Ames Research Center in California and apparently the story goes, one of them said to him, 'You know Dan, if you really want to fix the morale and change NASA, get rid of that damn worm logo.' And they're pointing down at one of the buildings as they're flying up, and he said like, 'oh I can change that?' And they said 'yeah, you're the director, of course you can.'
SW: and so literally the next day he gets up behind a podium that has the meatball logo printed on it.
HS: And he came out and said that they're changing it back.
SW: The worm is out. The meatball is back.
HS: So just sort of overnight, they rescinded it and they started painting over it. They started pulling the old worm logo off things.
SW: Off of all the buildings, the signs, they replace the stationary almost immediately. It was like a space agency coup!
HS: {robably cost millions and millions of dollars to do that, taxpayer dollars.
SW: But the worm hasn't totally disappeared. It's still on some satellites in outer space and it's carved onto the concrete in front of NASA headquarters in DC. And you can still buy it on t-shirts.
DM: Can I confess something? In my drawer at home, I think I have at least four shirts with the NASA logo on it. I didn't buy any of them.
DB: Can you think of any other part of the US government that would communicate anything like that if you wore down shirt?
DM: Like if I were an IRS t-shirt, I think I'd be yelled at and derided.
HS: NASA is definitely it's in a class of its own really. It's definitely not like the IRS.
DM: You build giant ass rockets you put people on top and they go into space and they survive like, how much better of a brand could you ask for?
DB: Tomorrow, I'm going to wear my department of the Interior shirt. So I'll show all of you.
Alright, more NASA stories right after this.
ACT II
RP: The next shelf down is a evolution of space food.
DB: We are back in Robert Pearlman's home of wonders in Houston.
RP: Some of the food samples we have here include seafood chowder and I got a beef patty back here.
DB: In the front though is a bag of chocolates that, to us look really familiar, but the label is really generic. All it says is "candy coated chocolate."
RP: But if you look really closely other candies themselves, you might notice that they have Ms on them. So yes, they are M&M's.
DB: But NASA, as NASA does, did not want to advertise a specific brand of chocolate.
RP: And it wasn't until Shannon Lucid flew to the space station Mir in the late '90s that it became known that she was a big fan of M&M's.
DB: And the NASA administrator called up to space before she was coming back to Earth and said they had a large supply of M&M's waiting for her.
RP: And that was the first time in more than two decades that M&Ms actually got a shout out from space.
DB: From M&Ms to a mysterious orange drink - Dave Mosher has the story of how NASA invented Tang.
DM: Which is completely false, Dan.
DB: What? I've been lied to my whole life.
DM: Your childhood has been a lie. This is actually a really common misconception because you see these commercials going up - well I certainly did, that'll age me a bunch - of kids and like parents like drinking Tang and astronauts on these commercials mixing up this powder with water and it's orange juice, it looks like orange juice, it kind of tastes like orange juice. And so why wouldn't NASA have created this magical gift to bestow upon the world? This is a very common misconception but it's not true.
So to find out more about Tang, I called up a woman named Amy Shira Teitel, who is a space historian,
AMY SHIRA TEITEL: Tang was available to consumers before NASA existed. But NASA realized in the early '60s that it was going to have to come up with some way of giving astronauts food and drink in space that was a little bit different than what we're normally used to.
DM: So when you go in the space, you have this whole part of your spacecraft where you need to store stuff. And if you have a bunch of liquids just kind of sloshing around, that is a bad thing. They can get behind controls. They can short circuits. They can do all sorts of really deadly kinds of things. So you want to bring up a dried powdered form and then mix it when you have like total control of the situation.
AST: You're in zero gravity, or microgravity rather, you can't just pour a glass of water and drink it because water, you know, surface tension will make it into a ball! Things don't work the same way in space.
DM: Certainly in the early missions, where you don't know how any of this shit works because you just don't even know if you can swallow in space. Like is that even a thing you can do? Like you need to launch people up there and try this.
