Published in Coffee or Die Magazine
For about as long as we’ve been in space coffee has just as long been an integral part of those voyages, for example, while Michael Collins maintained Apollo 11’s orbit around the moon he said, “Behind the Moon, I was by myself, all alone but not lonesome. I felt very comfortable back there. I even had hot coffee.”
Collins was also known for betting his coffee rations against fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong during missions. Bill Shepherd, the commander of Expedition 1 of the International Space Station (ISS) proposed an entirely separate storage locker for coffee when coffee rations ran out during a near five-month mission in 2000-2001 and retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly said, “Coffee is important to everyone.”
However, the coffee that they were betting and drinking, was not the highest quality and on most quality scales would rank somewhere between dirt and sludge.
The process for brewing coffee in space, until recently, is tightly controlled and in most cases has to be pre-planned in a lab back on Earth. Most of the coffee is instant coffee like those you’ll see on grocery store shelves and is kept in an airtight pouch. If a particular astronaut likes his or her coffee any way other than black, like sweetened or with creamer then that has to be pre-made back on Earth in a lab with predetermined ratios, until Rice University students designed new techniques for astronauts to make their own coffee how they want it when they want it.
“There’s a particular Starbucks blend that I like and NASA made that for me to take into space,” said Scott Kelly, “you drink it out of a bag like anything else.”
The tight restrictions on coffee in space have to do with the micro-gravity environment that the astronauts live and work in. Liquids and dust particles, like those from coffee grounds and brewed coffee, can find their way into important machines and circuitry on space shuttles and stations that can lead to catastrophic damages.
So up until relatively recently, coffee in space was relegated to bargain bin, piss water coffee. (side note: The water used to brew the coffee in space began its life as astronaut urine until a filtering process repurposed it into drinking water cleaner than that here on Earth.) There have been small breakthroughs in the quality of interstellar coffee, like in the 1980s when late astronaut Ellison Onizuka requested NASA send a Kona blend coffee from his home state of Hawaii and they obliged, and his suggested Kona blend, Hula Girl from the Royal Trading Coffee Co. is still provided to astronauts. That same Kona coffee is the most requested item from Russian cosmonauts when NASA sends up its bonus package as a courtesy to said cosmonauts.
Another major innovation for interstellar coffee consumption came in 2008 with Don Pettit’s zero-gravity coffee cup. Before Pettit’s special cup drinking coffee out of anything but a pouch with a straw was very difficult due to the inherent surface tension in micro-gravity environments that led to liquids, like coffee, sticking to the bottom of whatever container that they’re put into, making it so you’d have to stick your tongue directly into a near scalding liquid in order to get it out of its container.
“You could dip your tongue in the cup, and lick the hot coffee out. Or you could throw it out of the cup and suck down the scalding blob that forms in the air,” said Fluid physicist Mark Weislogel who helped invent the cups.
Pettit’s cup, in turn, looks like a hollowed-out airplane wing, with a very sharp angle toward the end of it. That sharp angle directs the coffee that would formerly stick tot the bottom of the cup to the top of it, taking advantage of the surface tension effects at play. This allows astronauts to drink coffee semi-normally without having to worry about floating liquids and drinking coffee through a straw.
“Basically, the liquid piles up right at the lip of the cup and keeps flowing as you sip,” explains Weislogel, “ It pours out by the combined effects of your mouth, the wetting conditions of the fluid, surface tension, and the particular shape of the cup.”
Weislogel explains the need for these “zero-g cups.”
"If you tried to use a regular coffee mug, you might not get the coffee to your face,” says Weislogel. “It would be trapped at the bottom of the mug.”
The next major innovation for space-bound coffee came in the shape of the ISSpresso machine. On April 20th, 2015 SpaceX delivered the new machine to the International Space Station after a combined development from the Italian Space Agency, engineering firm Argotec, and Italian coffee company Lavazza.
“Our aerospace engineers have designed a coffeemaker that can function in microgravity conditions,” says David Avino of Argotec. “Working together with the coffee company Lavazza and the Italian Space Agency, we have brought authentic Italian espresso onto the International Space Station.”
The way the machine works is by, first inserting a preground pod of coffee into the machine then water, heated to 201 degrees Fahrenheit, is pumped through steel tubing pressurizing the coffee which is then pumped into a drink pouch. The result is a much more palatable coffee for astronauts who already lose enough creature comforts in space.
“Unlike the freeze-dried coffee, it is ground coffee that hot water passes through to create freshly brewed coffee,” said Robert Pearlman, the editor of the space history publication Collectspace.com.
NASA considers the ISSpresso machine more of an experiment than a luxury, however. The machine highlights tests on heat and fluid transfers in micro-gravity and zero-gravity conditions which eventually led to Astronaut Kjell Lindgren’s zero-gravity hand brewer.
As coffee continues to be an item to many astronauts diets innovations like the ISSpresso machine will continue to be made.
“The crew members have enough space in their beverage containers to have up to three coffees per day,” said NASA Space Food Systems Laboratory Manager Vickie Kloeris, highlighting the importance coffee has to most astronauts.
Astronauts will continue fighting for better and better coffee to keep them sane up in the void.
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