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Currently everything used by astronauts in space gets there via a state/government sponsored lift. Astronauts can also bring a few personal supplies, but I imagine that most if not all financial considerations occur at government level electronically on earth.

If an astronaut has a candy bar, or something else of value that they are interested in exchanging with another astronaut, is cash (any countries' money) ever used in that exchange?

Tom11
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James Jenkins
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    This is a way better question than I expected from the title :) – SE - stop firing the good guys Mar 21 '17 at 18:40
  • The trivial answer is that there has been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0g_xD20mA. On the level of personal transactions, it may be hard to find an answer, but I suspect they probably just do IOUs. – called2voyage Mar 21 '17 at 18:50
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    I've heard informally from various crew members that there exists somewhat of a token economy involving food -- particularly tortillas. It all boils down, of course, to the various personalities on board at any given time. – Tristan Mar 21 '17 at 18:50
  • I'm sure the settling of bets is the only likely use of cash in space (for now). Really, I can't imagine them carrying extra cash because of weight and volume concerns. – Paxton Sanders Mar 21 '17 at 18:32
  • Why should the very expensive transport capacitiy of a rocket used to bring cash into an orbit and back again? The cost to transport cash into an orbit is much higher than the value of the cash itself. – Uwe Mar 21 '17 at 19:33
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    @Uwe what is the mass of a standard issue gorilla suit? https://youtu.be/f0lpiXAHuyA?t=23 I have a hunch that scientific studies have shown that (most) people need the occasional "creature comforts" to stay happy in space. Crew morale can probably be assigned an approximate, and very large monetary value if you need to look at it in those terms. Just for example, look at how much experimental research the crew does every day. – uhoh Mar 22 '17 at 01:13
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    @Uwe That's true of nearly every item that goes up including the human beings and food, and completely irrelevant if we're talking about an astronaut's gambling money. (It's not true for denominations above around US$50, by the way; US currency is 1 gram per bill.) – Russell Borogove Mar 22 '17 at 01:32
  • If gambling money is really important for crew morale, why not use virtual digital money? That money would not have mass if existing laptops are used. Using coins in a zero g environment would not be as easy as on earth anyway. – Uwe Mar 22 '17 at 09:06
  • Do you specifically mean bills and coins, or money in general (including bitcoin held on a laptop)? Does one astronaut wiring or paypaling money to another while both are on the ISS count as "money in space"? – gerrit Mar 22 '17 at 11:54
  • @gerrit I meant coins and bills when I wrote the question, but if you can show that wiring money or electronic transfer is occurring, that could answer the question. – James Jenkins Mar 22 '17 at 12:04
  • @Uwe: 1kg of\ $100 bills, costing about $10,000 to orbit, is about $100,000. If you go with 500EUR bills, the ratio is even better. – SF. Mar 22 '17 at 13:42
  • But I hope for some candy bars or for gambling, 100 $ bills are not needed. I had small cash (one dollar bills) in mind, especially coins. – Uwe Mar 22 '17 at 15:13
  • Tautology: cash is useless if you can't use it. When you're spending six months on orbit, cash is nothing more than dirty bits of paper and metal that you can't do anything with. It's not like there's somewhere you can spend it while you're up there. – Tristan Mar 22 '17 at 17:16
  • @Tristan in theory yes, but if that was the case your tortillas comment would not have a foundation. Except for barter, all economy is dependent on the exchange of dirty bits of something with no value other then what the community exchange is. (over simplification with exceptions) – James Jenkins Mar 22 '17 at 17:21
  • In some cases money has a very short, and specific theater of operation see Money during the Korean War - 1950-52 – James Jenkins Mar 22 '17 at 17:24
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    @JamesJenkins Except they eat the tortillas. – Tristan Mar 22 '17 at 20:40
  • @Tristan it seems like your comment, about tortillas might be the foundation of an answer. I have looked for references and am not finding anything. Would you care to write it as an answer? – James Jenkins Mar 31 '17 at 14:58
  • Unfortunately, I don't have anything more authoritative that I can point to, and I don't think my personal assertion would make for a good answer. – Tristan Mar 31 '17 at 15:14
  • Always where there are at least three human beings interacting with each other, there is a good used as money. (Ideally gold, of course, it is physically the optimal money good). See Ludwig von Mises for his logical proof of that. No empiricism is required, it is self evident by pure logic. – LocalFluff Apr 14 '17 at 06:43

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I was fortunate enough to sit in on a talk by astronaut Rick Mastracchio this morning. Among other things, he was a flight engineer for Expedition 38/39, during which the ISS saw the arrival of the first Cygnus resupply capsule to Station.