AST: Here you have Tang, a commercial-grade, ready-made option that was billed as a breakfast drink rich in vitamins A, C, E and calcium, so things that an astronaut, I mean anybody, needs, an astronaut needs, this is a ready-made way for NASA to send astronauts into space with some kind of breakfast drink.
DM: So while NASA's trying to figure all of this stuff out, Tang is tanking. It did so badly they just tried to do something else with it. They premixed the powder into drinks and tried to sell it on the shelf. That didn't work out either. So then you have NASA and you also have the first flight of an American in space John Glenn in the early '60s.
ARCHIVAL: Zero, ignition, lift off...
AST: The first time Tang flew in space was on John Glenn's first flight in 1962.
DM: And he became the first American to orbit Earth.
AST: This was NASA's first ever earth orbital mission, the entire world watched this flight.
ARCHIVAL: All three big engines burning clean and hot, pushing the friendship 7 spacecraft ever faster toward space. Moving toward altitude 100 miles...
DM: So they put all kinds of stuff in this capsule. They wanted to see what happens when you try to drink things in space and eat things.
SW: Wait, so they did not know for sure that he would be able to like, eat in space before they sent him up there?
DM: NASA didn't know a whole lot of things. They'd sent up, you know chimps, and they'd sent up other animals, and they certainly paid attention to what the Soviets were doing with dogs and other creatures, but we didn't really know what it would do to a human.
AM: Also John Glenn wasn't up there for very long. So if he couldn't actually eat then it's not like he would have died or anything, starved to death. Exactly.
DM: Yeah. This wasn't for his like sustenance. He probably could have gotten away with not eating or drinking anything. But in the few hours he was in Space, the legend goes he whips out a bag that says "orange drink" on it and mixes some water in there and sucks it down, and I can tell you he lived to tell the tale. So this... that orange drink was Tang.
AST: Because it was... it was readily available. Like, NASA could go and get it from a grocery store if need be, NASA at the time was working with different contractors to develop food for space, and General Foods was one of the companies that it had dealt with at some point, so yeah, why reinvent the wheel if you have something you can try?
DM: So NASA is like really protective of its brand, and you know, they didn't want to endorse any particular company because they're a government agency. So during the space program, they did fly a buttload of Tang into space, but it was not called Tang. It was called orange drink.
DB: So what happened after John Glenn drank some orange drink?
DM: So after after Tang found out about this, maybe they knew ahead of time... I'm not exactly sure, but they freaked out. And they used this in advertising and sales, sales went up. They went way up.
AST: General Foods starts using NASA imagery in a lot of advertisements, both television commercials and print ads.
TANG AD: But the astronauts do some things you do. In space they drank Tang. They mixed it like this in a zero g pouch because with no gravity, it would fly all over.
AST: And this becomes something that is massively successful and powerful marketing.
TANG AD: Tang: chosen for the Gemini astronauts.
DM: The entire nation was just really taken by NASA and this effort to get to the moon and people flying in space. The future felt like it was like at their doorstep and they were living through it. And in many senses they were. So everyone's super excited and anything that was advertised for or with the space program was almost guaranteed to be a seller.
And if you look at the advertisements from this period, the television advertisements, it is…. there's like this very slick like superimposing of like the cylindrical tank bottle as the rocket is launching. Like it's sort of pinning down the Tang container as if it's the rocket and then there's a mom who's like 'my boy like wants to live in the future! So he drinks Tang!' And there's this all this crazy, you know overt Space Age kind of appeal to their advertising.
TANG AD: Have a blast, have some Tang.
DM: One of the brilliant things that General foods and the brand Tang realized in marketing is that all of the stuff that NASA recorded in space, you know astronauts floating around and drinking things and docking and launching rockets, that's all public domain because it was created by a government agency. So they could use... they could do whatever the heck they want to with it. They could, they could superimpose a bottle of Tang next to a rocket without asking anybody. So whether or not astronauts actually drank a lot of this or just left it stowed the entire mission and just came back down. It didn't matter. Tang had the reputation of being flown in space and they exploited the hell out of it.
