July 31, 2018 • 49 mins
How can humanity ever hope to thrive without Earth if it can’t even function without its morning cup of coffee? Fortunately, engineers have devised increasingly practical means of brewing and sipping coffee in space -- neither of which are easy feats in microgravity. Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick for a consideration of space coffee.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, this is future Robert uh speaking on this
(00:03):
past episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I just
want to warn you in this episode, as at one
point I refer to the I S. S. Presso machine
as weighing four hundred pounds, I'm meant to say it
weighs forty pounds. Well, that totally undercuts my reaction to it,
so disregard all all considerations given thereafter. Alright, well that's
all we had to say. So we're gonna jump back
(00:23):
in the time machine and we'll chat to you again
in a future episode. But continue to enjoy this past
episode about coffee in space. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you,
(00:44):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And before we got
on Mike here, Robert and I were just talking about
our favorite coffee cliches. What do you call those sayings,
like sayings that people put on a T shirt or
in a little meme or on a pillow or a
key cha fob, Like you're talking about a little bumper
sticker wisdom, aren't you. Yeah, I don't know what the
(01:04):
word for that is it's not quotes, but the kinds
of text you put on things in order to be witty,
Like I like my coffee, like I like my men,
And then there's some joke, yeah, sort of like, uh,
I like my coffee, like I like my astronauts, bold
and highly susceptible to cosmic radiation. I like my coffee
like I like my men congested and with bone atrophy.
(01:28):
That doesn't make any sense to but but it we've failed,
we wouldn't know. We haven't failed. But what we're trying
to do as noble, we're trying to bring coffee and
space together. And really that's been that's been a noble
mission in space exploration in general for a while. How
How are we going to enable our brave astronauts to
(01:48):
drink coffee in space? This is an important subject, and
I actually mean that it's not. This might be kind
of kind of a niche topic maybe, but but stick
around because coffee and space is more interesting than you
might think, and it's more important than you might think. Yeah,
I mean, certainly we're gonna get into some into some
cool physics here. Relate. Those are the fluid dynamics of
(02:10):
liquids and uh and and heated liquids in microgravity. But
I mean, bottom line, coffee in the experience of having
a cup of coffee is a very important terrestrial practice.
And as we go into space, uh it is it's
it's good to have something like that to bring with us.
It grounds us, It gives us a sense of calm,
(02:32):
a sense of of normalcy in this highly dangerous environment. Robert,
what do you think would happen if you were, at
the same time asked to do something unusual, you had
to like undertake a dangerous mission, and you were also
deprived of coffee concurrent with that. Mmmm, well, I would
have to have this. This does happen sometimes, really, Yeah,
(02:54):
like when it's when traveling. Sometimes, you know, some sort
of stress comes up on traveling. So what I try
and do is have some sort of like green tea
pills on hand, you know, something where I can I
can give myself some caffeine and and I'm not having
to just chase down a bad cup of coffee in
the middle of nowhere to get pills. I don't mean
to judge that sounds sterile and perverted. You know, there's
(03:15):
no pleasure in it, except it can help stave off,
you know, a caffeine headache. It can help keep me
awake if I'm driving, that sort of thing. And so
if I was an outer space conceivably, you know, I
imagine I could get by without the coffee. It provided
that I had access to the green tea pills or
(03:36):
you know, or whatever what other whatever kind of you know,
additional stimuli they had up there on hand to keep
me alert and focused. But coffee is more than just caffeine, right,
I mean that caffeine is one of the main things
about it. We like, we like it's drug effects, but
coffee is an institution of human life in many cultures
(03:56):
around the world. It's not just a chemical, but it's
an important texture of life. Yeah, I mean, it's it's
the drinking of the coffee and the but it's also
the making of the coffee. Just the practice of making
a cup of coffee for many people, um, myself included,
like that is a part of the ritual you you
you just it's part of your morning or your your
(04:17):
afternoon whenever you you know, you have that at that
essential cup. It's quiet, it's meditative. It makes me start
to feel like I'm getting ready for the day. It's
one of those things that you know. I think often
we underestimate the power of simple physical rituals in preparing
our mind space for for activities. Like people think they
(04:39):
need coffee because they need caffeine in order to start
getting work done, and that that is somewhat true. The
caffeine does something, but you also need the process of
the brewing and the drinking that doing those familiar motions
gets you primed. Yeah, it's the you're engaging in the
story too, like this is the story of the thing
I must do to start working and uh And likewise,
(05:00):
that's a whole other avenue to for many coffee drinkers
like the story of the beans. And certainly, yes, they
are varying degrees of quality and varying flavors for different
different types of coffee beans and different preparation methods, etcetera.
But we also get just so into the story off
and it's like with with with the with with wine enthusiast, right,
(05:21):
I mean, there's some scientific studies that that kind of
cast doubt onto what degree of wine enthusiasts can actually taste.
Various differences in the uh, you know, the vintage that
they're drinking. But I mean, if you put a label
on wine that's a taste like seashells and sweet and low,
people would be able to taste that, right. Yeah. But
but ultimately it's all about the story of that wine,
(05:44):
and you're engaging with that story and it's bringing you value.
You know, it's a and I don't think there's anything
wrong with that. And so there's there's that going on
with coffee as well, And as we'll touch on later,
there's a little of that in the story of coffee
and space, you know, or Abert one of the things
that you made me realizes that the reason we actually
need coffee in space for real astronauts is the same
(06:06):
reason there's always a scene of astronauts drinking coffee in
sci fi movies about space. Oh yeah, yeah, we were
we were sort of brainstorming about this, like what what films?
What classic sci fi films, uh, you know have coffee
drinking scenes. And there's you see it in Alien from
seventy nine, you see it in a silent running from
seventy two two thousand and one of Space Odyssey. There's
(06:29):
stally forgotten. Yeah, now I now I'm not so, I
don't remember. It's been a little while since I've seen it.
I'm due for a reviewing. It's possible that they're they're
they're drinking tea. I'm not sure which characters are are
drinking in this particular scene, but maybe just scalding hot
orange juice. But but t is very similar, of course,
because the tea is also checking off the same boxes,
the ritual, the you know, the hot brew that invigorates you, etcetera.
(06:53):
Speaking of tea, we know that at least a certain
Starfleet captain loves his oh gray hot. But do they
drink coffee on the Inner Prize? Uh? They did, at
least I found a screenshot from from Star Trek Voyager,
So there's at least one scene with coffee. But I'm
sure they're countless other examples of characters drinking some sort
of coffee based beverage. Did the long Ones drink coffee
(07:15):
in the expanse Um, Well, there is a lot of
coffee drinking the in the expanse there's a particular high
grade coffee machine on one of the main ships, and
it's it's referenced a lot, and at one point it's
broken and and and everybody is is rather upset about it.
But this is a show that does at least value
the the the engineering challenges involved with creating a proper
(07:39):
coffee brewing device for a spaceship that's going to be
going in and out of micro gravity. And then of
course there's this scene from Event Horizon, Don't speak of
It features some really tasteless jokes. Yeah yeah, but but
even still, we see this trend continuing where you have characters,
(08:01):
you know, in outer space, in this just unrelatable environment
for the vast majority of the human population. You have
them engaging and even more elaborate scenarios encountering aliens or
demons from from the you know, the the other side
of a wormhole. But there's if there's anything that we
can relate to and what they're doing and what they
want out of life, it's that cup of coffee. Oh yeah.
(08:22):
This is a standard part of narrative theory that you have.
If you want to tell an extraordinary story, you need
to ground the extraordinary elements of the story and mundane things,
things that make you feel familiar and comfortable, in order
to accent the unfamiliarity of the strange parts of the story. Yeah.
I remember Berto Eco wrote an essay dealing with some
(08:43):
of this, talking about coffee consumption in I think James
Bond novels, as well as another spy series. What was
the one that they made films of it with the
Michael Caine. What was Michael Caine's spy character. I just
looked it up. It's Harry Palmer. Yeah, that's the one.
That's the one, so Hip Crest file. Yeah, So the
ideas you have, you have this these these spy characters
(09:04):
and they're doing all this this crazy stuff. They're gonna
have Harry Palms for some reason. But no matter what
they're doing, you know, if they're wrestling giant squid or
what have you, they're still drinking that coffee and that
that serves as an anchoring point for the for our experience.
A lot of horror and sci fi movies do this
also with cigarettes. Coffee and cigarettes I think are especially
(09:25):
useful consumables for this narrative purpose, for grounding the narrative
and a kind of mundane familiarity and comfort, because coffee
and cigarettes are symbols of order. You ever think about
this like you can group food and drink and drugs
into categories of order symbology and chaos symbology. Like if
you had characters on a on a starship doing heroin
(09:48):
or something like that, that would that would like throw
you off even more, right, it would sort of like
make the narrative feel even more untethered and chaotic. But
if you give people these drugs that we typically think
of as associated with regularity, stability, routine comfort, compliance, they're
sort of signals of orderliness and predictability. And nicotine and
(10:09):
caffeine are definitely both drugs like that, And of course
that's not an endorsement of of actually doing them now.
But to your point, like, the order comes from far
more than just the substance itself. It's the I've talked
to people who who have been smokers and former smokers,
and I think in most cases and they talk about
how just having the cigarette like gives them a sense
(10:29):
of purpose in a particular environment. So like you're standing around, um,
you know, outside at a show or something and the like,
having the cigarette it like kind of gives you license
to be there doing something and then potentially engaging socially
with other people. Yeah, well, it's also a meditative ritual,
and you perform the same familiar actions in the same
(10:50):
order over and over again, when you brew a cup
of coffee, or when you have a cigarette. Again not
endorsing tobacco, but when you do these things, you light
up again that familiar pathway in your brain. Yeah. I've
been at like, you know, social situations where I don't
know anyone, uh, and if there's coffee, or sometimes it's
just some other beverage. But as long as I have
(11:12):
the beverage, it gives me an added sense of purpose.
I have this thing that I'm doing, and then when
the cup is empty, I still feel compelled to carry
the cup around because if I put the cup down,
then I'm just standing here with nothing in my hands.
What am I doing here? What kind of a freak show?
Am I? You need a cup in each hand, and
then you feel even more secure duct taped into place,
right Edward, coffee hands. Yeah. So it's clear coffee plays
(11:36):
a role in in establishing these meditative rituals that make
us feel comfortable, in putting us in a calm mindset,
getting us ready to do things, making us productive. It
has all these benefits. I wanted to talk about a
couple of other benefits. I just found poking around, uh
in in studies on the effects of coffee that seemed
like they would be useful in space. One of them,
Robert I. Bett, you may have encountered, this is the
(11:58):
principle we've discovered in re cent years that warm drinks
make us feel social warmth. Oh yeah, we have touched
on that before. Yeah, so the standard study, I think
the original one of these was published in Science UM
years ago by Williams and Bargain. It's called Experiencing physical
warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth, and the basic setup is you've
(12:19):
got people who hold a cup of hot coffee as
opposed to a cup of iced coffee. And apparently what
the study found is that subjects who were holding the
hot coffee quote judged a target person as having a
warmer personality in terms of being more generous or caring.
