How long does it take to bake a cookie in space?
This is not an easy question to answer. First of all, you can’t just make cookie dough on the International Space Station (ISS) because flour and sugar in zero gravity would just float around and not stay in the bowl.
There would also be baking challenges. On Earth, the hot air in an oven moves around and heats the dough. This doesn’t happen in zero gravity. Likewise, gravity makes the cookies spread out and flatten, so a cookie in space would look different without a lot of baking changes.
Last November, these issues were tested. A tin of DoubleTree (the hotel) cookie dough and a zero-gravity oven were used on the ISS to bake cookies. (Here is a short video about what the oven looks like.) It was an interesting experiment.
First of all, they baked five cookies, one at a time. Each one was cooked at a different time and temperature. The first one was undercooked; the other four smelled like baked cookies. Unfortunately, the astronauts couldn’t eat the cookies. They were put in individual containers and sent back to Earth for testing.
Here is the answer to our opening question. The cookies on the ISS were baked between 70 and 130 minutes at 300 and 325 degrees. The best looking cookies were numbers 4 and 5 that baked for 120 and 130 minutes. Two hours!!!
This may seem like a frivolous experiment, but if we are going to have colonies on the Moon and Mars, it will help to have real food, including cookies. Plus, a fresh-baked cookie is better then one that’s been in a box for months, especially if you have a bag of milk with a straw to go with it.