DB: All right, so I guess that's it. Tang in space -
DM: We're not done yet. We still have to talk about a very interesting side note involving Tang and the human body on the moon.
DB: Yes?
DM: So. During Apollo 15 in the early '70s… This is the moon missions... fast forward to the sort of into the early space program as we know it. The astronauts were having trouble with their heartbeat, it was a little irregular, and NASA figured out that this was probably due to a shortage of potassium. So what they did with Apollo 16, a moon landing mission, is they added potassium to Tang to help keep astronauts healthy.
AST: There's no way to say this more delicately, but one of the side effects of drinking orange drinks laced with potassium is flatulence. (laughs)
DM: So Charlie Duke and John Young, Apollo 16, they're on the moon. They're in these really tight fitting space suits. The air is recycled. You know, you are, you are your own worst enemy, and these two… and they have bad gas. And they are, they are passing that gas and they are frustrated. They are tired of farting on the moon.
AM: And tired of smelling their farts on the moon!
DM: Yeah. It's kind of like farting right into your own face inside of a space suit. So this is not good. Like this is not a fun experience when you're supposed to be like pushing the envelope of human exploration. You are smelling your own farts. So Duke and Young think they're talking to each other privately over their helmet comms but they're actually talking over the public line too, with NASA mission control.
ARCHIVAL: Ok, and I still think [indistinct] you guys did an outstanding job.
DM: Which is broadcast to the entire world. They start cursing with f-bombs and the s word.
ARCHIVAL: Oh shit.
DM: About farting.
ARCHIVAL: I got the farts again. I got 'em again Charlie. I mean I haven't eaten this much citrus fruit in 20 years!
DM: and how they hate this orange drink and the potassium's making their stomach all acidic and giving them terrible gas and they said they're never going to drink an orange, eat an orange again after this!
ARCHIVAL: I ain't ever eating any more. We have a hot mic. How long have we had that?
AM: Did Tang use that audio in an advertisement as well?
DM: I don't think Ting ever used that again. Again, this is augmented Tang. Like this is no slight against Tang because NASA did this. They added the potassium.
DB: It was, uh, fartified. [laughter]
DM: Yeah. It was a yeah, it was definitely a fartified drink. God. That is the best pun ever. So. This is important. It's not... it's more than an aside because it just, it's just illustrative of how far we still have to go with human spaceflight. Like engineers hate dealing with humans.
AST: We're really big, we're pretty bulky, and we have a lot of annoying needs. Like the need to eat food. And we constantly have to do things like urinate and defecate. And what do you do with all that?
DM: In fact, one of the problems in space is that, or anywhere, is that vitamin C degrades. It doesn't last a long time. So if you don't have vitamin C, that's a big problem. You can start getting scurvy, which means your gums will start bleeding and your teeth with start falling out, and you also can't heal wounds that you have, like cuts or abrasions or anything like that.
AM: And on that note…
DM: I just like the circularity of it, you know in the very beginning, you know of NASA when John Glenn is lying in space. He's got this Tang and this little pouch, and fast-forward decades later, and in some weird way like we need... we need a space drink of the future to help us get into space and stay there and survive. And not just survive but thrive. You know, if you're Elon Musk, you want Mars bars and pizza joints on the red planet, like you're gonna have to keep people alive. You need workers to stay healthy because if you're on another planet, as Amy told me, and you're not healthy like why the hell are you there?
DB: Dave Mosher with the Tang facts.
Coming up, more Spacey stories.
ACT III
DB: And now back to Robert Pearlman's house. You've heard of the Cola wars, you've heard of star wars, but…
RP: Next shelf down here.
DB: he's telling us about
RP: The Coca Cola Wars in space.
DB: Coca Cola invented a pressurized can and that was going to be sent into space.
RP: It was not done as a PR exercise. They were not looking to advertise with it.