And also people holding the hot coffee were more likely
(12:39):
to choose a gift for a friend instead of for themselves.
And I've read there are subsequent studies on this that
look into things like oral temperature and all that. It
seems generally that hot beverages encourage positive social connections. And
we can certainly see the value of that just on
an office environment or out on the street, but certainly
(13:00):
in space you have a team that's having to work
together to give everything running, to keep everybody alive, sometimes
an international team. Uh. This the coffee and or tea
can be a unifying force exactly. And so this effect
maybe there with other hot beverages. I mean, sure you
could also have people hold and drink hot water or
(13:21):
scalding hot orange juice. But people already like hot coffee.
They already have hot coffee rituals, So why not try
to give them that. I got another one. Have you
read about how coffee apparently seems to give you some
kind of advantage in causing the brain to recognize emotionally
positive stimuli. Huh yeah. So there was a study in
(13:42):
PLS one by Lars co Chink and Vanessa Lucks called
caffeine improves left hemisphere processing of positive words. So basically
what they found is that caffeine consumption boosts the speed
at which the left hemisphere of the brain recognizes and
process us as positive words, but doesn't have any effect
(14:03):
on the processing speed of neutral or negative words. And
they think this is probably because caffeine seems to boost
dopamine transmission in the brain. The Ohio State professor of psychology,
Gary Wink, who has written a lot about the connection
between foods and neurochemistry, rights that basically, the dopamine activity
caused by caffeine is probably one of the main reasons
(14:25):
that caffeine is one of the most widely consumed psychoactive
substances across the entire world. And so, to go back
to the plos one study, the authors think that the
dopaminergenic qualities of caffeine are what's leading to this increased
positivity boost in in the processing powers of the you know,
the the verbal processing centers of the left hemisphere. So
(14:48):
at a time when you need people to work together
as a team, get along, well, have everybody happy with
each other seems to me like boosting the recognition of
words and other types of cues that signal positive emotions
sound is like a good deal, right, yeah, yeah, Anything
you can do to boost the positive communication, right, anything
that would help assist the processing of at least some
cues of positivity in our environment seems worthwhile. In space,
(15:12):
and of course again you could just have people take
a caffeine pill probably right. Yeah, but people already like coffee,
they already have coffee rituals. It seems like you can
you can get all of these different effects concentrated into
one thing if you just get coffee in space. So
is there a problem with coffee in space? Why can't
we just take mr Coffee up there? Well, it's only
(15:33):
occurring to me now that there's the whole diuretic coffee.
But that's a that's that's a that's a whole another
episode right there. Um, well, you're thinking about that while
I'm going on about positivity, you're like pooping. Yeah, well
I didn't think of it till till till now, to
be honest. But but I mean, that's a whole side
of the human condition that is also problematic in um microgravity,
(15:57):
and a lot of engineering problems has been directed at
the problems related to just going to the bathroom in space.
Less effort has been put into the coffee problem. Coffee
problem is is not as as high level, but the
problem of making coffee in space is that pretty much
all of our methods of of brewing coffee are highly
(16:18):
dependent upon gas on gravity. Oh yeah, and so you
don't even think about how important it is. Yeah, yeah,
even like just roughly speaking, there there two methods of
making coffee, Like one that's using that's straight up using
gravity like water flowing down through grounds and then brewing
the coffee. And then you have methods that involve pressure,
(16:40):
like an espresso machine or or or an aero press,
which is a device I really love for my coffee. Um,
I've never used that. How does that work? Well, it's
it's essentially like a cylinder has a filter on one end.
You put the grounds in, you pour hot water in,
and then use the plunger. You can let it steep
a little bit too, so you know, it's so it's
similar to something Frenche press in that respect, but then
(17:02):
you can press you you press it and the pressure
pushes the coffee out into your cup. But even that,
even though pressure is involved, like that would be a
disaster if I tried to use that in microgravity. And likewise,
even a very nice espresso machine which looks very compact
and uh and self contained, you would not be able
to run that in orbit because yes, it depends on pressure,
(17:24):
but it still depends on gravity. Maybe a little bit
poorous if if you don't actually have such a thing
as a down, right, and then if you have no
such thing as a as a proper kitchen sink to
clean any of these implements. Uh. I think most of
us can can can think two very recent examples of
huge messes they've made with coffee, you know, but that
by accident, maybe in the clean up foot phase. Uh,
(17:46):
and that's all with a down that's that Yeah, that's
with gravity in place and a proper sink to clean
it up. But in uh, in board the I S
S certainly aboard any other kind of uh you know,
conceivable um uh capsule rules or or shuttles that we've
used in in recent decades, you're just not gonna have
that kind of cleanup capability. Uh. The machine itself is
(18:09):
going to just become grotesque. And you can't just send
it back down necessarily either. I mean, if once you
get something up on I S S, it's uh, it
needs to stay up there for a while without having
to be You can't send it down every weekend to
get it cleaned. Now, what about the method where you
just put the grounds in your mouth and then squirt
the hot water in and kind of switch it around. Well,
I guess that would work, is that what is is
(18:30):
that cowboy coffee? No way, I'm I'm gonna rebrand it.
That's executive coffee. Executive coffee, So now it's a luxury. Well,
there's still a lot of room for human error in
that method. Um, I mean, basically, one of the big
things to keep in mind is that even if you
take the technology out of out of the scenario without
proper gravity in place, liquids moved differently, they absorbed differently,
and uh yeah, even something as seemingly no nonsense as
(18:53):
an aero press, which again just looks like a little
pump device, is just going to be disastrous in microgravity. Now,
the basic process that we depend on to make coffee,
just to to really boil it down. Uh, you have
hot water flowing through ground coffee beans picking up their
oil essence on the way down into the coffee pot.
This coffee oil released during the roasting process is what
(19:14):
we call cafe all now. And like I said, an
espresso machine that's going to force the water through the
fine grounds via pressure. But again even that depends on
gravity and would not work in space. So we're kind
of left with with quite a conundrum here, how to
how do you even bring coffee into space, much less
(19:34):
brew it? Well maybe we should take a quick break
and then come back and explore this further. Thank you.
All right, we're back. So how to get coffee into space?
How to brew coffee in space? Well, um, we're gonna
have to talk about the past first. How how it
was done previously as we as humanity uh clawed their
way up into orbits? Does does this involved the words
(19:58):
freeze dried? Yes, you better does? Oh boy? So first
of all, let's get one thing straight. Prior to Apollo eleven,
that's nine, the first Crewe jaunt to the surface of
the Moon. Prior to this, there was no hot coffee
in space. Bum you could have it cold, but this
was the first omission to actually feature hot water. So
(20:18):
so like the Giminy commanders were on, they were powered
by cold coffee. Yeah, that was that was the only option.
That's sick or at least room temperature or capsule temperature
got coffee. That was the only option. Well, here's the
science question. I don't know the answer to. Maybe you do.
Why is mid temperature coffee so disgusting like ice coffee
(20:40):
is Okay, I'm into that hot coffee is good, but
like slightly lower than than warm coffee is just gross.
Well I don't completely agree with that really, Yeah, I
mean I enjoy coffee at every level of every temperature.
But I think the problem is when coffee reaches room temperature,
(21:02):
because I I like cold coffee, but I have a
similar reaction if I am outside drinking coffee and I
have allowed it to become cold, as cold as the
natural environment. So I think that's the thing. Like with
hot coffee and cold coffee becomes clear that it's been
it's it's clear that it's been prepared, uh at a
different temperature. Well, I guess maybe it's the same as
(21:24):
true for a lot of foods and drinks, right, Like
hot meat and cold meat are good, but room temperature meat.
Bring me a room temperature hamburger patty. Yeah, nobody really
wants that. So hot coffee, cold coffee pre Apollo eleven,
post Apollo eleven, uh, it was still coffee making was
a very rough looking ordeal. So what we're talking about here,
(21:46):
as you referenced earlier, is is dehydrated black coffee freeze, dried,
stored in a clear plastic bag which you then reconstitute
through a water probe. Okay, so you stick the probe
in and pump some hot water are in? Yeah? Are
you are? Are you? You? You have your water reservoir
and the capsule or the I S S or where
wherever you have to be space shuttle. Uh. And if
(22:08):
you have the ability to have hot water, you can
use hot water. Otherwise you're just getting cold water and
then you're shooting it into this bag. It basically there's
some pictures of this online. I'll try and link to
one on the landing page for this episode of Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. But it looks kind
of like a catheter with instant coffee in it. No,
I'm afraid to ask, but I have to wonder. Is
the bag that the coffee came in the same kind
(22:30):
of bag they would pee in? Was it the same hardware?
I do not have an answer to that, but I
would not be surprised if it if it was. You know,
but when it comes to liquids in space, I mean
that's pretty much how a lot of it works. It's
just stuff in bags. City. Yeah, everything looks like a
catheter in space. Um, so this was the technology, and
(22:51):
really this technology remained the same until very recently instant
coffee in a bag. And it wasn't actually until hawai
In born astronaut Ellison on Azuka, the first Asian American astronaut,
he actually requested ConA coffee. He said, Hey, um, let's
spice it up a little bit. Let's let's you know,
(23:11):
we have some great coffee in my home state. Let's
see about getting some of that into orbit. And NASA said, oh, yeah,
we can try that. And it was apparently a hot commodity.
I mean literally, I guess for but also figuratively, Uh,
the ConA coffee would be something that they would they
would trade with with, say, you know, other astronauts, even cosmonauts. Yeah,
(23:32):
especially knowing what we know about the way the micro
gravity environment interacts with say, the fluids in your head.
We've talked before on the show about how you know,
astronauts often have this problem where they live in a
taste and scent deprived world because when you are in
a micro gravity environment, normally, uh, the gravity of the
(23:54):
Earth while you're standing on the Earth would be pulling
all the fluids in your body towards your feet and
your heart naturally has to compensate by for that by
pumping really hard to get stuff up into your head
and your upper shoulders and everything. But when that gravity
is not there and you're just floating around, the hearts
still overcompensating, and so it's just filling your head up
with fluids and you've got all this congestion and you
(24:16):
can't you can't smell or taste things very well. And
this is why so many astronauts, like when we talked
to Jeff Hoffman on the show, report really enjoying, especially
the shrimp cocktail, which sounds disgusting. Yeah, you know that
that shrimp. The shrimp itself is just awful. Yeah, but
it's not the shrimp. He's excited. It's got horse radish
in and that intense aroma sort of clears out the nose,
(24:37):
wakes you up and allows you to taste other things.
