Astronauts have never had a home-cooked meal in space aboard the International Space Station.

Instead, their sustenance is prepared in briefcase-like "food warmers" strapped on to the walls.

"It all kinda starts tasting the same after a while," NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson previously told Business Insider.

But any day now, the smell of a freshly-baked chocolate chip cookie will tantalizingly waft through the cramped quarters of the ISS, right under six astronauts' noses.

A first-of-its-kind space oven, and enough dough for five chocolate chip cookies, has been dispatched to the station to test what happens when food is cooked in the microgravity environment. The inaugural ISS cooking attempt is a three-way partnership between space-outfitter NanoRacks, cookie-maker DoubleTree by Hilton, and ZeroGKitchen, a New York City-based husband-and-wife startup that's paying to develop the space oven.

Retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson says she misses floating the most. NASA via AP

The astronauts won't get to eat any of the fresh-baked cookies, however.

"They definitely won't be doing that," NanoRacks Senior Internal Payload manager Mary Murphy, the project manager for the new oven, told Insider. "We will have them taking pictures and recording the results as they remove it from the oven."

After that data's been recorded, three of the five cookies will get sent back to Earth, while the other two will get tossed in the trash. (Wouldn't want the space travelers to accidentally eat any raw dough.)

"We did send the crew some pre-baked cookies that they could eat instead," Murphy said.

Astronauts have been fed cookies in space before, but never the freshly-baked kind.

As early as 1964 on the Gemini missions, NASA's space travelers were given sugar cookie cubes designed to be eaten in a single bite. (The cookies had to be coated in goo, to prevent wayward crumbs from clogging up the spacecraft's instrumentation.)

In the microgravity environment aboard the ISS, there's still a lot of mystery surrounding what might happen when astronauts attempt to bake cookies fresh. The first batch of space cookies are set to heat up in-near Earthly conditions, at a temperature of 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 18 minutes.

The cookie recipe is the exact same one that DoubleTree by Hilton hotels uses for its guests on Earth. But the oven setup, and the environment around it, will be completely different from what happens when we bake cookies with the benefit of Earthly gravity.

"On the ground you have the differential between cold and hot air, where the hot air actually rises while the cool air sinks," Murphy said, explaining that type of baking convection is completely absent in space. "The space inside the oven is heated through contact, instead of through that convection current."

The cookies will be baked one by one, in the middle of a cylindrical, shoebox-sized oven, heated by a circle of electric elements that wraps around the bake zone.

DoubleTree by Hilton / YouTube

The goal is to learn enough from these experiments that one day, a bigger oven, capable of actually feeding a crew headed into the far reaches of the solar system, could be dispatched.

"When we look at those longer duration space flights going farther and farther from Earth, we're not going to have the luxury of being able to provide all of the food that a particular crew is going to need for a mission," Murphy said.

The five test cookies will be baked on a silicone baking tray, which sandwiches each cookie in between two sheets so it doesn't float off while it's cooking.

Cookie dough will be baked in between 2 layers of silicon in space, a full-coverage baking sheet. . zerogkitchen / Instagram

"In microgravity, the cookie dough itself will want to hold itself together and it will pull itself to itself," Murphy said. "There are some theories that we might see a kind of a funky shape, and it might kind of a ball up a little bit."

The couple contracting with NanoRacks and DoubleTree to get the cookies in space know a thing or two about living with a less-than-ideal oven.

"We have a New York City rental apartment oven," ZeroGKitchen co-founder Jordana Fichtenbaum said. It isn't even big enough for some larger cookie sheets.

Fichtenbaum and her husband Ian financed and helped develop the space oven, and partnered with DoubleTree for the space dough, a collaboration that all started with a tweet about Elon Musk's Starman possibly needing an interstellar snack.

The space oven, they said, does cost a little more than their apartment's Avanti.

"We do know that amount, but that's not an amount we're going to publicize," Ian said.

They started working on the oven right around the time they got married, about two years ago, and they say now that the appliance is in orbit, there may be other space station kitchen items in store from ZeroGKitchen.

DoubleTree by Hilton / YouTube

"A blender, a freezer, a waffle maker," Ian said.

No matter what happens with the future food situation in space, there's a chance that the space cookies could make for better cookie-baking here on Earth.

"As we try to be creative and solve these problems in terms of how do we do things in these unique environments, we tend to learn a lot of things that then become applicable to people on the ground here as well," Murphy said. "It's certainly possible that we'll learn something from this that could then cause better efficiency, for instance, in ovens here on the ground."

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Chocolate chip cookies are about to be baked in outer space, the first test of an oven in microgravity - Business Insider