DB: But then, Pepsi found out about this. They heard that Coca Cola was going to space. They were not happy about this.
RP: they contacted NASA and said well we need to be able to fly.
DB: And they developed their own can.
RP: They took a shaving cream can and adapted it because they had a very short time to get onto the space shuttle.
DB: So in the end, both coke and Pepsi end up flying in space. The astronauts try them, and big let down, neither of them tasted good.
RP: So all in all, it offered some entertainment for the astronauts, but did not offer a refreshing drink. So the final frontier of carbonated beverages in space is still waiting to be mastered.
DB: And now from Coca Cola to space chickens with Anna Mazarakis.
AM: Okay guys. I have a very important question for all of you - which came first: the chicken or the egg?
DM: I'm going to say egg because I have a biology degree.
AM: Dan?
DB: I'm going to say egg because Dave Mosher corrects me on things, I might as well just go with whatever he said.
SW: I'm going to say chicken because I'm a contrarian.
AM: (laughs) Well, I found someone with the definitive answer. His name is John Vellinger.
JOHN VELLINGER: We like to say the egg came first because the egg was, you know, what went into space first.
AM: John's the guy who sent the egg into space! It all started when his science teacher saw this poster for a competition that said you could launch and land your own experiment.
JV: And the contest was sponsored by NASA and the National Science Teachers Association.
AM: So basically students could come up with an experiment that could be conducted on a future space shuttle mission and if you won the regional competition and then the national competition then NASA would try to find you a corporate sponsor to try to make this experiment a reality.
JV: Actually fly your experiment aboard the space shuttle.
AM: So our friend John learns about this and he had recently been to the science museum with his dad where he had watched these little chicken eggs hatch and he learned that hens rotate these eggs so that the yolk can be redistributed because of gravity and so he sees this and he thinks 'well, what would happen if there is no gravity?'
JV: and so I thought well, that would be a great idea to see how the chicken embryo would develop up in a microgravity environment because you don't have the hen, you don't need the hand to rotate the egg because of the lack of gravity. And what impact does that have on normal development?
AM: He sees this and he hatches an idea of his own, and thinks this could be my experiment. He writes up this idea and he enters this competition three years in a row. And then, FINALLY, he wins the national competition. And NASA says, 'ok we're going to try to find you a corporate sponsor and try to make this a reality.'
JV: And then they actually came across Kentucky Fried Chicken in Louisville, Kentucky.
AM: So he goes down to Louisville and he presents this idea at KFC headquarters and KFC thinks it's a great idea and they decided that they wanted to sponsor his experiment on a space shuttle.
DB: Why do they think this is a great idea? So it's just like marketing or do they actually think they can learn something from space chickens?
AM: So John was immediately media trained by KFC so he wouldn't say a ton about KFC's intentions in sponsoring or alleged intentions in sponsoring -
DB: What is KFC hiding?
AM: (laughs) But what he did say is that KFC wanted to support science and education.
DB: Hmm...
AM: He conceded that they may have also been interested in studying the development of a chicken embryo because that could have a big impact on their work in the chicken industry.
JV: I guess it was more of a long-term perspective for them. But I think really they were you know supporting science and education primarily.
DB: I'm skeptical.
AM: So KFC gets on board with this experiment and they formally call it "chicken embryo development in space." But because we are humans and we love to come up with catchy names for everything, so it got the nickname "chix in space."
SW: Chix in space!
DM: Wow.
AM: And along with this fun nickname, KFC created this patch, like a space patch, to go along with this mission and it's kind of like the shape of an egg yolk, or an egg, if you can imagine that, with a yellow dot in the middle, and then it's this chick riding on a spaceship.
Dave: Chick chick or a misogynistic chick?
AM: A chicken chick, a baby chick. (laughs) It's this very cute little patch and it was you know on all of the promotional materials for this.
DM: Space patches are a big deal. I mean people collect these things, they trade them, they're worth hundreds of dollars sometimes.
