Astronauts bust the myth of space ice cream - CNET

This makes one wonder why it's called astronaut ice cream if astronauts never snacked on it in space.

Although astronaut ice cream was originally developed by Whirlpool under contract to NASA for the Apollo missions, any records showing that it actually went into space are scarce on details.

Some news reports claim that the 1968 Apollo 7 mission had vanilla ice cream on board, so Vox contacted Walt Cunningham, the only astronaut on that flight who is still alive.

"We never had any of that," Cunningham said.

The transcripts of the Apollo 7 mission reveal that the astronauts ate chocolate pudding, but there is no mention of ice cream.

"After it came out, I remember thinking, 'Gee, wouldn't it have been nice if we had that,'" Cunningham added.

When you consider how crumbly astronaut ice cream can be, there's no way NASA could have allowed it to be consumed in zero gravity where the bits of freeze-dried ice cream could fly into the controls or create other problems floating inside the ship.