Over the weekend, John Carmack, co-founder of Doom developer Id Software, researcher of the kind of AI nobody is sure how to achieve, questionable convention attender, and ex-rocket ship entrepreneur, had a thought.
“Considering that muffin tops are the best part,” Carmack wrote on Twitter, “it occurs to me that in zero gravity on the [International Space Station], you could bake spherical muffins that are ‘all top’ by just floating a ball of dough in the oven with no pan.”
According to NASA, astronauts have experimented with baking, but they’ve only gotten as far as cookies, rather than the pie-in-the-sky goal of The Ultimate Muffin. “In November 2019, the Cygnus 12 vehicle brought to ISS a Zero G oven provided by Doubletree Hotels as an experiment to assess the possibility of baking in space,” NASA wrote in a blog about food on the ISS. “And just in time for Christmas, Expedition 61 astronauts Luca S. Parmitano and Christina H. Koch baked chocolate chip cookies that returned to Earth aboard SpaceX 19 in January 2020.”
Much to think about.
