A day-old corned beef sandwich smuggled aboard Gemini 3 in 1965 triggered a congressional inquiry over floating breadcrumbs. This deep dive uses that famous incident as a gateway into the surprisingly high-stakes science of eating in orbit. It starts with the Mercury-era fear that humans could not swallow without gravity, the gelatin-coated cubes and toothpaste tubes that resulted, Yuri Gagarin's pureed meat, and John Glenn's applesauce test in 1962 that proved peristalsis works fine in weightlessness. It also explains the low-residue diets designed to keep astronauts from needing a toilet that did not exist.

From there the episode covers the Apollo spoon bowl, the fluid shift that leaves astronauts congested and craving horseradish shrimp cocktail, the wet-burp problem with carbonated drinks, the cream sherry test that triggered gag reflex ...