So they would sort of have a shrimp cocktail full
of horse radish as an order so they could taste
the rest of their meal. Uh yeah, in anyway, a spicier,
more fragrant kind of coffee. I can see that maybe
doing a similar sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Um and I've also seen it pointed out that the
astronauts tend to they'll crave spicier and more flavorful with
(25:00):
things in orbit then they would normally crave on Earth. Right,
it's an extra special reason why you don't want to
just be stuck with freeze dride folders or whatever they've
got right now, We've we've touched on a number of
other fluid dynamics and microgravity issues on the show before.
We talked about how tears pool and an astronauts I
socket if they're they're crying or just generally leaking from
the ice socket um the sinus has refused to drain.
(25:23):
One of my favorite is the fact that the bladder
fills up, but but not from the bottom to the top,
as it doesn't a gravity bound body, but instead from
all sides. So it's it's not until it's completely full
that you said that you realize you need a urinate.
That's a weird image. Blood flow is also an issue,
and this was This was actually explored in the third
(25:44):
season of The Expanse, the science fiction television series that
I've talked about here on the show before, including earlier
when I referenced their coffee maker where that. But there's
a scene where you have all these individuals that have
sustained internal injuries, and it's the everyone realizes that they're
just doomed because they don't have a chance to heal
(26:05):
um unless they have some sort of artificial gravity, be
at propulsion based or some other form, or just return
to some sort of gravitational environment. Now, why would that be,
why would it affect healing? Well? I looked at a
I looked this up in a paper. There's a paper
from two thousand nine titled severe Traumatic Injury during long
duration space flight light years beyond a t l S.
(26:27):
So here's a quick quote from that article. After a
prolonged exposure to weightlessness, the injured astronaut will be at
a physiologic disadvantage compared to patients on Earth. Changes likely
to impair their ability to withstand injury include reductions in
circulating blood volume, reduced red cell mass, cardiac atrophy, this rhythmias,
(26:49):
reduced cardiac output, alterations in vascular tone and nero endocrime function,
loss of the projective bony mass, and possible immune suppression.
Oh yeah, we read about that before too, Immune system
and space. Yeah, so it's I mean again, you can't
help but think of that espress a machine now, no
matter how well it's designed, it's just useless in microgravity.
(27:13):
It's really a testament to uh, you know, to to
biological evolution, just how well uh life can do in
a microgravity environment, you know. I mean that we're not, say,
like the mythical Japanese kappa with a little bowl of
water on its head, that would just float free and
they lose their life essence in orbit. But all of
(27:34):
our earthly coffee machines are more like the cop That's true.
They have the the the engineering prowess of a yokai.
It's true. But wait a minute. We were talking about
drinking coffee in space. Oh yeah, yeah, and having to
go urinate in space. Uh you know, going back to
that urinary example about the bladder filling up from all sides.
The fluid dynamics that we described there also impact such
(27:55):
matters as fuel tanks. So again, in microgravity, without gravity
to force liquids to the bottom, they clean to surfaces.
So our spaceship designs depend on veins, sponges, screens, and
channels to guide liquids on the in the inside of
tanks all right, say, guiding them to a spigot or
(28:15):
to an engine in the case of fuel. Uh. Now
we've also experimented with the use of liquid repellent coatings
inside fuel tanks as well to avoid cleaning and uh
and the boil off that can occur in the tanks.
And this is research is very much still ongoing. There
was one study that came out just last year on
the matter. Now, fortunately the astronauts do not need to
(28:36):
drink from the fuel reserves, no, they just they drink
out of a straw or just sort of squeezing out
of the bag. As you might imagine, everything is essentially
a capri son, I guess in orbit. As I said
earlier about your green tea pills, no offense, but that
is a sick perversion of nature. You can't drink coffee
with a straw, not hot coffee. Indeed, drinking hot coffee
(28:57):
with a straw, that's just asking for trouble. Well, I
mean it's it's actually part of the ritual. Again, if
if the importance the psychological importance of calming rituals like
making and drinking a cup of coffee, it depends on
minute repetitions of movements. The sipping is an important part
of the ritual. Right, yeah, you've only you've essentially only
(29:18):
met me halfway. I'm still laugh with this ridiculous consumption method.
It does not resemble my rituals at home. But boy,
how'd he's sipping in space? Ain't easy? Is there a way, Joe?
Do we have a way? Now? There is a way.
So my source on this is a two thousand eleven
piece in NASA Tech Briefs which details the development of
what was then known as the zero G cup. And
(29:41):
this cup was the work of Donald ar Pettit of
the Johnson Space Center, Mark Wise, a Logal of Portland
State University, and independent consultants Paul Concas and Robert Finn. So,
given the physics involved, if you're in, say, the International
Space Station, how would you drink from a cup? The
odd thing about trying to drink from a cup in
(30:03):
space is that the main problems are not even necessarily
the problems you're thinking about right now, because you would think, probably, okay,
if there's no gravity holding the drink in the cup,
it'll just float up out of the cup into the air. Right.
It's not that this couldn't happen. Uh, it certainly could
given the right kind of forces. But generally in space,
(30:23):
fluids like to stick to surfaces. If you've never watched, say,
videos of astronauts playing with water in space, this is
one of the things you'll first observe is that the
water tends to not go off on its own unless
you kind of like force it to by like flinging it. Otherwise,
say you take a wet towel and you try to
wring it out in space, what you'll see is that
(30:45):
the water gathers around the outside of the towel, like
this undulating liquid worm around the towel and uh. And
that's generally how things go. The liquids want to cling
to surfaces. And this is because surface tension and appillary action,
rather than gravity, dictate how liquid behaves in a container
or on a surface. And so if you had a
(31:06):
regular cup of coffee in space, imagine a mug it's
got coffee in it, you would probably have a hard
time sipping it because what do we do in order
to sip coffee from a cup. We tilt the angle
of the cup. We tipped the cup and lower the lip,
relying on gravity to keep the liquid level the same
(31:27):
and eventually drive the liquid over the edge of the
cup as the angle of the cup's lip goes down.
But the coffee won't do that in space because you
could turn the cup completely upside down and the liquid
would probably stay in it trying to cling to the
walls of the container. So in this environment, sipping is
dang near impossible. You have a few other options. If
you've got coffee in a cup, you could suck it
(31:49):
out with a straw, or I guess you could just
Another suction option would be you could clamp your mouth
over the top of the coffee cup and create a
seal and try to suck the coffee out that way.
I think that would work, but that's not really what
people want to do, what they're calling that's the very
inhuman scene to try and imagine. You could try to
(32:10):
use momentum to get it out of the cup, basically
throwing the coffee out of the cup at your mouth.
That's not a good option either, So if you don't
want to burn your face or do any kind of
cone head like mouth movement. Oh my god, I just realized,
like that's another huge thing. If you had a piping
hot cup of coffee. It's just gonna and it gets
on you. It's gonna cling to you, cling to I
(32:31):
just wanted to fall off. Yeah, I mean, this is
one of the reasons that some of the worst things
to be scalded by are are what they're they're viscous,
or there's something like a noodle because it it doesn't
just splash you and run, it splashes and cling exactly. So, yeah,
you don't want piping hot coffee getting out of control
out into the environment. So these are not great options.
(32:53):
So the solution that these engineers came up with is
to design the interior surface of the cup up to
take advantage of the way fluids behave in microgravity and
zero G environments. And so the zero G cup uses
sloping sides that encourage the coffee in the cup to
gather toward the lip of the cup through capillary action,
(33:14):
because the shape of the cup is basically always causing
any liquid in it to want to gather right near
the lip of the cup. And then the astronauts can
essentially put their mouth at the lip of the cup
and kind of suck the liquid so that they can
drink with a more or less normal sipping behavior. Nice,
So they kind of designed the inside of the coffee
(33:35):
cup like it with the inside of a fuel tank. Yes,
and so it's not always possible to get every single
drop of liquid out of the cup. But of course,
as we know from our earthly coffee cups, once the
water or the liquid level gets down to the very bottom,
there's usually a few drops left in there you can't
get out even with the help of gravity. Now, one
thing they pointed out about it is that so if
(33:56):
like a tiny drop of coffee gets stuck in there
and it dries there, the residue can upset how the
sides of the cup make the coffee behave. So essentially,
if it doesn't get cleaned out right, it'll stop working right.
So so that's one thing is you've got to make
sure it gets cleaned. But yeah, so it's rather different
(34:17):
than your typical office environment, where some coffee cups will
be sort of a science ongoing science experiment. Have you
ever been the passive aggressive person who washed somebody else's
coffee mug? I don't think I've I've gotten that far.
I sometimes I have been known to tidy desks a
little bit if it's like obvious that they're say multiple
empty diet coke can or something like that's a little much,
(34:39):
or like an obviously right riding fruit. But but then again,
I'm I'm sometimes hesitant because I'm like, I don't know,
is this a neglected orange or is this really a
science experiment? Because the house stuff works offices are exactly
the places where something like that sort of place where
that kind of thing could be happening. Well, maybe we
should take a break and when we come back, we
will discuss the ultimate coffee space solution, the I S espresso.
(35:04):
Thank alright, we're back. It is it's the twenty one century. Uh,
bring bring me technology. Yeah, we we have humans in space.
We don't have any we we haven't been back to
the moon. We haven't sent people to Mars or Venus
as far as you know. Well I know, I'm gonna
go ahead and say I know for certain that hasn't happened.
(35:26):
But we have come up with ingenious solutions for putting
hot coffee in people's faces without burning them or making
them clamp their mouth over the top of the cup
like a cone head. Right, and it is it, It
truly is joking aside. It is a testament to human
engineering that we actually have an espresso machine that functions
in orbit and is functioning in orbit right now. It's
pretty awesome. Yeah, it's called the they call it the
(35:49):
I S S Presso, So it's the spress. I'm not
sure exactly how we should we should we should pronounce
it on the show here I S S Presso I
S S Presso because then it ends with the S espresso. Yeah,
it's I think it's overthinking it here. It definitely works better,
um reading it in your head versus speaking it aloud.
But but yeah, this is so, this is the device.
(36:11):
Some of the key design challenges here, of course, as
we've discussed, come down to water containment and sanitation. You
want to keep the heated water contained. You can't just
be leaking out all over the place. Uh and uh
and it and it has to do its thing with
the with the grounds the grounds as well. You wanted
to absorb the exact you know, correct amount of oil
as it passes through at the correct temperature. Also, you're
(36:33):
gonna have a big problem if your machine is difficult
to clean. Yes, yeah, it basically has to be self
cleaning or just a very clean process to begin with.
You can't again, there's no kitchen sink that you can
take the thing apart in at the end of the day.