SW: Yeah, like every space mission has its own space patch. So this is a place of honor for the chix in space.
AM: And so to make chix in space work, KFC teamed John up with one of their engineers. Yes, KFC has engineers. His name was Mark Deuser and basically what he did is develop equipment that could be used in restaurants. So like the fryers and the refrigerators and that sort of thing. But he also had some experience in consulting as an engineer, so they said that's why they think the two of them got put together.
So how do you send a very fragile egg in a spaceship that is vibrating a lot and accelerating very fast without it breaking?
DB: Space carton.
DM: This is like that challenge you do in school where you put the - you have to make the egg survive like a three-story drop or something and you build all these cages made out of straws.
SW: You like wrap it in Styrofoam, attach a parachute on there.
DM: Put it inside a ball of duct tape. This is like the ultimate version of that.
AM: Yes. NASA's technology was put to good use and they did something a little bit fancier than that. They basically came up with this mechanism that was like a suspension system in a car.
So, you know when you go over a speed bump, there's a spring and a shock to sort of lessen the blow of going over that bump. Well, they had the same sort of thought for this contraption that would hold this egg, where they would have this egg rack that was suspended with springs and shocks so that as this space shuttle is vibrating and accelerating, this very fragile egg could be supported and not wind up breaking and ruining the whole experiment.
DM: The universe's most advanced egg carton.
AM: True. So they do a lot of testing and the model is looking pretty good. They do all of these crazy simulations to make sure that it doesn't break.
JV: And then actually what we did to kind of really verify the design is we actually took a live chicken embryos, chicken eggs and would grow them out in that device. Just to make sure that we did have a good temperature and humidity profile.
AM: And so as they're working on this, the two guys, John and Mark, got some really great news: chix in space is actually going to go into space. But then they got some bad news, which they didn't realize was bad news at the time.
ARCHIVAL: And as the Challenger roars off the path Sunday morning, it'll be carrying a cargo looking a great deal like what might be on your breakfast plate right now.
AM: So, I don't know if you guys remember this but there was a teacher on the Challenger Mission, Christa McAuliffe, and so Mark and John got to work with Christa and show her how to take care of these eggs while she was on the shuttle, and before the launch they were in the actual shuttle checking on their eggs, making sure everything was okay. They actually had to bring in a new batch of eggs at some point and Mark says he was actually one of the last people in the shuttle before it launched and ultimately exploded.
MARK DEUSER: And so, that certainly left an eerie feeling in my mind to realize that I was one of the last living humans inside of the orbiter before it launched into space and was lost forever.
AM: John and Mark are heartbroken. Of course, they were struck by it just like the rest of the world was struck by it, but they also, one, were very good friends with the people who were on the shuttle and, two, they were standing there - they were at the launch, so they saw it happen in real-time and had all of the confusion of not knowing what was going on. And then of course as a very side thought in their mind, as they said, their chicks were on that mission and they didn't know if they would have another opportunity to send their chicks into space.
MD: Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know, they went back and they reconsidered and looked at all the different options, but they came back very quickly after the Challenger accident and said they wanted to support this effort again, and we want to try to get on the next available shuttle.
DM: Do they get to go again? Do they get to launch the eggs?
AM: So they're hoping. They have no idea. They're working on this design, they're refining it.
And finally chix in space is greenlit for a ticket aboard the Discovery shuttle three years later and this time the eggs took off without a hitch and they spent five days in space and then they landed and John and Mark were ecstatic.
MD: It was really cool to hear the sonic boom when the shuttle comes across the desert and you hear the two sonic booms.
AM: They had worked on this for so long and they'd finally get to find out what the answer was to this question that they'd been asking for so long: what happens to an egg's development in zero gravity?
So in search of that answer, they had sent 32 eggs up into space. The eggs had been divided into three groups that were pretty much like the three trimesters of a gestating egg, and then they compared those to 32 eggs on earth.
MD: There was certainly an impact on that early age group of being in the space environment.
