A unique payload box designed for K-12 microgravity experiments received its latest flight to space by popping popcorn in lunar gravity.

Professor Steven Collicott’s Zero Gravity Flight Experiments course (AAE418) designed the “Purdue Launch Box” for K-12 teachers who want to send automated experiments on Blue Origin launches. It meets the company’s specific requirements for shape, size, and power.

“The teachers shouldn’t have to worry about building a custom payload box – they and their students should be able to focus on the experiments that go in them,” says Collicott, who has distributed dozens of these boxes to school teachers around the world.

Blue Origin’s 29^th New Shepard mission, which flew on February 3, carried Collicott’s experiment along with many others. During that mission, automated systems on Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule fired thrusters to spin it like a centrifuge in space, simulating the gravity felt on the moon.

The experiment designed by Collicott’s AAE418 students had sensors to detect the lunar gravity phase of the mission, and at that point sent a power boost to the little heating elements wrapped around the kernels – yielding perhaps the first true space popcorn.

This experiment may have been the first time anyone made popcorn in space and in lunar gravity. But Collicott emphasizes that the experiment is an instructional tool and not science research.

“There’s so much variation among popcorn kernels that you’d have to pop thousands of them to make a meaningful comparison with how they pop on Earth. But a lot of science topics come into play in making this work, and lessons in experiment design,” he says. “For example, there are strict electrical power limitations which are addressed by careful mission planning to assure that enough heat is produced at and delivered to the kernel at the proper time, thermal concerns, physical changes in how the moisture in the kernel is boiled and how the kernel bursts.”

Teaching K-12 science concepts like energy and power in both electrical and thermal forms is also enabled by the popping process. 

But, now that it’s popped, is he going to eat one?

“It is very tempting, but it’s just one kernel, so I think it’s better to show it off than to consume it.  Now, when we get a bowl of popcorn from space, some of that I would love to eat.”