There has to be a better way, yes and uh
and there is. So it's detailed in the in the
(36:56):
ride up I S. S Presso Development and Operations by
Valerio Datana and Joshua Hall, published in the Journal of
Space Safety. Engineering and Italian designers at the engineering firm
Argotech worked with the Lavazza Coffee Company and the Italian
Space Agency and they set out to conquer all of
(37:17):
these challenges and bring a new kind of coffee into
orbit to to create what we've come to know as
the I S S Presso. Well, I hate to just
openly celebrate cultural stereotypes, but I'm glad it was the
Italians who made it happen. Yeah, it feels right, doesn't
And I think they realized it too. They said, look,
somebody's got a step up and make coffee work in microgravity,
(37:38):
and it should be the Italians. So the finished result
is in many ways a kind of super carrat cut machine. Um,
it looks kind of like a three D printer as well. Um.
Nice if you look at the images of it. So
here's what the device does. Pretty straightforward, except you know,
highly engineered. You add the water, it heats it up,
(37:58):
It shoots it through a prepackaged cat stool and into
a pouch which then is either consumed from a straw
that was the original design or U now is actually
added to our special zero G cup. Well that sounds nice,
but that also makes it sound very simple. I suspect
your skipping a little bit of detail. Yes, so, yeah,
there are a number of details here. It's more complicated
(38:19):
than it sounds. For starters, you still have to hit
some key temperatures to make a proper cup of coffee.
Oh yeah, so it needs to hit the water needs
to hit the grounds at two and eight degrees fahrenhyd
or ninety degrees cytegrade, and it needs to leave the
brewing unit and a hundred and sixty seven degrees fahrenheyd
or seventy five degrees cyntegrade. This is a home coffee
making tip. If your home coffee machine makes bad coffee,
(38:42):
it's very likely that the reason for this is that
the water that's hitting the grounds is not hot enough.
One easy way to find out if this is the case,
is to just see how your your coffee that you
normally use tastes. If you just add your own boiling
water in like a free filter and pour it over
sometimes makes a huge different. Yeah, I mean, and that's
one of the reasons, one of the many reasons I've
(39:03):
only use AeroPress and French press these days, Like I
just heat the water it myself. There's no question about
how hot the water is. Now. One of the things
about hot water in space though in microgravity, steam bubbles
don't evenly distribute. The bubbles can form together and create
pockets of hot air that can potentially damage the machine,
(39:24):
in the machine and the users. And that's why the
I S. S machine here uses steel tubes instead of
rubber tubes that can resist pressures greater than four hundred bars.
I'm just now thinking for the first time, wouldn't it
be a horrible story if there was like a fatal
disaster on a spacecraft and the cause of it was
the coffee machine. It would I mean, But it's it's
(39:46):
the kind of thing that is possible given given the
constraints of the environment. I mean, there's it's a reason
that there are so many. The reason there are so
many additional safety requirements for anything that goes up, any device,
especially goes up on the I S S. So everything
from sharp edges to the touch temperature, etcetera. Um, so
they not only had to design in a sense, the
(40:08):
perfect coffee maker here the perfect espresso machine, but also
one that just managed to hit some of the pickiest
safety uh uh demands humanly possible. So how big is
this hog? It is a four pound machine. Uh. And
I didn't I didn't do the breakdown. I mean we've
we've done the breakdown on on the on how much
(40:31):
money it really takes to send you know, orbital payload costs. Yeah,
a little paylo. I didn't do that breakdown on this
particular machine because ultimately, who can put a price tag
on a proper espresso in orbit? That is, we should
say it is not cheap. Not each pound do you
take into orbit, even lowerth orbit is expensive. Yeah. So
it was a sent up on a thanks to SpaceX,
(40:56):
and it is as of this recording, still in operation.
It produced is it has a few different options, So
you can produce a short black, a long black. You
can make tea with it, which is good because not
everybody that goes up on the I S S especially
is is going to be a coffee drinker. Tea is
more popular with other cultures. Totally true. Yeah, and then
(41:16):
also you can use it to make broth, so it
can be used to rehydrate food. And I think this
is this is this really, you know, I think makes
a light bulb come on in many people's head when
you realize, oh, it's not just a coffee and teamaker.
It is uh, it is a multi purpose kitchen implement
as well. It's how you make your shrimp stock and
court bouyond on the I S S. Yeah. So here's
(41:38):
a quote from the paper I referenced from Daytona and
Hall quote. One of the big challenges undertaken by the
engineering team was to design the I S S Presso
as an I S S system and not only as
a payload and extending the I S S Presso functionalities
and capabilities. It does make espresso, which can provide a
psychological benefit to the crew that is away from home
(42:01):
from months at a time, but it also has the
ability to expand or modify the crew menu. The I
S S Presso can make tease as well as consumme a.
These additional options provide flexibility to the crew menu that
is not currently available. Again, this was as of the writing,
it had not yet gone up. For example, a dish
of rice may have a variety of broth added to
(42:21):
it for different tastes. And they also point out what
we mentioned already that astronaut tastes often change uh in
in in microgravity due to fluid build up in the head,
so they may prefer more spice, more flavor in orbit.
So the so the options with this machine give them
that flexibility. Oh that is important because so let's say
you have astronauts taste testing food before they go into
(42:45):
orbit to try to say, Okay, what am I gonna
like once I get up there? But you, the way
food tastes to you on Earth is not the same
way that it's going to taste to you once you're up. Yeah,
so you're gonna want to have options, and this machine
provides them. No, I want to be clear about something
I said a minute ago. I was making jokes about
the the costs of putting the coffee machine in space.
But I think stuff like this matters. I am a
(43:06):
pro space exploration person, even considering the costs, because in
many ways you could argue that at least as a contingency,
space exploration is the future of humankind potentially for from
a colonization standpoint, but at the very least from say
a an exploration research and planetary protection standpoint. Yeah. And
and certainly, the engineering problems involved in making espresso, as
(43:28):
we've we've laid out, are not confined just to coffee making.
Uh that they they they they impact everything from from
fuel systems to human biology. So uh so it's not
everything's interconnected when you're talking about the I S S
or or any kind of a prolonged space mission. So
speaking of the future, Robert, tell me about the future
(43:49):
of coffee and space, Well, my read on all of
this is that this is the machine or the for
the conceivable future. Um. I think we're gonna you may
see different versions of it, but I think this is
the one that's going to stick for a while. I mean,
because it's it's it's been engineered to do the thing
we wanted to do. Plus it also can reconstitute food.
(44:12):
I don't think you're gonna see the technology evolved beyond this, really,
you know. I mean, like this is this is kind
of the perfect coffee maker. Well wait a minute, what
about artificial gravity? Okay, well that that would change everything
if because you're gonna have people they're like, all right,
I've been I've been on this uh, this lengthy space mission.
I love the I S S press so, but I
really want to proper pour over, which is impossible. To
(44:34):
do a pour over, you would need some sort of
artificial gravity. Now, now, we've recorded an episode in the
past where we talked about the two main conceivable methods
outside of just magic gravity. Uh, the two main methods
that could be used here, Yeah, the ones that are
feasible in reality. One of those would be linear acceleration,
where you've got a spacecraft whatever you're inhabiting, constantly accelerating
(44:57):
at exactly the right rate to generate a force pulling
you towards the floor at the same rate as Earth's
gravity would accelerate you towards the ground on the Earth,
which is I think nine point eight meters per second squared.
But that method is only good on the way to
wherever you're going. So you could have your poor over
on board this barreling spaceship. But then when you when
you were reaching your destination, if you need to decelerate
(45:20):
or something, then it's either go back to the I
S presso or go back around I guess well the Yeah,
you could flip the ship around, um like halfway. You
spend half your trip accelerating half the trip decelerating. But
then what happens when you get to you know, the
planet that you're orbiting. Oh yeah, yeah, that's tricky. Well anyway,
the more stable method that people usually talk about is
(45:42):
uh the centripetal force method, which essentially involves a rotating
habitat because as you know, like if you take a
bucket of paint and you spin it around really fast
in the air, you can hold it sideways and the
paint doesn't pour out, and that's because of forces driving
the paint and the bottom of the bucket together there
because of the spinning the spinning angular momentum. And of course,
(46:04):
the same principle could be employed in a spacecraft or
a space station. If you have it spinning and it's
the right size and the right spinning at the right speed,
it will generate a force pulling you toward the outside
rim of that spinning wheel or spinning capsule or whatever.
And you could feasibly stand on it, pour coffee over
on it, Uh, make a court bouyon. So you could
(46:24):
have the in theory, you could have a spaceship with
a rotating taurus that does nothing but enable coffee preparation.
Like it could just have a Mr. Coffee machine on
it and that's it. It would be the most expensive
Mr Coffee in the history of humanity. But hey, you know,
it really matters to have a kitchen with a down,
as we've said, not just for coffee. I mean there
(46:45):
are a lot of things that if you are dealing
with a kitchen, you're going to be dealing with containers
of liquids and stuff like that. If you can have
a down, that would be great. Now that of course,
you could also try and get one of those event
horizon gravity dry lives. And if you had one of
those in place, then you could probably brew one hell
of a cup of coffee where we are going. You
won't need a mouth to taste. That's good. That's good. Now.
(47:09):
The one thing you want to avoid, you know, you
want to get some cream in your coffee, probably because
you don't want it so black, uh that light cannot
escape it. It's just gonna be probably it's gonna be
a problem. That's how we create a black hole exactly.
Somebody bruised the dankest cup of coffee and history up
in space, and that's how that's how it all ends,
brewing for centuries while the crew is in hypher sleeve, Robert,
(47:35):
this has been fun. This has uh And I think
I managed to finish my oh almost finished my own
cup of coffee while we were podcasting here. I've finished
mine too. Accept a little tepid sip here at the bottom.
Am I gonna drink it or not? My my sip
was was a little chili, but it was actually the
air conditioning in this room has made it cold enough
that it did feel like like it was like cold
(47:58):
brew coffee. I'm here contemplated in the riddle of existence.
Will I swallow it? You should? Yeah? Okay, here we go.
