What better way to greet the day than this tw**t from astronaut Samantha Christoforetti, who, being Italian, was elated on Wednesday to take delivery of a special space espresso machine ferried to the International Space Station via the Dragon vehicle. “Sam”, as she calls herself, is, as Wikpedia notes, the first Italian woman in space, is festooned with multiple degrees, and is also a polyglot, “fluent in Italian, English, German, French and Russian.“
I didn’t know this, but as Star Trek fan Grania points out in the first comment below (and gives a video), Christoforetti’s comment is a direct quote from Captain Janeway.
Note that Christoforetti even donned a special Star Trek uniform for the occasion! Much as I’d like to, I can’t designate her the Official Website Sweetheart™ as that position is already filled by Philomena, but she’s just become The Official Website Astronaut™.
According to Forbes, the astronauts previously had to make do with powdered coffee mixed with hot water. No self-respecting Italian could tolerate such swill.
The Dragon is a private SpaceX supply vehicle that carries supplies and equipment to the ISS. This time, besides the espresso machine, it also carried less important stuff like imaging satellites and paraphernalia for scientific experiments (including mice). It looks like this:
The Guardian has a long article on the Space Espresso Machine, which is surprisingly cumbersome. Here’s a photo, labeled “The ISSpresso machine weighs about 20kg – the same as all the science instruments on the Philae comet lander put together. Photograph: Lavazza”. And it apparently produces coffee of a quality indistinguishable from that of real Italian espresso. I have to say that this is a LOT of effort to get decent coffee to the astronauts!
A description:
The device was made by two Turin-based companies, Lavazza Coffee and engineering firm Argotec. It is called the ISSpresso and was delivered by Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti in the early hours of Monday morning, when her Soyuz space capsule docked at the orbiting habitat.
Making coffee in space is difficult, especially espresso, which relies on 94°C water being passed through ground coffee under high pressure.
On Earth this is achieved with the help of gravity. The ground coffee is placed in a perforated container, the water is heated and shot on to the coffee to drip into the cup. In space there is no up and down, so things don’t naturally fall.
Water – and the scalding coffee – would simply form droplets and float away, presenting a hazard both to the astronauts and to the sensitive electronics on board. So the ISSpresso takes water from a pouch and pumps it round the machine.
The water is heated and placed under pressure then fired through a capsule of ground coffee. According to the Italian national espresso institute, the water must reach the coffee at 9 bar of pressure to be called a certified Italian espresso.
To guard against accidents, the piping in the ISSpresso can withstand pressures of up to 400 bar. The machine itself weighs 20kg, which is the same as all the science instruments on the Philae comet lander put together.
The resulting drink is pumped into another plastic pouch and the astronaut drinks it through a straw.
Lavazza has a video on PuffHo that you can see by clicking on the screenshot below (it’s at the bottom of the article). The ISS justifies the machine because it’s an important psychological booster. I agree fully!
Sadly, Astronaut Sam won’t be able to have a morning cappuccino:
Those hoping for cappuccino on the ISS however still have some time to wait. The process relies on frothing milk using steam, then separating the resulting foam from the milk. On Earth, gravity does the separation for you. In zero-G, the milk and the foam would be almost inseparable unless you placed the device in a centrifuge. But then, how do you get the milk foam to float on the coffee?
Here’s our hero again; you can follow her at @AstroSamantha (her Flickr Photostream is here):
h/t: Jon
A Janeway quote:
I just get garbled noise… can you write whar she says?
Is it the same as the quote in the post?
The sound still works for me, and yes, it is the famous (infamous?) little “there’s coffee in that nebula” speech that Janeway gives. [If memory serves, they need an energy source for Voyager’s Replicators and are hoping to collect necessary resources from the nebula.]
I remember the episode – I love Voyager. They had been running on strict rations for a while because they hadn’t been able to refuel (or whatever you call it for Voyager’s power source). Janeway wasn’t able to have her usual morning coffee – Neelix pulled her up for providing a bad example when she tried. I had all seven series on video. They took up a lot of space!
The sound works for me, although initially it was automatically muted for some reason (see button bottom left).
20 kg! That’s unbelievably heavy; a payload like that must have cost millions to send. I never understood how people can be so addicted to coffee. (I’m ducking the coffee mugs that are being thrown right about now!)
I don’t drink coffee either but I see the worth of this in terms of it solving an engineering problem that may have more general utility. We now have a way of shooting pressurized liquid through a filter system in space, controlling all the relevant engineering factors (temperature, pressure, etc…). Not just ‘in principle,’ but in practice. The same would be true of cappuccino: I may have no use for it, but it seems to me that figuring out how to separate liquid and foam phases of a substance in zero-g might be something useful to know down the road.
