We Were Promised Cosmic Cocktails

In the early days of its human spaceflight program, astronauts would often prank each other by stashing small amounts of booze on a spacecraft before launch. When Wally Schirra blasted into orbit in 1962 as one of the original seven astronauts chosen for NASA’s Mercury program, he discovered that someone had stashed a pack of smokes and a small bottle of scotch in the capsule before launch. (Schirra waited until he was safely back on Earth to indulge.) And during the Apollo 8 mission around the moon, astronaut Deke Slayton had stashed a few small bottles of brandy in the astronauts’ holiday meal kit. It was all in good fun, but Frank Borman, the Apollo 8 commander, wasn’t having it. “I didn’t think it was funny at all,” he later said. “If we’d have drunk one drop of that damn brandy and the thing would have blown up on the way home, they’d have blamed it on the brandy.”