10 Wild Things We’ve Fired Into Space

Multiple dinosaur bones have been sent into space, and without the benefit of an accurate timeline, if aliens are actually scooping any of this stuff up, Earth must seem wild.

Fully without scientific approval, astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich into space on the Gemini 3 flight. Thankfully for him, and the reputation of corned beef forever, the banned crumbs didn’t end up dooming the expedition.

As part of the not-ominous-at-all-sounding “Immortality Drive,” the full DNA sequences of celebrities including Stephen Hawking, Stephen Colbert and possibly other Stephens is stored on the International Space Station.

Not just a NASA counterpart for science purposes, but honest-to-god, green Nickelodeon slime made it to the International Space Station. With actual scientific merit too, since the non-Newtonian fluid provided for some genuinely interesting experiment opportunities.

I like to think that if aliens are observing our activities in space, they would find our propensity for pranks charming. Like astronaut Scott Kelly's smuggling of a gorilla suit onboard the space station to scare fellow astronauts with.

A Playboy made its way into space on the Apollo 12 mission, in the most perfect year possible: 1969.

For the most part, I’ve tried to avoid advertising campaigns, because I slightly hate the idea of Pizza Hut cheapening space to sell their at-best-mediocre food. Though, given that they did spend over a million dollars getting a salami pie to the space station for the world’s first off-planet pizza delivery, I’ll begrudgingly give them a mention. 

The best part? Because NASA wouldn’t allow the advertisement, American astronauts had to watch as Russian Yuri Usachov chowed it down.

Unfortunately, this space-bound burger was never making it out of orbit, but it wouldn’t have been edible anyways. One of the few “food in space” attempts that wasn’t a soulless advertising campaign, a couple of Harvard students varnished a burger and got it all the way into space attached to a weather balloon.

When the two most famous space-traveling populations are the U.S. and Russia, it’s not completely surprising someone brought guns up there. In this case, it was Russia, and it was the “TP-82 survival pistol,” which in honesty was a lot closer to a sawed-off shotgun. It wasn’t for taking down possibly moon goblins, however. It was instead designed and carried in case cosmonauts landed in bear country on their return and needed to defend themselves.

Though not a physical object, roughly 26,000 text messages were fired skyward as part of project “Hello From Earth.” To be honest, this probably has the best chance of alien response, if only in the form of a single message saying “UNSUBSCRIBE.”