Or perhaps we can use the modern caffeine addiction to push the space program in a different (more forward-thinking) direction: “you know folks, if you just built a spinning toroid space station, you could feed your addiction for high quality coffee drinks and many other luxuries without having to re-engineer every single process…”
Or open a series of overpriced cafes named Starbucks (oops, that name is taken), serving a special unique gourmet blend of coffees including 1% beans that has been to space and so has a special, delicate, if completely imaginary jizz. Charge $7.00/cup (oh wait, they already do that) and finance the space program….
SpaceX claims it costs $2000-$3000 (USD) per pound for them to put something in orbit. So that’s 44 lbs or $88,0000-$132,000.
Not millions, but an exceedingly precious coffee machine nonetheless.
If only the ISS had some real purpose, besides a make-work program for astronauts with nowhere to go, it’d seem a little less so.
A lot of money for not doing any science… & – I have to be careful he so as not to upset PCC – then talking about climate change…?
Here is the carbon footprint of coffe…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/17/carbon-footprint-of-tea-coffee
That article seems a bit silly to me. Eat a biscuit to save on the CO2e from the milk used in white coffee? I’d use way more CO2e in baking the biscuit, not to mention the milk I used to make the biscuits. I’d like to see their numbers.
Maybe – we are all screwed anyway…
I suppose if a person already holds the opinion that manned space flight is not a good thing, for any of several reasons that people hold that opinion, then perhaps ISS is a waste.
But, I don’t see it. Even if no science, research (but there is), or anything else of relatively direct benefit is done on ISS, just the experience of building equipment, using it, maintaining it, living and working in space, is going to be very useful for the future. A huge amoung of data and experience. I am always somewhat surprised that even some science oriented people would think that such data is worthless.
Perhaps it is because they are so sure that there is no need for manned space flight, and or that there will never be any significant human presence in space. I am not sure about that and think it is moot anyway. I think that regardless of “need” humans will continue to push into space.
I’ve seen make-work public projects, bridges to nowhere for example, that I think are a waste. That does’t mean I’m anti-bridge.
ISS is a waste because at no point was it designed with any clear purpose in mind. Rather, the purpose was “build a space station”, and the assumption was that once built all sorts of useful things would come out of it. It’s a solution in search of a problem and that approach almost never pays off. Sure, we’re learning a little bit about living in space for long times, about keeping things working in space, etc. But only a very little. The Russians had already been doing that for ages before the ISS was built, at a tiny fraction of the cost. And when we finally do go somewhere else, back to the moon, to mars, how much will what we learned be useful? How much will be lost institutional knowledge by then? How much will be obsolete due to technology?
But what really turns me against ISS as a project is the opportunity costs it entails. For it’s $150 billion price tag we could have sent a hundred robots to Europa, Titan, Ganymede, and Callisto. Think about that for a moment. 100 robotic missions! Think of all we have learned from just the dozen or so we have sent. Now imagine sending out ten times as many solar system exploration missions than we have sent so far. We could have had sample and return missions to Mars to look for signs of life. Heck, we could have even sent astronauts to an asteroid, or probably built a little camp on the moon, for a similar price. Any one of those things would have been more valuable than what we are doing with ISS. And, I would contend, ISS isn’t even helping us have a manned presence in space, but rather it is a barrier to it. It neither captures the public imagination nor pays off scientifically. It’s both useless and boring and keeps us from actually doing things that would further any real activity in space.
All that said, if the choice is ISS or spending that $150 billion on more beer and Cheetos, I think it’s a good use of money. Better make-work for astronauts than no work. So I’m with you that far. But compared to what we could have done with that $150 billion, it is a crime, a total failure of imagination, vision, and purpose.
I bet a lot of the decision making is political. Sure, we could send 100 robots to the gas giant moons, but a space station filled with astronauts has much more PR implications and visibility. I say we should do both; make space-robots, not war!
Well, sure. $500 billion ANNUALLY, not a one time cost but year in and year out, PLUS per-war costs for our huge “defense” spending is another kind of crime. Imagine if we shaved that to starvation levels of a mere $400 billion a year.. still more than the rest of the world combined… and plowed the $100 billion difference into space every year….
Sigh.
I disagree on a few things, but I largely agree about missing out on what we could have done with more robotic missions.
But my point of view is that you are off target. To me the better target is the paltry amount that we have invested in space period, altogether. We could easily have spent twice as much on space and done those robotic missions and manned space missions both, and done them better. A modest decrease in military spending, for example, could have covered it nicely with no significant loss in our defense capabilities. And shoot, if we did it half as smartly as Space X has been operating so far compared to the mess NASA has become?
Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s “Space Oddity” video has 25 million views.
And an excellent video it is. You guys may be right. I may be completely wrong on this point. People definitely like astronauts and space and even the space station… those are always popular, there is no doubt about it.
