Have You Ever Guessed How Many Common Grocery Store Items Are Currently Orbiting 250 Miles Above Your Head
This lighthearted aerospace science feature breaks down the unexpected everyday objects on the International Space Station that keep regular crew missions running far more smoothly than many costly specialized custom parts
In late March 2024, NASA released its full public inventory log for the International Space Station, a document most casual followers of space programs ignored entirely at first glance. Buried deep in the 470-page dataset, though, was a surprising statistic nearly no one saw coming: 11.8 percent of all non-specialized utility items stored on the orbiting outpost are regular, unmodified consumer goods that any shopper could grab off a shelf at their local neighborhood supermarket. No custom aerospace grade certification, no rigorous multi-million dollar testing process, no special packaging marked for space use, these items hitched a ride up on regular resupply missions over the past 12 years, after astronauts or ground teams casually added them to spare cargo space at the last minute, and they have ended up becoming some of the most relied on gear on the entire station.
The most famous of these accidental space staples is a pack of food grade silicone baking mats, the exact same product sold for 8 dollars a set at common kitchen supply stores. The crew first brought the mats up in 2021 to test baking small no-bake cookies as a casual weekend leisure activity, but they quickly noticed the thick, high-friction surface solved a problem that had frustrated station teams for 15 years. Before the baking mats arrived, tiny loose screws, sensor parts, and pen tips would drift off workbenches constantly in micro gravity, forcing astronauts to spend up to 30 minutes every time chasing stray small parts floating around the module. The silicone mats hold all those tiny components firmly in place the second they are set down, no clips or adhesive required, and ground teams calculated they save the crew more than 70 hours of wasted work time every single year. Custom made aerospace anti-drift work pads that performed the same function used to cost 1200 dollars each, and lasted less than half as long as the 8 dollar silicone baking mats the crew now swears by.
Other surprisingly effective everyday items have popped up all over the station over the past few years, picked up through trial and error by different rotating crews. A bottle of regular lemon scented dish soap, brought up by a Japanese astronaut in 2022 to wash personal food containers, turned out to be far better for cleaning smudges of sweat and sunscreen off the station interior walls than the harsh industrial specialized cleansers that used to be standard issue. The dish soap leaves zero irritating fumes in the recycled air, leaves no sticky residue, and costs less than one percent of the custom cleanser it has now completely replaced. A pack of standard badminton shuttlecocks brought up for recreational use during off hours solved a long running issue the station team had measuring hidden air flow dead zones around the crew sleep stations. Previously the team used expensive specialized optical sensors to map air flow, but the lightweight feathers on the shuttlecocks spread out in micro gravity to create a perfectly visible floating marker that lets astronauts trace air flow paths with the naked eye, completing a full air circulation audit in less than two hours instead of the full work day it used to take. Even plain rubber office rubber bands, added to a resupply bag as a throwaway extra by a cargo coordinator in 2019, are now kept in every storage drawer on the station, used for quick temporary fixes to hold loose data cables and spare equipment in place.
Space agency teams say this trend of embracing regular everyday goods is not a sign of lazy engineering, but rather the result of 60 years of accumulated human manned space flight experience. Product designers working for regular consumer brands spend hundreds of millions of dollars testing their goods against every possible use case, durability standard, and safety requirement for mass market sale, and in many situations the final product performs far better than the custom parts aerospace engineers would design from scratch for a single narrow purpose. Most teams planning future deep space missions are already adding more of these low cost, high reliability everyday items to their supply manifests now, as they plan for longer missions further away from Earth where every item needs to be as low maintenance and long lasting as possible. The upcoming Artemis II crewed lunar flyby mission scheduled for late 2025 already lists plain unscented hand cream, regular corn starch baby powder, and a set of non-toxic children’s modeling clay on its official supply list, all to be used for quick emergency seal tests for small gaps in the module hull.
The next time you step outside on a clear dark night, and spot the bright slow moving dot of the International Space Station drifting overhead against the starry sky, you are not just looking at a 150 billion dollar structure full of ultra specialized scientific instruments. You are looking at a place where everyday items you might have picked up on your last trip to the grocery store float right alongside radiation detectors and zero gravity telescopes, working together to make life off planet feel a little more familiar, a little less intimidating, and far more connected to the regular daily world all of us live in down on the surface.