Yeah one very good. So there you have it, Uh,
coffee and space a great opportunity to talk a little
bit about fluid dynamics and microgravity and some wonderful human
(48:18):
engineering uh feats of achievement. So before we close out here,
we're just gonna say the usual. If you want more
stuff to Blow your Mind. Head on over to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find
all the episodes, including such episodes as our micro gravity
episode which we'll get which gets very in depth on
some of these topics that we h we briefly discussed
(48:39):
here today. You'll also find links out to every social
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if you want to support the show, the best thing
you can do is to find us and rate us
and review us at wherever you get your podcast. Huge
thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams
and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get in
(48:59):
touch with us with feedback about this episode or any other, uh,
let us know your favorite kind of coffee, what what
brew you would drink in space? Uh, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hi, let
us know where you listen from. You can email us
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com
(49:23):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com
Hey, everybody, this is future Robert uh speaking on this
(00:03):
past episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I just
want to warn you in this episode, as at one
point I refer to the I S. S. Presso machine
as weighing four hundred pounds, I'm meant to say it
weighs forty pounds. Well, that totally undercuts my reaction to it,
so disregard all all considerations given thereafter. Alright, well that's
all we had to say. So we're gonna jump back
(00:23):
in the time machine and we'll chat to you again
in a future episode. But continue to enjoy this past
episode about coffee in space. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you,
(00:44):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And before we got
on Mike here, Robert and I were just talking about
our favorite coffee cliches. What do you call those sayings,
like sayings that people put on a T shirt or
in a little meme or on a pillow or a
key cha fob, Like you're talking about a little bumper
sticker wisdom, aren't you. Yeah, I don't know what the
(01:04):
word for that is it's not quotes, but the kinds
of text you put on things in order to be witty,
Like I like my coffee, like I like my men,
And then there's some joke, yeah, sort of like, uh,
I like my coffee, like I like my astronauts, bold
and highly susceptible to cosmic radiation. I like my coffee
like I like my men congested and with bone atrophy.
(01:28):
That doesn't make any sense to but but it we've failed,
we wouldn't know. We haven't failed. But what we're trying
to do as noble, we're trying to bring coffee and
space together. And really that's been that's been a noble
mission in space exploration in general for a while. How
How are we going to enable our brave astronauts to
(01:48):
drink coffee in space? This is an important subject, and
I actually mean that it's not. This might be kind
of kind of a niche topic maybe, but but stick
around because coffee and space is more interesting than you
might think, and it's more important than you might think. Yeah,
I mean, certainly we're gonna get into some into some
cool physics here. Relate. Those are the fluid dynamics of
(02:10):
liquids and uh and and heated liquids in microgravity. But
I mean, bottom line, coffee in the experience of having
a cup of coffee is a very important terrestrial practice.
And as we go into space, uh it is it's
it's good to have something like that to bring with us.
It grounds us, It gives us a sense of calm,
(02:32):
a sense of of normalcy in this highly dangerous environment. Robert,
what do you think would happen if you were, at
the same time asked to do something unusual, you had
to like undertake a dangerous mission, and you were also
deprived of coffee concurrent with that. Mmmm, well, I would
have to have this. This does happen sometimes, really, Yeah,
(02:54):
like when it's when traveling. Sometimes, you know, some sort
of stress comes up on traveling. So what I try
and do is have some sort of like green tea
pills on hand, you know, something where I can I
can give myself some caffeine and and I'm not having
to just chase down a bad cup of coffee in
the middle of nowhere to get pills. I don't mean
to judge that sounds sterile and perverted. You know, there's
(03:15):
no pleasure in it, except it can help stave off,
you know, a caffeine headache. It can help keep me
awake if I'm driving, that sort of thing. And so
if I was an outer space conceivably, you know, I
imagine I could get by without the coffee. It provided
that I had access to the green tea pills or
(03:36):
you know, or whatever what other whatever kind of you know,
additional stimuli they had up there on hand to keep
me alert and focused. But coffee is more than just caffeine, right,
I mean that caffeine is one of the main things
about it. We like, we like it's drug effects, but
coffee is an institution of human life in many cultures
(03:56):
around the world. It's not just a chemical, but it's
an important texture of life. Yeah, I mean, it's it's
the drinking of the coffee and the but it's also
the making of the coffee. Just the practice of making
a cup of coffee for many people, um, myself included,
like that is a part of the ritual you you
you just it's part of your morning or your your
(04:17):
afternoon whenever you you know, you have that at that
essential cup. It's quiet, it's meditative. It makes me start
to feel like I'm getting ready for the day. It's
one of those things that you know. I think often
we underestimate the power of simple physical rituals in preparing
our mind space for for activities. Like people think they
(04:39):
need coffee because they need caffeine in order to start
getting work done, and that that is somewhat true. The
caffeine does something, but you also need the process of
the brewing and the drinking that doing those familiar motions
gets you primed. Yeah, it's the you're engaging in the
story too, like this is the story of the thing
I must do to start working and uh And likewise,
(05:00):
that's a whole other avenue to for many coffee drinkers
like the story of the beans. And certainly, yes, they
are varying degrees of quality and varying flavors for different
different types of coffee beans and different preparation methods, etcetera.
But we also get just so into the story off
and it's like with with with the with with wine enthusiast, right,
(05:21):
I mean, there's some scientific studies that that kind of
cast doubt onto what degree of wine enthusiasts can actually taste.
Various differences in the uh, you know, the vintage that
they're drinking. But I mean, if you put a label
on wine that's a taste like seashells and sweet and low,
people would be able to taste that, right. Yeah. But
but ultimately it's all about the story of that wine,
(05:44):
and you're engaging with that story and it's bringing you value.
You know, it's a and I don't think there's anything
wrong with that. And so there's there's that going on
with coffee as well, And as we'll touch on later,
there's a little of that in the story of coffee
and space, you know, or Abert one of the things
that you made me realizes that the reason we actually
need coffee in space for real astronauts is the same
(06:06):
reason there's always a scene of astronauts drinking coffee in
sci fi movies about space. Oh yeah, yeah, we were
we were sort of brainstorming about this, like what what films?
What classic sci fi films, uh, you know have coffee
drinking scenes. And there's you see it in Alien from
seventy nine, you see it in a silent running from
seventy two two thousand and one of Space Odyssey. There's
(06:29):
stally forgotten. Yeah, now I now I'm not so, I
don't remember. It's been a little while since I've seen it.
I'm due for a reviewing. It's possible that they're they're
they're drinking tea. I'm not sure which characters are are
drinking in this particular scene, but maybe just scalding hot
orange juice. But but t is very similar, of course,
because the tea is also checking off the same boxes,
the ritual, the you know, the hot brew that invigorates you, etcetera.
(06:53):
Speaking of tea, we know that at least a certain
Starfleet captain loves his oh gray hot. But do they
drink coffee on the Inner Prize? Uh? They did, at
least I found a screenshot from from Star Trek Voyager,
So there's at least one scene with coffee. But I'm
sure they're countless other examples of characters drinking some sort
of coffee based beverage. Did the long Ones drink coffee
(07:15):
in the expanse Um, Well, there is a lot of
coffee drinking the in the expanse there's a particular high
grade coffee machine on one of the main ships, and
it's it's referenced a lot, and at one point it's
broken and and and everybody is is rather upset about it.
But this is a show that does at least value
the the the engineering challenges involved with creating a proper
(07:39):
coffee brewing device for a spaceship that's going to be
going in and out of micro gravity. And then of
course there's this scene from Event Horizon, Don't speak of
It features some really tasteless jokes. Yeah yeah, but but
even still, we see this trend continuing where you have characters,
(08:01):
you know, in outer space, in this just unrelatable environment
for the vast majority of the human population. You have
them engaging and even more elaborate scenarios encountering aliens or
demons from from the you know, the the other side
of a wormhole. But there's if there's anything that we
can relate to and what they're doing and what they
want out of life, it's that cup of coffee. Oh yeah.
(08:22):
This is a standard part of narrative theory that you have.
If you want to tell an extraordinary story, you need
to ground the extraordinary elements of the story and mundane things,
things that make you feel familiar and comfortable, in order
to accent the unfamiliarity of the strange parts of the story. Yeah.
I remember Berto Eco wrote an essay dealing with some
(08:43):
of this, talking about coffee consumption in I think James
Bond novels, as well as another spy series. What was
the one that they made films of it with the
Michael Caine. What was Michael Caine's spy character. I just
looked it up. It's Harry Palmer. Yeah, that's the one.
That's the one, so Hip Crest file. Yeah, So the
ideas you have, you have this these these spy characters
(09:04):
and they're doing all this this crazy stuff. They're gonna
have Harry Palms for some reason. But no matter what
they're doing, you know, if they're wrestling giant squid or
what have you, they're still drinking that coffee and that
that serves as an anchoring point for the for our experience.
A lot of horror and sci fi movies do this
also with cigarettes. Coffee and cigarettes I think are especially
(09:25):
useful consumables for this narrative purpose, for grounding the narrative
and a kind of mundane familiarity and comfort, because coffee
and cigarettes are symbols of order. You ever think about
this like you can group food and drink and drugs
into categories of order symbology and chaos symbology. Like if
you had characters on a on a starship doing heroin
(09:48):
or something like that, that would that would like throw
you off even more, right, it would sort of like
make the narrative feel even more untethered and chaotic. But
if you give people these drugs that we typically think
of as associated with regularity, stability, routine comfort, compliance, they're
sort of signals of orderliness and predictability. And nicotine and
(10:09):
caffeine are definitely both drugs like that, And of course
that's not an endorsement of of actually doing them now.
But to your point, like, the order comes from far
more than just the substance itself. It's the I've talked
to people who who have been smokers and former smokers,
and I think in most cases and they talk about
how just having the cigarette like gives them a sense
(10:29):
of purpose in a particular environment. So like you're standing around, um,
you know, outside at a show or something and the like,
having the cigarette it like kind of gives you license
to be there doing something and then potentially engaging socially
with other people. Yeah, well, it's also a meditative ritual,
and you perform the same familiar actions in the same
(10:50):
order over and over again, when you brew a cup
of coffee, or when you have a cigarette. Again not
endorsing tobacco, but when you do these things, you light
up again that familiar pathway in your brain. Yeah. I've
been at like, you know, social situations where I don't
know anyone, uh, and if there's coffee, or sometimes it's
just some other beverage. But as long as I have
(11:12):
the beverage, it gives me an added sense of purpose.
I have this thing that I'm doing, and then when
the cup is empty, I still feel compelled to carry
the cup around because if I put the cup down,
then I'm just standing here with nothing in my hands.
What am I doing here? What kind of a freak show?
Am I? You need a cup in each hand, and
then you feel even more secure duct taped into place,
right Edward, coffee hands. Yeah. So it's clear coffee plays
(11:36):
a role in in establishing these meditative rituals that make
us feel comfortable, in putting us in a calm mindset,
getting us ready to do things, making us productive. It
has all these benefits. I wanted to talk about a
couple of other benefits. I just found poking around, uh
in in studies on the effects of coffee that seemed
like they would be useful in space. One of them,
Robert I. Bett, you may have encountered, this is the
(11:58):
principle we've discovered in re cent years that warm drinks
make us feel social warmth. Oh yeah, we have touched
on that before. Yeah, so the standard study, I think
the original one of these was published in Science UM
years ago by Williams and Bargain. It's called Experiencing physical
warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth, and the basic setup is you've
(12:19):
got people who hold a cup of hot coffee as
opposed to a cup of iced coffee. And apparently what
the study found is that subjects who were holding the
hot coffee quote judged a target person as having a
warmer personality in terms of being more generous or caring.
