In space travel, the firsts are often what matter most: the first woman in orbit and the first man to walk on the moon, or, less famously, the first time astronauts grabbed a wobbling satellite with their hands.

Yet in the 1980s, America’s two biggest soft drink companies raced for another milestone: to serve the first fizzy drink in orbit.

One of the greatest excesses of the cola wars happened as NASA was transitioning from the prestige-driven program of the Apollo years toward our modern era of commercial spaceflight, which has dominated by companies willing to land a Nokia 4G/LTE communications system on the moon, or launch a mannequin-driven Tesla Roadster into deep space. To the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, the commercially minded shuttle program was a perfect marketing opportunity.

Forty years on, a NASA astronaut remembers positive moments of the soft drink space race. “We did our job and it was kind of fun,” said Loren Acton, a space shuttle payload specialist.

But others who faced the cola giants’ rivalry were less charitable.

“Of all the things that were done on the shuttle, the one that caused the most aggravation was the goddamn cola war,” said James M. Beggs, the NASA administrator in the early 80s. Mr. Beggs died in 2020, but was quoted in a 1986 interview by Joseph Trento, a reporter, in Mr. Trento’s book “Prescription for Disaster: From the Glory of Apollo to the Betrayal of the Shuttle.”

The cola companies earned Mr. Beggs’s frustration. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo would take their space race to the upper levels of NASA, and all the way to the White House. Though spaceflight is difficult, the companies’ earthbound rivalries proved even more difficult to overcome.