Coke pepsi ad wars12/27/2022 ![]() ![]() So when it came time to drink, Bartoe was "banned to the flight deck," Fullerton, England and mission specialist Story Musgrave tried out the Coke and Acton, pilot Roy Bridges and mission specialist Karl Henize drank the Pepsi. Three of us will drink Pepsi and three will drink the Coke.'" "He said, 'Okay, new plan: everybody is going to drink - except John. "He could have put my alternate on board right there at that moment, but he went off and thought about it," said Bartoe, recalling Fullerton's reaction. ![]() ![]() Gordon Fullerton, the mission's commander, decided that the easiest way to limit the crew's involvement would be to have only Bartoe and Loren Acton, the flight's other payload specialist, drink from the cans.īut Bartoe did not want to be any part of it. The astronauts - and more importantly, Coca-Cola and Pepsi - wanted to stay clear of any questions about which tasted better. To begin, the crew would limit any critiques to how the cans functioned and avoid commenting on the beverages inside. Prior to the launch, four of each company's cans were packed aboard the shuttle and NASA and the astronauts agreed to some rules. "It wasn't really until we recast it as 'Can we use carbonated beverages?' that it seemed like a reasonable request." "There was some reluctance on the part of the crew, because it seemed so commercial," said Tony England, who like Bartoe was on his first and only space mission as a member of the STS-51F crew. NASA, seeking to downplay the commercial nature of the payload, referred to the Coke and Pepsi cans as the "Carbonated Beverage Container Evaluation" (CBCE) and relegated the activity to whenever the crew had time between what was the primary focus of the STS-51F mission, advancing the study of solar, atmospheric and astro-physics. It was not nearly as high tech and was more like a whipped cream can with a little white tab tipped sideways." "The Pepsi can was made last minute in a big rush. So they put their engineers to work and came up with this high-tech can," Bartoe said. They wanted to see if they could develop a can that could dispense a carbonated beverage in space just as if you were drinking it here on the ground. "This started out as a very serious research project for the Coca-Cola company. Similar to the dispensers used to package spray cheese or whipped cream, Pepsi's space can also used a carbon dioxide-filled pouch to push the soda out, but instead of being pre-pressurized, it employed chemicals to produce the gas. The agency agreed, but only if Pepsi could develop and deliver a dispenser in time.įor its can, Pepsi modified an existing design that it said originally cost $14 million to develop. When Pepsi got word that Coca-Cola was going to space, it appealed to NASA to be included on the mission, as well. The can was topped with a metal valve and a drinking spout. A mechanism is needed to push or extract the liquid out of the container, but only when desired by the astronaut to avoid making a mess of the cabin.Ĭoca-Cola invested about a quarter of a million dollars to adapt what looked like one of its aluminum cans to hold a laminated plastic bag filled with soda and a carbon dioxide-pressurized bladder to propel the drink out. Given the way that liquids can behave in the microgravity environment of Earth orbit, launching off-the-shelf soda cans or bottles would not work. "In retrospect," he told collectSPACE in a recent interview, "that was really a dumb thing for me to do."Ĭoca-Cola was the first to approach NASA about testing a soda dispenser aboard the space shuttle. So while his STS-51F crewmates took turns testing out either Coke's or Pepsi's soda cans developed for use in space, Bartoe stayed apart. I didn't like it all," said Bartoe, reflecting 35 years later on what the media dubbed then the "space cola wars." "I said, 'I'm not going to do it, I think it it's a terrible idea.'" "I thought it was frivolous and detracting from the science of the mission. ![]() He was glad to be on his first mission and even happier to have made it safely into space after what was the space shuttle program's first and only abort-to-orbit, but becoming one of the first astronauts to drink Coca-Cola or Pepsi off Earth was a sip too far. John-David Bartoe was having none of it.Ī payload specialist aboard a 1985 flight of the space shuttle Challenger, Bartoe sequestered himself away from his six crewmates. ![]()
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