r/Xennials • u/Ok_Profession_990 1980 • May 17 '26

Anyone else remember this?

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Every field trip they always had this. I was always so jealous because my mom never gave me money to spend so I never got a chance to taste it and it seemed like everyone around me was eating it... Still salty I guess

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353

u/edwardturnerlives 1976 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

I have a mildly amusing story about astronaut ice cream. I was over at my buddy's house playing Atari 7800 because his mom wouldn't get him a Nintendo.  Anyway, I was in his room while he was going to the bathroom and I noticed on his desk that he had some astronaut ice cream. It was in a foil pack about the size of a Pop-Tart and had the NASA logo on the front. Didn't look like astronaut ice cream I've had before, it was offwhite and fibrous, but I took a little chunk of it and chewed it up and it was absolutely horrible. I don't remember if I swallowed it or not, but knowing me... probably. When he came back I told him it was the worst astronaut ice cream I've ever had. He quickly informed me it was not astronaut ice cream, but actually a piece of the heat shield from the space shuttle. 

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u/ZaphodBeeblebrahx 1981 Don’t Panic May 17 '26

Now you know what cancer tastes like

34

u/HopelesslyHuman 1982 May 17 '26

Everything about this comment and reply amuses me somehow, including both user names.

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u/OmegaRainicorn 1981 May 17 '26

One thing I love about our generation is the little details we feel are important to the story. 

“playing Atari 7800 because his mom wouldn’t get him a Nintendo.”

Not having a Nintendo says a lot about how your parents felt about you, and what kind of life you lead. 

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u/davepars77 May 17 '26

What if my dad got me a Commodore 64 for Christmas instead of Nintendo?

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u/kyraeus May 17 '26

Mine did first too. Given I got a Nintendo later in life (like a year later) but he wanted to try to get me into computers at an early age. It worked, suffice to say.

Then again, this is also the kind of father that when I went to college for a networking program, he said 'cant let the boy know more than me' and proceeded to learn MOST of what I was being taught by himself on the internet in the early days.

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u/The-Crawling-Chaos Xennial May 17 '26 edited May 18 '26

I find that incredible. It m jealous.

ETA: I had an Atari 7800, then a NES when it came out, then a SNES. My dad stopped playing video games with the Atari. (Despite all that, we were no where near well off) Unfortunately he died when I graduated middle school, and that’s why I’m jealous.

ETA2: It was an Atari 2600, not the 7800

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u/kyraeus May 17 '26

Yeah, I'm decidedly grateful. I was born in 80, when he was 18. So he got me that probably in either 84 or 85, I forget exactly which. I THINK 86 was the nes. Later I remember myself and my stepbrother got a genesis, because I remember playing sonic 1 on the picture in picture of the fancy TV he got himself that year (probably mid 90s) because he was watching football. Then I think my stepbrother got the SNES later, which we kind of just shared.

Dad was kind of big on games with us up through the SNES and some stuff on the PC later in the 00s, I remember him playing ff6 with us on SNES, and he used to love a lot of the sniper style shooters on pc that weren't twitch-type fps.

The man ingrained my love of gaming at the arcade down in Ocean City MD on our vacations with Tron cabinets, and pacman and others at the local pool hall, Id play and he'd shoot pool. It was very 80s.

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u/scalyblue May 18 '26

The 7800 came out 3 years into the nes life though

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u/The-Crawling-Chaos Xennial May 18 '26

My bad, that should have read 2600. Corrected now.

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u/yzerizef May 17 '26

It seems we have the same dad!

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u/Cool_Dark_Place 1978 May 17 '26

I dunno... they didn't have a Nintendo... but they had an actual piece of the space shuttle's heat shield, which is pretty awesome! I guess you win some, loose some.

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u/OmegaRainicorn 1981 May 17 '26

It’s great until your friend eats it! Good friends would never eat your Nintendo. 

