SpaceX Dragon takes ice cream, Silly Putty to Space Station

Among the important cargo onboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule is material to create Silly Putty as well as ice cream. And it’s not that freeze-dried “astronaut” kind.

The ice cream is tagging along on the space flight that launched Sunday night from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The capsule is expected to reach the International Space Station on Wednesday.

The ice cream is encased in a GLACIER refrigerator, which is an ultra-cold freezer that stores samples at temperatures as low as minus 301 degrees Fahrenheit.

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According to CollectSpace.com, the Dragon is carrying vanilla with swirled chocolate sauce ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries, which is based in Texas and popular in Houston where NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center resides.

This isn’t the first time that Blue Bell ice cream has gone into space. It previously went up in 2006 when it flew inside the Atlantis space shuttle.

Also onboard the capsule is material to make Silly Putty, the malleable substance used as a toy.

Students from Lincoln Middle School and Santa Monica High School designed an experiment that will look at whether Silly Putty can be made in space, and if so, how it differs from the regular, Earth-made version of the toy.

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The experiment is among 11 chosen from a pool of 1,125 experiments proposed from around the country, according to Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.

What will happen? Well, according to SSEP Community Network, the students hypothesize that it will be possible to make Silly Putty in space but they expect its viscosity and bounce to be different from the Silly Putty we know.

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