And also people holding the hot coffee were more likely
(12:39):
to choose a gift for a friend instead of for themselves.
And I've read there are subsequent studies on this that
look into things like oral temperature and all that. It
seems generally that hot beverages encourage positive social connections. And
we can certainly see the value of that just on
an office environment or out on the street, but certainly
(13:00):
in space you have a team that's having to work
together to give everything running, to keep everybody alive, sometimes
an international team. Uh. This the coffee and or tea
can be a unifying force exactly. And so this effect
maybe there with other hot beverages. I mean, sure you
could also have people hold and drink hot water or
(13:21):
scalding hot orange juice. But people already like hot coffee.
They already have hot coffee rituals, So why not try
to give them that. I got another one. Have you
read about how coffee apparently seems to give you some
kind of advantage in causing the brain to recognize emotionally
positive stimuli. Huh yeah. So there was a study in
(13:42):
PLS one by Lars co Chink and Vanessa Lucks called
caffeine improves left hemisphere processing of positive words. So basically
what they found is that caffeine consumption boosts the speed
at which the left hemisphere of the brain recognizes and
process us as positive words, but doesn't have any effect
(14:03):
on the processing speed of neutral or negative words. And
they think this is probably because caffeine seems to boost
dopamine transmission in the brain. The Ohio State professor of psychology,
Gary Wink, who has written a lot about the connection
between foods and neurochemistry, rights that basically, the dopamine activity
caused by caffeine is probably one of the main reasons
(14:25):
that caffeine is one of the most widely consumed psychoactive
substances across the entire world. And so, to go back
to the plos one study, the authors think that the
dopaminergenic qualities of caffeine are what's leading to this increased
positivity boost in in the processing powers of the you know,
the the verbal processing centers of the left hemisphere. So
(14:48):
at a time when you need people to work together
as a team, get along, well, have everybody happy with
each other seems to me like boosting the recognition of
words and other types of cues that signal positive emotions
sound is like a good deal, right, yeah, yeah, Anything
you can do to boost the positive communication, right, anything
that would help assist the processing of at least some
cues of positivity in our environment seems worthwhile. In space,
(15:12):
and of course again you could just have people take
a caffeine pill probably right. Yeah, but people already like coffee,
they already have coffee rituals. It seems like you can
you can get all of these different effects concentrated into
one thing if you just get coffee in space. So
is there a problem with coffee in space? Why can't
we just take mr Coffee up there? Well, it's only
(15:33):
occurring to me now that there's the whole diuretic coffee.
But that's a that's that's a that's a whole another
episode right there. Um, well, you're thinking about that while
I'm going on about positivity, you're like pooping. Yeah, well
I didn't think of it till till till now, to
be honest. But but I mean, that's a whole side
of the human condition that is also problematic in um microgravity,
(15:57):
and a lot of engineering problems has been directed at
the problems related to just going to the bathroom in space.
Less effort has been put into the coffee problem. Coffee
problem is is not as as high level, but the
problem of making coffee in space is that pretty much
all of our methods of of brewing coffee are highly
(16:18):
dependent upon gas on gravity. Oh yeah, and so you
don't even think about how important it is. Yeah, yeah,
even like just roughly speaking, there there two methods of
making coffee, Like one that's using that's straight up using
gravity like water flowing down through grounds and then brewing
the coffee. And then you have methods that involve pressure,
(16:40):
like an espresso machine or or or an aero press,
which is a device I really love for my coffee. Um,
I've never used that. How does that work? Well, it's
it's essentially like a cylinder has a filter on one end.
You put the grounds in, you pour hot water in,
and then use the plunger. You can let it steep
a little bit too, so you know, it's so it's
similar to something Frenche press in that respect, but then
(17:02):
you can press you you press it and the pressure
pushes the coffee out into your cup. But even that,
even though pressure is involved, like that would be a
disaster if I tried to use that in microgravity. And likewise,
even a very nice espresso machine which looks very compact
and uh and self contained, you would not be able
to run that in orbit because yes, it depends on pressure,
(17:24):
but it still depends on gravity. Maybe a little bit
poorous if if you don't actually have such a thing
as a down, right, and then if you have no
such thing as a as a proper kitchen sink to
clean any of these implements. Uh. I think most of
us can can can think two very recent examples of
huge messes they've made with coffee, you know, but that
by accident, maybe in the clean up foot phase. Uh,
(17:46):
and that's all with a down that's that Yeah, that's
with gravity in place and a proper sink to clean
it up. But in uh, in board the I S
S certainly aboard any other kind of uh you know,
conceivable um uh capsule rules or or shuttles that we've
used in in recent decades, you're just not gonna have
that kind of cleanup capability. Uh. The machine itself is
(18:09):
going to just become grotesque. And you can't just send
it back down necessarily either. I mean, if once you
get something up on I S S, it's uh, it
needs to stay up there for a while without having
to be You can't send it down every weekend to
get it cleaned. Now, what about the method where you
just put the grounds in your mouth and then squirt
the hot water in and kind of switch it around. Well,
I guess that would work, is that what is is
(18:30):
that cowboy coffee? No way, I'm I'm gonna rebrand it.
That's executive coffee. Executive coffee, So now it's a luxury. Well,
there's still a lot of room for human error in
that method. Um, I mean, basically, one of the big
things to keep in mind is that even if you
take the technology out of out of the scenario without
proper gravity in place, liquids moved differently, they absorbed differently,
and uh yeah, even something as seemingly no nonsense as
(18:53):
an aero press, which again just looks like a little
pump device, is just going to be disastrous in microgravity. Now,
the basic process that we depend on to make coffee,
just to to really boil it down. Uh, you have
hot water flowing through ground coffee beans picking up their
oil essence on the way down into the coffee pot.
This coffee oil released during the roasting process is what
(19:14):
we call cafe all now. And like I said, an
espresso machine that's going to force the water through the
fine grounds via pressure. But again even that depends on
gravity and would not work in space. So we're kind
of left with with quite a conundrum here, how to
how do you even bring coffee into space, much less
(19:34):
brew it? Well maybe we should take a quick break
and then come back and explore this further. Thank you.
All right, we're back. So how to get coffee into space?
How to brew coffee in space? Well, um, we're gonna
have to talk about the past first. How how it
was done previously as we as humanity uh clawed their
way up into orbits? Does does this involved the words
(19:58):
freeze dried? Yes, you better does? Oh boy? So first
of all, let's get one thing straight. Prior to Apollo eleven,
that's nine, the first Crewe jaunt to the surface of
the Moon. Prior to this, there was no hot coffee
in space. Bum you could have it cold, but this
was the first omission to actually feature hot water. So
(20:18):
so like the Giminy commanders were on, they were powered
by cold coffee. Yeah, that was that was the only option.
That's sick or at least room temperature or capsule temperature
got coffee. That was the only option. Well, here's the
science question. I don't know the answer to. Maybe you do.
Why is mid temperature coffee so disgusting like ice coffee
(20:40):
is Okay, I'm into that hot coffee is good, but
like slightly lower than than warm coffee is just gross.
Well I don't completely agree with that really, Yeah, I
mean I enjoy coffee at every level of every temperature.
But I think the problem is when coffee reaches room temperature,
(21:02):
because I I like cold coffee, but I have a
similar reaction if I am outside drinking coffee and I
have allowed it to become cold, as cold as the
natural environment. So I think that's the thing. Like with
hot coffee and cold coffee becomes clear that it's been
it's it's clear that it's been prepared, uh at a
different temperature. Well, I guess maybe it's the same as
(21:24):
true for a lot of foods and drinks, right, Like
hot meat and cold meat are good, but room temperature meat.
Bring me a room temperature hamburger patty. Yeah, nobody really
wants that. So hot coffee, cold coffee pre Apollo eleven,
post Apollo eleven, uh, it was still coffee making was
a very rough looking ordeal. So what we're talking about here,
(21:46):
as you referenced earlier, is is dehydrated black coffee freeze, dried,
stored in a clear plastic bag which you then reconstitute
through a water probe. Okay, so you stick the probe
in and pump some hot water are in? Yeah? Are
you are? Are you? You? You have your water reservoir
and the capsule or the I S S or where
wherever you have to be space shuttle. Uh. And if
(22:08):
you have the ability to have hot water, you can
use hot water. Otherwise you're just getting cold water and
then you're shooting it into this bag. It basically there's
some pictures of this online. I'll try and link to
one on the landing page for this episode of Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. But it looks kind
of like a catheter with instant coffee in it. No,
I'm afraid to ask, but I have to wonder. Is
the bag that the coffee came in the same kind
(22:30):
of bag they would pee in? Was it the same hardware?
I do not have an answer to that, but I
would not be surprised if it if it was. You know,
but when it comes to liquids in space, I mean
that's pretty much how a lot of it works. It's
just stuff in bags. City. Yeah, everything looks like a
catheter in space. Um, so this was the technology, and
(22:51):
really this technology remained the same until very recently instant
coffee in a bag. And it wasn't actually until hawai
In born astronaut Ellison on Azuka, the first Asian American astronaut,
he actually requested ConA coffee. He said, Hey, um, let's
spice it up a little bit. Let's let's you know,
(23:11):
we have some great coffee in my home state. Let's
see about getting some of that into orbit. And NASA said, oh, yeah,
we can try that. And it was apparently a hot commodity.
I mean literally, I guess for but also figuratively, Uh,
the ConA coffee would be something that they would they
would trade with with, say, you know, other astronauts, even cosmonauts. Yeah,
(23:32):
especially knowing what we know about the way the micro
gravity environment interacts with say, the fluids in your head.
We've talked before on the show about how you know,
astronauts often have this problem where they live in a
taste and scent deprived world because when you are in
a micro gravity environment, normally, uh, the gravity of the
(23:54):
Earth while you're standing on the Earth would be pulling
all the fluids in your body towards your feet and
your heart naturally has to compensate by for that by
pumping really hard to get stuff up into your head
and your upper shoulders and everything. But when that gravity
is not there and you're just floating around, the hearts
still overcompensating, and so it's just filling your head up
with fluids and you've got all this congestion and you
(24:16):
can't you can't smell or taste things very well. And
this is why so many astronauts, like when we talked
to Jeff Hoffman on the show, report really enjoying, especially
the shrimp cocktail, which sounds disgusting. Yeah, you know that
that shrimp. The shrimp itself is just awful. Yeah, but
it's not the shrimp. He's excited. It's got horse radish
in and that intense aroma sort of clears out the nose,
(24:37):
wakes you up and allows you to taste other things.
