NASA spent months engineering the perfect menu for the Artemis II mission. And the menu is surprisingly tasty: barbecued beef brisket, broccoli au gratin, vegetable quiche, five types of hot sauce, and way, way more. Because bread is banned in space (crumbs can damage precision instruments), there are 58 tortillas. There are cashews and almonds, mango salad and butternut squash, and more than 10 types of beverages, all culminating into 189 unique food items. One item in particular this week was Nutella, which stole the show just moments before the Artemis II astronauts broke a 56-year-old record and became the furthest humans from Earth when it slingshot back from the far side of the moon.
But perhaps one food item not on the list will be the one that the Artemis II crew will talk about forever: Uncrustables.
Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen have all been promised a lifetime supply of the peanut butter-and-jelly treat upon their splashdown, expected later today.
“Artemis you rang? we’ve got the crew covered on the OG uncrusted sandwiches from here on out…no joke,” the brand wrote in a now viral Instagram post showing an Uncrustable hovering over the earth, much like photos from the far side of the moon taken aboard the Artemis II.
When the four astronauts climbed aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft (which they dubbed Integrity), they embarked on a 10-day journey that will finally see their splashdown tonight, April 10, at around 8:07 in the evening. They knew the food that was aboard the ship—and they made one request for when they landed: the pocket-sized PB&J treat. The Navy confirmed that the recovery vessel, when they make splash down, will have an “abundant amount” of the sandwiches.
And Smucker’s replied with an even better PR stunt than maybe what Nutella had in the first place.
The Artemis II crew just traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, and after all that history, what they wanted was a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off.