Humans are pretty resourceful creatures. We've landed a spacecraft on a comet travelling at speeds of around 135,000km/h. We've dug 12 kilometres down into the crusty contents of Earth. We've achieved direct brain-to-brain communication, and like it or not, we're now editing the genes of human embryos. But not all of us are interested in using our resourcefulness to achieve something meaningful. Some of us - like Swedish brothers Alexander and Benjamin Jönsson - are using their resourcefulness to advance the sillier things in life. That said, enter the Space Doughnut.
Launched to ridiculous heights earlier this month, the world's first space doughnut might not have technically made it to space, but it made it past the stratosphere, which is higher than most us will ever get. The Jönsson brothers attached a camera and a delicious-looking doughnut to a weather balloon and sent it 32 kilometres up into Earth's atmosphere to get a look at the view. And as the footage above shows, it sure did get a view.
According to Phil Edwards at Vox, once the doughnut had gotten as high as it could go, it fell back down to Earth and was retrieved from the water by the Swedish Sea Rescue Society.
Speaking of delicious baked goods in space, even if astronauts wanted to get their hands on them - and you know they definitely do - until recently, it's been quite a challenge. "As Mary Roach described in Packing for Mars, conventional foods aren't very well-suited to space travel," Edwards says at Vox. "On 23 March 1965, a corned beef sandwich was brought aboard the Gemini III capsule. But before astronaut Jim Young could eat it, he had to stash it - the sandwich broke apart too easily and risked spreading crumbs around the ship (which in low gravity are almost impossible to extract)."
Vacuum-sealed packaging has since changed all that, and now astronauts just might be able to 3D-print their own space pizzas. What a world we live in.
Oh but you know the most tragic part of this whole story? The Space Doughnut made it 32 kilometres about the surface of the Earth and back, only to end up soggy, mashed up, in pieces, and inside someone else's stomach. RIP Space Doughnut. Sorry it had to end like this.
Source: Vox