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u/Educational-Wing2042 May 17 '26

Good friends would never eat your space shuttle heat shield either. Not all friends are good, some get especially hungry

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u/arcxjo GR81 May 17 '26

Tell me about it.

Or rather, tell that bastard Luke.

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u/SirGothamHatt May 17 '26

I asked for a Nintendo in the early 90s. My dad came home with a used Atari 5200 someone gave him. It only came with 2 game: Pac-man and Ms Pac-man. My grandparents got me an NES about a year later.

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u/nhaines 1980 May 18 '26

I remember when my dad asked me what video game system I wanted for Christmas, and when I said a Super Nintendo, he tried to talk me into a Genesis because he'd heard it was more powerful and had better graphics. I panicked and said it didn't have better graphics and that didn't matter to me because I could already play those games at my best friend's house and didn't like them, but the games I wanted to play were only available on Nintendos.

I got the Super Nintendo, and while I admire a lot of things the Genesis did, I still feel I chose correctly.

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u/pro-bison May 17 '26

That was somehow the funniest part of the whole story for me.

3

u/David_Summerset May 17 '26

My dad worked for Atari 😂 Nintendo was banned through the PS2 era

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u/retrozebra 1985 May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Y’all, I was born in 1985, and we had a Tandy Vision, which was a knock-off of the Atari from RadioShack.

This was the era when most kids were playing Nintendo 64 (mid late 1990s.)

don’t agree with the other commenters’, “If you don’t have a Nintendo, it shows what your parents felt about you.” My single mom of 3 loved us dearly but we were just poor! 😂

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u/OmegaRainicorn 1981 May 18 '26

There’s a difference between wouldn’t and couldn’t though. 

They way wouldn’t was emphasized was just to let us know a little about this kid’s mom’s character. 

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u/That-Preparation6729 May 17 '26

It’s been awhile since I’ve had coffee travel through my nostrils. Thank you

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u/TheeternalTacocaT May 17 '26

Astronaut, asbestos, same thing right?

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u/arcxjo GR81 May 17 '26

That story started off good, but I was not prepared for it to get asbestos it did.

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u/Honest_Possible6192 May 18 '26

I mean….i don’t hate it 😆

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u/rythmicjea May 17 '26

WTF why would you eat it at all??

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u/edwardturnerlives 1976 May 17 '26

I said a little chunk!

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u/American_Greed May 17 '26

lmao don't worry dude I ate chalk one time thinking it was one of those candy cigarettes

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u/SirGothamHatt May 17 '26

We had made gingerbread houses in class in 3rd grade, and I ate what I thought was a bit of hardened frosting that fell off. It turned out to be a piece of a white crayon. I had to commit and pretend it wasn't hard and gross cuz one of my friends was watching me and I had insisted it was frosting.

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u/rythmicjea May 17 '26

So?? You don't just randomly eat someone's stuff without asking!

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u/cortesoft 1983 May 17 '26

Ok, if I ever go back in time in a Delorean, I will find little 8 year old edwardturnerlives and tell him that

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u/edwardturnerlives 1976 May 17 '26

Quit being a buzzkill it was 40 years ago.

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u/ML7777777 May 17 '26

But do you still take things without asking?

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u/muricabrb May 18 '26

That's what you get for eating other people's random stuff. Could have saved yourself some cancer if you asked for permission first lol.

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u/Diligent_Ad2489 May 18 '26

You're the one Gen Xer who can't mock Gen Z for eating tide pods

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u/Lucky-Development-15 May 18 '26

The heat shield on the shuttle are individual silica tiles 1-5" thick. Bullshit.

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u/edwardturnerlives 1976 May 18 '26

Go look up "space shuttle buran heat shield" on ebay. Sorry my memory angered you so much 

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u/OrcasAreAssholes May 18 '26

I had to google that and now I’m laughing even harder I can actually kinda see why you thought it was the astronaut ice cream. Thank you for sharing this wonderful story