— McDonald’s new adult Happy Meal celebrates “Space City” in the Lone Star State.
The fast food chain has launched a Texas-only promotion coinciding with the return of Spicy Chicken McNuggets and Mighty Hot Sauce to its menu on Sept. 1.
“Where you’re from? Where you’ve been? Where you belong. Round here, nobody’s story stays inside of one single zip code. Texas life is made of all these chapters, so we piece it together at McDonald’s,” says a voiceover in a television ad for the new Texas Meal.
Each Texas Meal includes either a 10-piece Spicy or regular Chicken McNuggets, medium fries and a soft drink with one of seven collectible plastic cups.
“Each cup tells a tale, raise a toast to yours,” the ad says. “Collect your Texas.”
Each cup is themed to a different city or area in the state, including Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin/Central Texas, West Texas, East Texas and the Rio Grande Valley/South Texas. Designed by the Austin-based artist Avery Orendorf, who is known for capturing Texas’ diverse cultures in her murals and illustrations.
For Houston, also known as “Space City,” the cup features NASA’s space shuttle on one side and an astronaut on the other. Other city icons include an art car, the rodeo, the “Be Someone” graffiti and the city’s skyline.
The astronaut is based on a photo of Michael Gernhardt during a spacewalk outside of space shuttle Endeavour during NASA’s STS-69 mission in September 1995. The same image also appears to have influenced the astronaut engraved on Texas’ entry for the American Innovation $1 Coin Program issued by the U.S. Mint in January 2025.
At least one McDonald’s restaurant, located on NASA Road 1 (NASA Parkway) in Houston, has a large statue of an astronaut holding a box of fries outside its main entrance.
The space shuttle is more generic. All 335 astronauts who flew on the now-retired winged orbiters trained at the Johnson Space Center in southeast Houston, as was Mission Control for all of its 135 missions located there. Houston continues to be the home for the astronaut corps and Johnson is the lead NASA facility for the Artemis program sending humans back to the moon.
A replica orbiter and the real Boeing 747 jetliner that carried the space shuttles across the country are on outside display at Space Center Houston, the official visitor center for Johnson Space Center.
The other six cups offered with McDonald’s Texas Meal do not depict other space activities or landmarks located elsewhere the state. The West Texas cup, for example, highlights the rugged frontier but omits Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch site. The Rio Grande Valley/South Texas cup skips SpaceX’s Starbase in favor of celebrating the state’s border region’s vibrant culture.
The McDonald’s Texas Meal, including the collectible cup, varies in price based on its contents (Spicy or regular nuggets) and location but averages between $9 and $11. Without the food, the cups sell for $1.50 each at participating restaurants.