It's 'Slime Time'! Nickelodeon's Green Slime Is Launching Into Space

Nickelodeon slime is packaged in food-grade pouches for shipment to the International Space Station.
Nickelodeon slime is packaged in food-grade pouches for shipment to the International Space Station. (Image credit: International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory)

The International Space Station is about to get "slimed."

Nickelodeon's iconic green slime, best known for being poured onto the heads of game show contestants on the television series "Slime Time Live" in the early 2000s, will launch into space today (July 24) on a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. 

The television network is not planning to revive the old series in space, though. Rather than dumping buckets full of slime onto the astronauts — and creating a huge mess that could be extremely difficult to clean up in microgravity — Nickelodeon is sending its slime into space for science. 

Related:  Fun in Zero-G: Weightless Photos from Earth and Space

Ken Shields, chief operating officer of the International Space Station National Laboratory, holds a pouch of the Nickelodeon slime during a prelaunch news conference at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 23, 2019. (Image credit: Kim Shiflett/NASA)

The science investigation, titled "Non-Newtonian Fluids in Microgravity," will examine the physical properties of slime in microgravity through a series of fun experiments, and astronauts will record videos of the "zero-g" slime to share with the world. (The term "zero-g" is actually a bit of a misnomer; the International Space Station is still subject to Earth's gravitational pull, but the astronauts experience a constant state of freefall as they speed around the Earth.)

For one of the experiments, astronauts will play a game of "slime pong," in which they will use ping-pong paddles to bat a glob of slime back and forth. This won't be the first time that astronauts have played ping-pong with liquids in space. In 2017, NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fisher played ping-pong with globs of water in the first live 4k video stream from the space station. 

Surface tension helps to hold water molecules together as they drift around in microgravity. The slime has a slightly different consistency than water, though, so we'll have to wait and see if it holds up any better (or worse) than water during that ping-pong match. 

The astronauts will also fill balloons with slime and toss them around the space station, blow slime bubbles and even spray slime at each other, Nickelodeon officials said in a statement. "The astronauts on the ISS will try to keep the slime from turning their orbital home green," the statement said. 

Exactly who will be the lucky astronaut to get "slimed" in space has yet to be announced. There are currently six people at the orbiting lab: NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Nick Hague and Andrew Morgan, Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Alexander Skvortsov, and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency. 

Six small pouches of the slime are currently packed inside the Dragon cargo spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida this evening at 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 GMT). It will arrive at the space station early Friday morning (July 26). You can watch the launch live here at Space.com

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.