The First Soft Drink in Space

There's General Knowledge, and there's Trivia. And there's little doubt which side of the divide this one falls.

Especially as the first soft drink in space was little more than a publicity stunt, staged by the Coca–Cola Company. AP News (the website of The Associated Press – a well–known American non–profit news agency) reported in 1985 that "Coke officials [were] boasting in advertisements" that "'The first soft drink enjoyed in space was a Coke. Of course'", explaining that "astronauts on the recent Challenger space shuttle mission [had] tried Coca–Cola, then Pepsi, in the first use of soft drinks in space." They tried Coke first because "Coca–Cola executives were the first to submit an application to take their product aboard the flight."

Lots of other websites agree that Coke was the first soft drink in space; but not everyone does. According to a website called considerable ("A new media brand for people who are redefining what it means to grow older and are looking forward to what's next"), the first soft drink in space was something called Tang. Considerable describes Tang as "the astronauts go–to water enhancer", explaining how John Glenn, the second American in space, "took Tang into space aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962". He took it because the water on board his spacecraft "was infused with nontoxic chemicals to keep it purified in orbit – which really did not make it taste so great".

Considerable is not an entirely credible witness; it describes John Glenn as "the first human ... to orbit Earth". A couple of weeks ago a setter in MQL made the same mistake, but I pointed out on that occasion that Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth once, and the second Soviet cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, did it seventeen times. Glenn was actually the third human to orbit the Earth.

On the topic of Tang however, Considerable is backed up by Wikipedia, which describes it as "an American drink mix brand that was formulated by General Foods Corporation food scientist William A. Mitchell and General Foods Corporation chemist William Bruce James in 1957, and first marketed in powdered form in 1959." Wikipedia confirms that "NASA used [Tang] on John Glenn's Mercury flight in February 1962, and on subsequent Gemini missions. Since then it has been closely associated with the US human spaceflight program, which created the misconception that Tang was invented for the space program. "Considerable adds that "While Tang sold slowly when it was first marketed in 1959, the NASA publicity served as a booster rocket that launched it into the upper stratosphere of branding." Some people, apparently, even believed that Tang had been invented by NASA; but this was not true.

I'm not sure it was ever sold in the UK, but some people clearly think that Tang was the first soft drink in space.

I suppose what it boils down to is whether or not Tang is a soft drink. It's sold as a powder, which is clearly not drinkable; but you only add water, so you could argue that once a packet of Tang has been mixed with water you might refer to it as "a glass [or maybe, in space, a pouch?] of Tang."

But at the end of the day ... do we care? It's one thing for Coca–Cola to make an advertising campaign out of their (supposedly) being first; but does that make it a quiz question?

I guess we'll all have our own opinions.