So they would sort of have a shrimp cocktail full
of horse radish as an order so they could taste
the rest of their meal. Uh yeah, in anyway, a spicier,
more fragrant kind of coffee. I can see that maybe
doing a similar sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Um and I've also seen it pointed out that the
astronauts tend to they'll crave spicier and more flavorful with
(25:00):
things in orbit then they would normally crave on Earth. Right,
it's an extra special reason why you don't want to
just be stuck with freeze dride folders or whatever they've
got right now, We've we've touched on a number of
other fluid dynamics and microgravity issues on the show before.
We talked about how tears pool and an astronauts I
socket if they're they're crying or just generally leaking from
the ice socket um the sinus has refused to drain.
(25:23):
One of my favorite is the fact that the bladder
fills up, but but not from the bottom to the top,
as it doesn't a gravity bound body, but instead from
all sides. So it's it's not until it's completely full
that you said that you realize you need a urinate.
That's a weird image. Blood flow is also an issue,
and this was This was actually explored in the third
(25:44):
season of The Expanse, the science fiction television series that
I've talked about here on the show before, including earlier
when I referenced their coffee maker where that. But there's
a scene where you have all these individuals that have
sustained internal injuries, and it's the everyone realizes that they're
just doomed because they don't have a chance to heal
(26:05):
um unless they have some sort of artificial gravity, be
at propulsion based or some other form, or just return
to some sort of gravitational environment. Now, why would that be,
why would it affect healing? Well? I looked at a
I looked this up in a paper. There's a paper
from two thousand nine titled severe Traumatic Injury during long
duration space flight light years beyond a t l S.
(26:27):
So here's a quick quote from that article. After a
prolonged exposure to weightlessness, the injured astronaut will be at
a physiologic disadvantage compared to patients on Earth. Changes likely
to impair their ability to withstand injury include reductions in
circulating blood volume, reduced red cell mass, cardiac atrophy, this rhythmias,
(26:49):
reduced cardiac output, alterations in vascular tone and nero endocrime function,
loss of the projective bony mass, and possible immune suppression.
Oh yeah, we read about that before too, Immune system
and space. Yeah, so it's I mean again, you can't
help but think of that espress a machine now, no
matter how well it's designed, it's just useless in microgravity.
(27:13):
It's really a testament to uh, you know, to to
biological evolution, just how well uh life can do in
a microgravity environment, you know. I mean that we're not, say,
like the mythical Japanese kappa with a little bowl of
water on its head, that would just float free and
they lose their life essence in orbit. But all of
(27:34):
our earthly coffee machines are more like the cop That's true.
They have the the the engineering prowess of a yokai.
It's true. But wait a minute. We were talking about
drinking coffee in space. Oh yeah, yeah, and having to
go urinate in space. Uh you know, going back to
that urinary example about the bladder filling up from all sides.
The fluid dynamics that we described there also impact such
(27:55):
matters as fuel tanks. So again, in microgravity, without gravity
to force liquids to the bottom, they clean to surfaces.
So our spaceship designs depend on veins, sponges, screens, and
channels to guide liquids on the in the inside of
tanks all right, say, guiding them to a spigot or
(28:15):
to an engine in the case of fuel. Uh. Now
we've also experimented with the use of liquid repellent coatings
inside fuel tanks as well to avoid cleaning and uh
and the boil off that can occur in the tanks.
And this is research is very much still ongoing. There
was one study that came out just last year on
the matter. Now, fortunately the astronauts do not need to
(28:36):
drink from the fuel reserves, no, they just they drink
out of a straw or just sort of squeezing out
of the bag. As you might imagine, everything is essentially
a capri son, I guess in orbit. As I said
earlier about your green tea pills, no offense, but that
is a sick perversion of nature. You can't drink coffee
with a straw, not hot coffee. Indeed, drinking hot coffee
(28:57):
with a straw, that's just asking for trouble. Well, I
mean it's it's actually part of the ritual. Again, if
if the importance the psychological importance of calming rituals like
making and drinking a cup of coffee, it depends on
minute repetitions of movements. The sipping is an important part
of the ritual. Right, yeah, you've only you've essentially only
(29:18):
met me halfway. I'm still laugh with this ridiculous consumption method.
It does not resemble my rituals at home. But boy,
how'd he's sipping in space? Ain't easy? Is there a way, Joe?
Do we have a way? Now? There is a way.
So my source on this is a two thousand eleven
piece in NASA Tech Briefs which details the development of
what was then known as the zero G cup. And
(29:41):
this cup was the work of Donald ar Pettit of
the Johnson Space Center, Mark Wise, a Logal of Portland
State University, and independent consultants Paul Concas and Robert Finn. So,
given the physics involved, if you're in, say, the International
Space Station, how would you drink from a cup? The
odd thing about trying to drink from a cup in
(30:03):
space is that the main problems are not even necessarily
the problems you're thinking about right now, because you would think, probably, okay,
if there's no gravity holding the drink in the cup,
it'll just float up out of the cup into the air. Right.
It's not that this couldn't happen. Uh, it certainly could
given the right kind of forces. But generally in space,
(30:23):
fluids like to stick to surfaces. If you've never watched, say,
videos of astronauts playing with water in space, this is
one of the things you'll first observe is that the
water tends to not go off on its own unless
you kind of like force it to by like flinging it. Otherwise,
say you take a wet towel and you try to
wring it out in space, what you'll see is that
(30:45):
the water gathers around the outside of the towel, like
this undulating liquid worm around the towel and uh. And
that's generally how things go. The liquids want to cling
to surfaces. And this is because surface tension and appillary action,
rather than gravity, dictate how liquid behaves in a container
or on a surface. And so if you had a
(31:06):
regular cup of coffee in space, imagine a mug it's
got coffee in it, you would probably have a hard
time sipping it because what do we do in order
to sip coffee from a cup. We tilt the angle
of the cup. We tipped the cup and lower the lip,
relying on gravity to keep the liquid level the same
(31:27):
and eventually drive the liquid over the edge of the
cup as the angle of the cup's lip goes down.
But the coffee won't do that in space because you
could turn the cup completely upside down and the liquid
would probably stay in it trying to cling to the
walls of the container. So in this environment, sipping is
dang near impossible. You have a few other options. If
you've got coffee in a cup, you could suck it
(31:49):
out with a straw, or I guess you could just
Another suction option would be you could clamp your mouth
over the top of the coffee cup and create a
seal and try to suck the coffee out that way.
I think that would work, but that's not really what
people want to do, what they're calling that's the very
inhuman scene to try and imagine. You could try to
(32:10):
use momentum to get it out of the cup, basically
throwing the coffee out of the cup at your mouth.
That's not a good option either, So if you don't
want to burn your face or do any kind of
cone head like mouth movement. Oh my god, I just realized,
like that's another huge thing. If you had a piping
hot cup of coffee. It's just gonna and it gets
on you. It's gonna cling to you, cling to I
(32:31):
just wanted to fall off. Yeah, I mean, this is
one of the reasons that some of the worst things
to be scalded by are are what they're they're viscous,
or there's something like a noodle because it it doesn't
just splash you and run, it splashes and cling exactly. So, yeah,
you don't want piping hot coffee getting out of control
out into the environment. So these are not great options.
(32:53):
So the solution that these engineers came up with is
to design the interior surface of the cup up to
take advantage of the way fluids behave in microgravity and
zero G environments. And so the zero G cup uses
sloping sides that encourage the coffee in the cup to
gather toward the lip of the cup through capillary action,
(33:14):
because the shape of the cup is basically always causing
any liquid in it to want to gather right near
the lip of the cup. And then the astronauts can
essentially put their mouth at the lip of the cup
and kind of suck the liquid so that they can
drink with a more or less normal sipping behavior. Nice,
So they kind of designed the inside of the coffee
(33:35):
cup like it with the inside of a fuel tank. Yes,
and so it's not always possible to get every single
drop of liquid out of the cup. But of course,
as we know from our earthly coffee cups, once the
water or the liquid level gets down to the very bottom,
there's usually a few drops left in there you can't
get out even with the help of gravity. Now, one
thing they pointed out about it is that so if
(33:56):
like a tiny drop of coffee gets stuck in there
and it dries there, the residue can upset how the
sides of the cup make the coffee behave. So essentially,
if it doesn't get cleaned out right, it'll stop working right.
So so that's one thing is you've got to make
sure it gets cleaned. But yeah, so it's rather different
(34:17):
than your typical office environment, where some coffee cups will
be sort of a science ongoing science experiment. Have you
ever been the passive aggressive person who washed somebody else's
coffee mug? I don't think I've I've gotten that far.
I sometimes I have been known to tidy desks a
little bit if it's like obvious that they're say multiple
empty diet coke can or something like that's a little much,
(34:39):
or like an obviously right riding fruit. But but then again,
I'm I'm sometimes hesitant because I'm like, I don't know,
is this a neglected orange or is this really a
science experiment? Because the house stuff works offices are exactly
the places where something like that sort of place where
that kind of thing could be happening. Well, maybe we
should take a break and when we come back, we
will discuss the ultimate coffee space solution, the I S espresso.
(35:04):
Thank alright, we're back. It is it's the twenty one century. Uh,
bring bring me technology. Yeah, we we have humans in space.
We don't have any we we haven't been back to
the moon. We haven't sent people to Mars or Venus
as far as you know. Well I know, I'm gonna
go ahead and say I know for certain that hasn't happened.
(35:26):
But we have come up with ingenious solutions for putting
hot coffee in people's faces without burning them or making
them clamp their mouth over the top of the cup
like a cone head. Right, and it is it, It
truly is joking aside. It is a testament to human
engineering that we actually have an espresso machine that functions
in orbit and is functioning in orbit right now. It's
pretty awesome. Yeah, it's called the they call it the
(35:49):
I S S Presso, So it's the spress. I'm not
sure exactly how we should we should we should pronounce
it on the show here I S S Presso I
S S Presso because then it ends with the S espresso. Yeah,
it's I think it's overthinking it here. It definitely works better,
um reading it in your head versus speaking it aloud.
But but yeah, this is so, this is the device.
(36:11):
Some of the key design challenges here, of course, as
we've discussed, come down to water containment and sanitation. You
want to keep the heated water contained. You can't just
be leaking out all over the place. Uh and uh
and it and it has to do its thing with
the with the grounds the grounds as well. You wanted
to absorb the exact you know, correct amount of oil
as it passes through at the correct temperature. Also, you're
(36:33):
gonna have a big problem if your machine is difficult
to clean. Yes, yeah, it basically has to be self
cleaning or just a very clean process to begin with.
You can't again, there's no kitchen sink that you can
take the thing apart in at the end of the day.