My own sense, though, is that while people like it, it also has a numbing effect on the public. Somewhere, we all know, there are people in orbit. It’s not obvious what they are doing there, we like the idea of astronauts and so we’re happy there are some doing something… making music videos, or science videos for schools, or playing around with spiders, mice, or whatever it is they are doing. People are willing to pay for that. But nothing about that makes them want to invest more in the project than they already are. Nothing about that makes them want to spend more than the minimum necessary to keep that hotel in operation. After all, it’s not like such videos will be better if there are more astronauts in orbit. One is enough to give us the “Gee isn’t being in orbit neat” feeling. It’s good enough to give us a cheap astronaut fix, but not good enough to inspire us to really do something ambitious.
Now some say it’s a stepping stone to Mars or some such. NASA has been talking about going to Mars for decades. I don’t think many people feel like it’s going to happen, at least not at the hands of NASA. To the public ear I conjecture that it sounds like just more of the talk they’ve heard for ages. Many for their whole life. I think that kind of talk, without concrete and obvious directed effort, is numbing too. If NASA really acted like they were going to Mars, or anywhere even, really started *doing* obvious things to make that happen, I think the public would be inspired, and would be receptive to make budget sacrifices to see it happen. But ramping up funding to merely get more talk about going, for NASA to formulate yet another 20 year plan to “study” a mission to Mars or “develop technology” to go… yawn. They’ll pass. Because the public is, justifiably, skeptical that it’s a serious project. Even if it is a serious project, it has to be seen to be making progress. And 40+ years of hanging out in LEO isn’t, I judge, giving people that feeling.
So NASA is sort of stuck, operating an expensive hotel with neither the extra cash to pursue something ambitious, nor the ambitious project that would inspire people to cough up extra cash.
That’s how I see it. I expect to die never again seeing astronauts leave LEO. But I’m wrong about a lot of stuff. I hope I’m wrong about this.
SpaceX is charging NASA $133M per Dragon/F9 launch to the station. The Dragon can carry up to 3,310 kg of payload to ISS, which comes out to $40K/kg. So, 20kg is $800K.
I’m with you Lou. My thought was — Really? Must have fancy coffee?
Astronauts give up A LOT — especially in the area of eating and drinking, in order to participate in space flight and the ISS.
How did espresso rise to the top of the priority list? (I can imagine the chagrin of all the scientists whose experiments were bumped from this mission to accommodate the espresso machine.)
Caffeine patch for the addicts? Or Nescafe (the real stuff, that I found available in the EU and also Asia and Africa)?
I don’t drink coffee, but I can see it would be good for morale for those who do.
I just threw mine!
This is one of things where some people will complain that we’re wasting time and money on an espresso machine for space when there are more important issues. I say, good for Sam, the ISS and the companies that made the ISSpresso machine.
Science is awesome.
Yes, but consider the opportunity costs. Several experiments were likely bumped for an espresso machine.
Opportunity costs? I didn’t see anything that got bumped on the NASA website to make room for the ISSpresso.
Sending people into space in the first place – that is the real issue.
I don’t understand why sending people into space is an issue. I also don’t understand why you say they aren’t doing science.
Please explain.
I did not say the cosmonauts/astronauts are not doing science.
As to whether pople go into space & whether BETTER science cannot be done using robotic missions, THAT is a well known discussion that has been going around for decades. I did not give an opinion on that, I was careful not to. Imerely pointed out that it is a contentious area.
For example -http://www.wired.com/2012/04/space-humans-vs-robots/
The ‘not doing any science’ refers to the money/space/cost of the coffee machine, not the space station in general.
I think you’re getting close to an important point here…. Suppose that the experiments going up to ISS were obviously highly scientifically valuable. Suppose, for example, that it was an espresso machine or a new camera for the Hubble telescope that was to go up. Would there be an espresso machine? No. Of course not. The science would go up and the expresso machine would stay. Part of the reason the expresso machine goes is because whatever science that could-have-gone in it’s place is not that compelling.
My impression of most of the science done on the ISS is that it’s make-work science, basically people looking at the ISS and saying, “Well, here’s a big lab in space. What could we do with it?”, and trying to make up experiments that have some space angle. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s a cramped expensive laboratory, with limited resources at hand. What scientific advantage is there to being in orbit? Microgravity, of course. How many scientific questions hinge on microgravity? The most obviously useful science one might do in LEO is science on human physiology in space. But even there, most of the experiments I’ve heard of strike me as rather weak. Corrections welcome. I’d be interested to learn what the most valuable science done on ISS is. My impression of most of the science is pretty dim.
In any case, I don’t begrudge them their espresso machines, even if it bumped some half way decent science. They are humans and I have empathy for their creature comfort cravings. I’d just blow the tax $ spent on more Cheetos or something anyway, and I get as much vicarious enjoyment as that thinking about espressos in space.