AM: So basically what it is is the older embryos were already developed a little bit. So once they were in space dealing with zero gravity and all the jostling around, I guess it wasn't as much of a hit, so to speak. Like they could survive that. Whereas the younger ones were not as well developed, so all of the jostling around was harder.
SW: So but there were chickens that survived this experiment?
AM: there were chickens that survive this experiment! Of the 32 eggs, eight of them hatched and you know, John and Mark weren't really sure how many eggs they could expect to have hatch once they got back to Earth, but eight of them ended up hatching. The first one's name was Kentucky.
SW: Hey!
DM: Also some fun stats: 80% of chicken eggs will hatch but if you ship them only half, like 50% of the eggs will hatch. So the fact that like eight out of 32 eggs hatched, it's pretty good. I want to know what happened to these chickens because like when when the Soviets launched the dogs into space, the ones that came back and they had a litter of puppies, they gave they gave them to the Kennedys - the puppies, like this treasured lineage of dogs. I wonder what happened to these chickens.
ARCHIVAL: With Kentucky Fried Chicken involved in the project, some might wonder if the hatched space chickens will wind up smothered in the colonel's secret herbs and spices. The answer is no.
AM: Most of them went to zoos from what I can gather and some of them were studied in scientific facilities like Purdue University where John Vellinger went to college.
DB: So besides this obvious huge contribution to science what did KFC get out of all this?
AM: So as I said before, John was media trained very quickly and KFC signed him up for speaking engagement after speaking engagement, interview after interview. So they got a lot of publicity for this and there's certainly a case to be made that they did contribute to science and they did help inspire little kids, as they said. But they also certainly helped their own brand as well and in doing so showed that it helps your brand to be connected to the brand of NASA, because everybody is so inherently interested in space and learning more about what's going on in space. And so if your brand is connected to learning more about the unknown of space or gravity in this case, then your brand is only helped along the way.
DB: Alright team, after all these years, after 60 years of NASA, why are we still so captivated by space?
SW: I think because we still know so little about space, there's something about it that still feels incredibly novel and exciting, even in this moment.
DM: There's a moment in Apollo 8 when Jim Lovell and the other astronauts are looking back on Earth, you know the blue marble, and they just got the willies and they were totally blown away and they just had this sort of out of body experience looking through the window because they knew that everyone who lived on Earth was like, they could cover them up with a thumbprint.
SW: I mean, that's the thing. I can only imagine what that would be like. Like I've never had an experience in my life that compares to that even remotely.
AM: And yeah at the same time, even if you've never been into space, you can still feel the wonder of it, even if you're just looking up at the stars at night or going to the planetarium on a field trip or something like that. You feel the wonder and excitement of what it must be like to be up there in the great unknown of it. And seeing the stuff that's been up in space, like the stuff that Robert Pearlman collects, that feels very exciting, too.
RP: There's only been about 500 people that have flown to space in the history of humanity, and we can't be them. But we can maybe get to hold something that they took.
SW: You know, pictures, objects.
RP: A package of M&M's or a flashlight or a pen.
SW: And, the rest of us can kind of, I don't know, get a little closer to experiencing what that must be like.
RP: Being able to hold or be within the presence of something that actually went there speaks more to our inner psyche than simply seeing it on TV.
DM: And bringing space closer to everybody.
RP: And to me that is what NASA embodies.
DB: Alright, Dave Mosher, Insider science and technology correspondent. And our producers Sarah Wyman and Anna Mazarakis. Thank you! This has been out of this world.
CREDITS
DB: Our prime crew for this episode was Anna Mazarakis and Sarah Wyman.
Dave Mosher, Amy Pedulla and I were on backup.
Back at mission control, our support crew included:
Our editor, Gianna Palmer.
Original music and spacey sound design by John DeLore and Casey Holford.
Executive producers Chris Bannon, Laura Meyer, Jenny Radelet and me.
Special thanks to Dan Lockney and the NASA Technology transfer program.
Household Name is a production of Insider Audio.
