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In space, no one can
hear you dunk. Spacemen
from the United States are united in a state
of bored stiffdom about the blandness of
the biscuits provided by NASA for their
intergalactic tea parties, up in space.
Astronaut lobbyists have been hobnobbing
with top NASA bods and demanding they find
a new biccie to munch, or else face
a mass moonwalk-out later this month.
The spacemen have since
completed a series of crisis talks, leading
to a series of crisis tests, featuring a
number of different kinds of earth biscuits
being eaten by experts in a big space simulator
at Alton Towers. Each biscuit was then ranked
according to its performance in terms of:
- Crunch
The ideal
biscuit had to be brittle and not so hard
that, when snapped in zero gravity, it
would send the spaceman flying off in
the other direction.
- Dunkability
Astronauts
are tea-mad, and there’s nothing
that upsets them more than slurpy biscuit
sludge at the bottom of their cup.
- Diameter
/surface area
It’s
fucking boring up in space, and a favourite
pursuit of spacemen over recent years
has been public school classic, the biscuit
game - and in zero gravity a larger biscuit
is preferred.
After a gruelling battle
beating off on strong contenders Jammy
Dodgers, Digestives and Custard
Creams, it was the Garibaldi
biscuit that finally took the biscuit, with
its firm yet chewy consistency, large square
size and big shape, and resilience in hot
water.
Other brands fared less
well. The lack of gravity had particularly
grave consequences for Boasters,
which cracked under the low pressure, exploding
into hundreds of tiny chocolatey clusters
that then had to be rounded up with a special
biscuit net.
NASA scientist Jacob McVitie
told us: “The air inside the space
simulation chamber cooled by a fraction
of a degree, however the tiny pockets of
air inside the Boasters biscuit did not.
This miniscule atmospheric imbalance was
enough to exert a slight outward force on
the already fragile structure of the biscuit,
which caused it to break apart and dissipate."
“Basically that’s
just the way the cookie crumbles,”
he added. |