There has to be a better way, yes and uh
and there is. So it's detailed in the in the
(36:56):
ride up I S. S Presso Development and Operations by
Valerio Datana and Joshua Hall, published in the Journal of
Space Safety. Engineering and Italian designers at the engineering firm
Argotech worked with the Lavazza Coffee Company and the Italian
Space Agency and they set out to conquer all of
(37:17):
these challenges and bring a new kind of coffee into
orbit to to create what we've come to know as
the I S S Presso. Well, I hate to just
openly celebrate cultural stereotypes, but I'm glad it was the
Italians who made it happen. Yeah, it feels right, doesn't
And I think they realized it too. They said, look,
somebody's got a step up and make coffee work in microgravity,
(37:38):
and it should be the Italians. So the finished result
is in many ways a kind of super carrat cut machine. Um,
it looks kind of like a three D printer as well. Um.
Nice if you look at the images of it. So
here's what the device does. Pretty straightforward, except you know,
highly engineered. You add the water, it heats it up,
(37:58):
It shoots it through a prepackaged cat stool and into
a pouch which then is either consumed from a straw
that was the original design or U now is actually
added to our special zero G cup. Well that sounds nice,
but that also makes it sound very simple. I suspect
your skipping a little bit of detail. Yes, so, yeah,
there are a number of details here. It's more complicated
(38:19):
than it sounds. For starters, you still have to hit
some key temperatures to make a proper cup of coffee.
Oh yeah, so it needs to hit the water needs
to hit the grounds at two and eight degrees fahrenhyd
or ninety degrees cytegrade, and it needs to leave the
brewing unit and a hundred and sixty seven degrees fahrenheyd
or seventy five degrees cyntegrade. This is a home coffee
making tip. If your home coffee machine makes bad coffee,
(38:42):
it's very likely that the reason for this is that
the water that's hitting the grounds is not hot enough.
One easy way to find out if this is the case,
is to just see how your your coffee that you
normally use tastes. If you just add your own boiling
water in like a free filter and pour it over
sometimes makes a huge different. Yeah, I mean, and that's
one of the reasons, one of the many reasons I've
(39:03):
only use AeroPress and French press these days, Like I
just heat the water it myself. There's no question about
how hot the water is. Now. One of the things
about hot water in space though in microgravity, steam bubbles
don't evenly distribute. The bubbles can form together and create
pockets of hot air that can potentially damage the machine,
(39:24):
in the machine and the users. And that's why the
I S. S machine here uses steel tubes instead of
rubber tubes that can resist pressures greater than four hundred bars.
I'm just now thinking for the first time, wouldn't it
be a horrible story if there was like a fatal
disaster on a spacecraft and the cause of it was
the coffee machine. It would I mean, But it's it's
(39:46):
the kind of thing that is possible given given the
constraints of the environment. I mean, there's it's a reason
that there are so many. The reason there are so
many additional safety requirements for anything that goes up, any device,
especially goes up on the I S S. So everything
from sharp edges to the touch temperature, etcetera. Um, so
they not only had to design in a sense, the
(40:08):
perfect coffee maker here the perfect espresso machine, but also
one that just managed to hit some of the pickiest
safety uh uh demands humanly possible. So how big is
this hog? It is a four pound machine. Uh. And
I didn't I didn't do the breakdown. I mean we've
we've done the breakdown on on the on how much
(40:31):
money it really takes to send you know, orbital payload costs. Yeah,
a little paylo. I didn't do that breakdown on this
particular machine because ultimately, who can put a price tag
on a proper espresso in orbit? That is, we should
say it is not cheap. Not each pound do you
take into orbit, even lowerth orbit is expensive. Yeah. So
it was a sent up on a thanks to SpaceX,
(40:56):
and it is as of this recording, still in operation.
It produced is it has a few different options, So
you can produce a short black, a long black. You
can make tea with it, which is good because not
everybody that goes up on the I S S especially
is is going to be a coffee drinker. Tea is
more popular with other cultures. Totally true. Yeah, and then
(41:16):
also you can use it to make broth, so it
can be used to rehydrate food. And I think this
is this is this really, you know, I think makes
a light bulb come on in many people's head when
you realize, oh, it's not just a coffee and teamaker.
It is uh, it is a multi purpose kitchen implement
as well. It's how you make your shrimp stock and
court bouyond on the I S S. Yeah. So here's
(41:38):
a quote from the paper I referenced from Daytona and
Hall quote. One of the big challenges undertaken by the
engineering team was to design the I S S Presso
as an I S S system and not only as
a payload and extending the I S S Presso functionalities
and capabilities. It does make espresso, which can provide a
psychological benefit to the crew that is away from home
(42:01):
from months at a time, but it also has the
ability to expand or modify the crew menu. The I
S S Presso can make tease as well as consumme a.
These additional options provide flexibility to the crew menu that
is not currently available. Again, this was as of the writing,
it had not yet gone up. For example, a dish
of rice may have a variety of broth added to
(42:21):
it for different tastes. And they also point out what
we mentioned already that astronaut tastes often change uh in
in in microgravity due to fluid build up in the head,
so they may prefer more spice, more flavor in orbit.
So the so the options with this machine give them
that flexibility. Oh that is important because so let's say
you have astronauts taste testing food before they go into
(42:45):
orbit to try to say, Okay, what am I gonna
like once I get up there? But you, the way
food tastes to you on Earth is not the same
way that it's going to taste to you once you're up. Yeah,
so you're gonna want to have options, and this machine
provides them. No, I want to be clear about something
I said a minute ago. I was making jokes about
the the costs of putting the coffee machine in space.
But I think stuff like this matters. I am a
(43:06):
pro space exploration person, even considering the costs, because in
many ways you could argue that at least as a contingency,
space exploration is the future of humankind potentially for from
a colonization standpoint, but at the very least from say
a an exploration research and planetary protection standpoint. Yeah. And
and certainly, the engineering problems involved in making espresso, as
(43:28):
we've we've laid out, are not confined just to coffee making.
Uh that they they they they impact everything from from
fuel systems to human biology. So uh so it's not
everything's interconnected when you're talking about the I S S
or or any kind of a prolonged space mission. So
speaking of the future, Robert, tell me about the future
(43:49):
of coffee and space, Well, my read on all of
this is that this is the machine or the for
the conceivable future. Um. I think we're gonna you may
see different versions of it, but I think this is
the one that's going to stick for a while. I mean,
because it's it's it's been engineered to do the thing
we wanted to do. Plus it also can reconstitute food.
(44:12):
I don't think you're gonna see the technology evolved beyond this, really,
you know. I mean, like this is this is kind
of the perfect coffee maker. Well wait a minute, what
about artificial gravity? Okay, well that that would change everything
if because you're gonna have people they're like, all right,
I've been I've been on this uh, this lengthy space mission.
I love the I S S press so, but I
really want to proper pour over, which is impossible. To
(44:34):
do a pour over, you would need some sort of
artificial gravity. Now, now, we've recorded an episode in the
past where we talked about the two main conceivable methods
outside of just magic gravity. Uh, the two main methods
that could be used here, Yeah, the ones that are
feasible in reality. One of those would be linear acceleration,
where you've got a spacecraft whatever you're inhabiting, constantly accelerating
(44:57):
at exactly the right rate to generate a force pulling
you towards the floor at the same rate as Earth's
gravity would accelerate you towards the ground on the Earth,
which is I think nine point eight meters per second squared.
But that method is only good on the way to
wherever you're going. So you could have your poor over
on board this barreling spaceship. But then when you when
you were reaching your destination, if you need to decelerate
(45:20):
or something, then it's either go back to the I
S presso or go back around I guess well the Yeah,
you could flip the ship around, um like halfway. You
spend half your trip accelerating half the trip decelerating. But
then what happens when you get to you know, the
planet that you're orbiting. Oh yeah, yeah, that's tricky. Well anyway,
the more stable method that people usually talk about is
(45:42):
uh the centripetal force method, which essentially involves a rotating
habitat because as you know, like if you take a
bucket of paint and you spin it around really fast
in the air, you can hold it sideways and the
paint doesn't pour out, and that's because of forces driving
the paint and the bottom of the bucket together there
because of the spinning the spinning angular momentum. And of course,
(46:04):
the same principle could be employed in a spacecraft or
a space station. If you have it spinning and it's
the right size and the right spinning at the right speed,
it will generate a force pulling you toward the outside
rim of that spinning wheel or spinning capsule or whatever.
And you could feasibly stand on it, pour coffee over
on it, Uh, make a court bouyon. So you could
(46:24):
have the in theory, you could have a spaceship with
a rotating taurus that does nothing but enable coffee preparation.
Like it could just have a Mr. Coffee machine on
it and that's it. It would be the most expensive
Mr Coffee in the history of humanity. But hey, you know,
it really matters to have a kitchen with a down,
as we've said, not just for coffee. I mean there
(46:45):
are a lot of things that if you are dealing
with a kitchen, you're going to be dealing with containers
of liquids and stuff like that. If you can have
a down, that would be great. Now that of course,
you could also try and get one of those event
horizon gravity dry lives. And if you had one of
those in place, then you could probably brew one hell
of a cup of coffee where we are going. You
won't need a mouth to taste. That's good. That's good. Now.
(47:09):
The one thing you want to avoid, you know, you
want to get some cream in your coffee, probably because
you don't want it so black, uh that light cannot
escape it. It's just gonna be probably it's gonna be
a problem. That's how we create a black hole exactly.
Somebody bruised the dankest cup of coffee and history up
in space, and that's how that's how it all ends,
brewing for centuries while the crew is in hypher sleeve, Robert,
(47:35):
this has been fun. This has uh And I think
I managed to finish my oh almost finished my own
cup of coffee while we were podcasting here. I've finished
mine too. Accept a little tepid sip here at the bottom.
Am I gonna drink it or not? My my sip
was was a little chili, but it was actually the
air conditioning in this room has made it cold enough
that it did feel like like it was like cold
(47:58):
brew coffee. I'm here contemplated in the riddle of existence.
Will I swallow it? You should? Yeah? Okay, here we go.
Yeah one very good. So there you have it, Uh,
coffee and space a great opportunity to talk a little
bit about fluid dynamics and microgravity and some wonderful human
(48:18):
engineering uh feats of achievement. So before we close out here,
we're just gonna say the usual. If you want more
stuff to Blow your Mind. Head on over to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find
all the episodes, including such episodes as our micro gravity
episode which we'll get which gets very in depth on
some of these topics that we h we briefly discussed
(48:39):
here today. You'll also find links out to every social
media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And as always,
if you want to support the show, the best thing
you can do is to find us and rate us
and review us at wherever you get your podcast. Huge
thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams
and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get in
(48:59):
touch with us with feedback about this episode or any other, uh,
let us know your favorite kind of coffee, what what
brew you would drink in space? Uh, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hi, let
us know where you listen from. You can email us
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com
(49:23):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com
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