CRS Orb-1 was originally scheduled to arrive on Station just before Christmas, and the crew was looking forward to its arrival like kids on, well, Christmas. Unfortunately, a fault developed with an ISS coolant system that necessitated a series of spacewalks, causing NASA to stand down the launch of the capsule. It eventually arrived and was grappled on January 12th.

Before these dates were decided, there was betting amongst the crew about whether the repairs or the delivery would win out in the scheduling - Rick mentioned putting a spicy chicken meal on the line (apparently a favorite).

While it's possible this was just a joke, I'd be willing to believe it. Later in the talk, Rick was asked about the food on station - he said that while it was good overall, a 9-day variety cycle across a 6 month stay started to get pretty old. I would imagine that the fresh food right after a delivery is very valuable to the crew.

This doesn't prove that cash is never used in the exchange, of course, but with the crew's basic needs provided for, this sort of wagering is probably about the only time a "money" substitute is needed. And I suspect that the prospect of winning something novel on orbit is much more fun than just putting cash on the line!

Bear
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Another $0.51!

Currently this money is not in the possession of any astronauts, but it is none the less money in space. (well, the penny is on Mars, so not exactly "in space"?)

Two US state commemorative quarters (Florida and Maryland) were added to New Horizons "for spin balance". They are mentioned in Coin World here and here. The Florida quarter is notable because it is space-themed and was handed to NASA engineers by Florida's Governor Bush. Actually according to the article it was an entire roll of quarters! The rest were donated as souvenirs to people working on the spacecraft.

"For spin balance, we need to add a number of kilograms to various places [on New Horizons]," explained Stern. "We knew this was the case because the moments of inertia of the spacecraft and the dynamical properties of it, that we would have to trim it out down to literally the grams-level with balance weights. Of course, we had a whole variety of big ones and little ones; you start off with adding a kilogram here and a kilogram there and you end up getting smaller and smaller weights in various places until you're done. We used the coins to that purpose," he said.

"Since we needed a counter balance to [the Florida state quarter], we decided to fly a second state quarter. We picked Maryland because that is where the spacecraft was built. And because we had so many people back in Maryland at the Applied Physics Lab and at Goddard, it was easy for someone to ship us a quarter really quick."

A 1909 US penny is attached to the Curiosity Rover's test pattern collection. Read more about it at Coin News. Here is an image of it on Mars:

below x2: Martian dust-covered penny on Curiosity Rover. From here.

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below: Penny on Curiosity Rover. From here.

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below: Penny on Curiosity Rover's eye chart. From here.

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below: State of Florida Commemorative Quarter to be attached to New Horizons spacecraft. Maryland state quarter was also on board, but located at a different position for balance reasons. From here.

enter image description here

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uhoh
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    A good answer for the title, but not for OP's question as written. – Russell Borogove Apr 26 '17 at 14:23
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    @RussellBorogove ya I had thought about that, but then decided that since there was already a good quality 'primary' answer, adding a supplementary answer would not hurt in this case, as long as I included the disclaimer "Currently this money is not in the possession of any astronauts, but it is none the less money in space." as the first sentence. Just now I've added to that the parenthetical about the penny being on Mars. In the future, people seeing the title to this question and coming here to read might benefit from learning about this money in space and how it got there. – uhoh Apr 26 '17 at 14:32
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    In God we dust... – Vikki Mar 21 '19 at 00:12
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Possibly as much as another $200!

From page 12 of Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon (found here)

money on the Moon

From http://www.jeffersonspacemuseum.com/apollo-15

About the Bill

The crew of Apollo 15 took along \$2 bills and \$20 bills within their pilots preference kits (PPKs). This bill is one of the 50 flown US two dollar bills which made it along on the mission in the command module Endeavor with Al Worden, and remained in lunar orbit while Dave Scott and Jim Irwin explored the lunar surface. Another package of bills was flown to the lunar surface, but were unfortunately left there by mistake -- leaving a number of extremely rare \$2 and \$20 bills that have spent the last 40+ years on the lunar surface. The Apollo 15 crew would later become embroiled in a scandal involving flown postal covers, which would impact all future US manned flights in terms of what could be carried in a PPK. By 1973, currency and coins, which could be commercialized on the secondary market, were banned by NASA from being taken along on US space flights -- forever altering the tradition on post-Apollo flights. (Even official NAA flight certification dollars were changed to flown certificates on later flights to comply with this regulation.) After Apollo, only bills flown via Russian Soyuz or private commercial flights (such as SpaceShipOne) would add to the population of space flown \$2 bills.

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