Behold, the 50-year-old Corned Beef Sandwich in Space

What an odd thing to memorialize – but there it is. The 50th anniversary of the first (and last) corned-beef sandwich to fly through space. Back on the 23rd of March, 1964, NASA launched their first two-man space mission Gemini 3. Two hours into the flight, astronaut John Young pulled a corned beef sandwich out of his space suit pocket. It was a joke, or a "gotcha" as his partner called them – but a joke that turned deadly serious not long after his epic sandwich-heavy space-prank was revealed.

Fifty years after the first reveal of the corned beef sandwich in space, the Grissom Memorial Museum in Mitchell, Indiana is displaying its own replica corned beef sandwich to memorialize the original. To "memorialize the infamous sandwich" onboard the Gemini 3, this sandwich sits encased in resin at the museum – as you see here.

The Grissom Memorial Museum is named after Gus Grissom, the chief of the Gemini 3 mission and co-pilot to the sandwich smuggler John Young.

Gemini 3 was one of 10 crewed flights flown in the Gemini program between 1965 and 1966. The Gemini missions were a precursor to sending astronauts to the moon – Apollo 11 would successfully land on the moon in 1969.

One important goal in this series of flights was to test space-friendly food. The corned beef sandwich was not a planned piece of the mission's meal plan.

The world fell in love with the corned beef sandwich after the crew returned to the surface of our planet – LIFE magazine even interviewed the pilots, asking about the sandwich specifically. "I took a bite," said Grissom, "but crumbs of rye bread started floating all around the cabin."

"A couple of congressmen became upset," said Young in his 2012 memoirs, "thinking that, by smuggling in the sandwich and eating part of it, Gus and I had ignored the actual space food that we were up there to evaluate, costing the country millions of dollars."

Will there ever be another corned beef sandwich in space?

Likely not.

Associate administer for manned spaceflight George Mueller spoke with government representatives and the public not long after the mission took place, suggesting that "We have taken steps ... to prevent recurrence of corned beef sandwiches in future flights."

Have a peek at the timeline below for more sights in space – completely sandwich-free.

VIA: Collect Space