It’s not obvious to me that any experiments were bumped to make room for this machine.
Chris Hadfield took a guitar to ISS. So clearly astronauts are allowed some amount of personal baggage for things like that. If they want to use it on an espresso machine, who are we to tell them no?
Moreover, SpaceX is a commercial carrier, not a government agency. Presumably it’s legitimate for anyone — including Lavazza — to bid on a spot on one of their flights. In principle it’s no different than you or me ordering an espresso machine from Amazon and having it shipped by UPS. Only the price tag is different.
Not many non-scientists have much reason to ship stuff up to ISS (yet). But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to. If there’s enough demand, SpaceX will schedule more flights, so nobody’s package needs to get bumped.
How many sunrises a day do they get to see? 15-16… That’s a lot of espresso!
They will be bouncing off the walls in a new way.
-evan
What is not to like? She even throws down a Star Trek Voyager quote! Excellent choice for Official Website Astronaut™.
Minor correction. At the moment neither the Dragon spacecraft nor the Falcon 9 booster are man rated. Space X is steadily working towards that though. Currently Space X is only transporting goods. It is likely to be a couple of years yet before they achieve man rating for their systems and begin flying people.
Since the Shuttle was retired Russia has been the only entity capable of flying people into space. All astronauts that have flown since then have flown on Soyuz.
I am sure that Elon Musk will get there. The cost of sending the coffee machine up there via his rocket is much cheaper than NASA doing it.
I agree. There are no serious obstacles, at least not technical ones. It is just a matter of time, and not a very long time, while they dot the Is and cross the Ts. They are also making steady progress on reusability. I think it very likely that their next attempt at landing their 1st stage on a barge at sea, their 4th attempt (or 3rd if you discount the one they decided to abort), will be successful. In any case, there is no reason to doubt they will achieve it soon.
What with Space X, Tesla Motors and Solar City Elon Musk is a real game changer. I don’t really do heros, but he is very high on my list of admirable people.
I agree and do so on the hero thing. A very over-used word these days. Generally should be reserved for those who go into combat or into burning buildings and very exceptional things. Elon Musk is just a very smart guy with a vision and a lot of guts.
I’ve fixed the description so it’s accurate; thanks!
And for anyone who complains about NASA not getting people into space – just look at what happened with ESA and the Jules Verne type of spacecraft. Long before the announcement of the retirement of the shuttle fleet ESA engineers said “we can get this rated as a human transport vehicle” – but I suspect ESA politics killed the idea. Only 5 such spacecraft were ever built and there were never any approved programs for attaining rating for human transport. So I’m betting Musk gets the Dragon to that stage before anyone else in the USA or EU get a human-rated spacecraft.
He does seem to have an insurmountable lead. Both Boeing and Space X were awarded contracts from NASA to start crew transport missions to ISS by late 2017. I don’t see how Boeing can meet that dead line, though their contract is about twice the amount of Space X’s so maybe that will help. Space X is, very visibly, well on their way.
Boeing’s spaceship will be launched on a ULA booster. ULA does not currently have a human rated booster. Originally ULA was going to create an upgraded human rated version of their Atlas 5 booster. But, for political reasons the Russian built RD-180 engines the Atlas uses have become a problem. Congress has approved a ban on them, among other things. ULA now has plans to build an all new booster with an all new main engine provided by relative new comer Blue Origin. They better hurry! 2-3 years is not much time at all for developing a new human rated booster with new engines from paper to flying missions.
Space X’s human rated Dragon spacecraft will be launched by their own Falcon F9 booster. The Falcon F9 was intended and designed from the start to be a human rated booster and it is unlikely Space X will have any problems achieving human rating for it in the alloted time.
Russia’s next generation manned spacecraft, the Advanced Crew Vehicle (ACV), isn’t due for its first test flight until 2018. They had orginally planned on developing a new booster to launch it but more recently decided to upgrade an existing booster to human rated instead.
Dragons don’t carry people yet.
A dragon (named Drogin) will be carrying Dani around toward the end of this season of GoT.
No Spoilers! 🙂
Sub
Wow 🙂
I was under the impression that Sarah Silverman &/or Sandra Bullock were the official website sweethearts? Does that mean they are available?!
You forgot Philomena
She is an interloper! A cheeky mun-keh…
They are unofficial website sweethearts.
Can we have some official site studs? We’ve only got the calendar of priests.
I nominate Brian Cox.
Lack of coffee was the main reason I had no interest in going into space. I guess I’ll have to go now. How much are the tickets?
I’m gonna hold off till they get BLT’s…
Now if they’d get a juicer up there to replace the Tang®, I’d consider popping in for brunch (although it usually takes at least eggs benedict to get me all the way up even to a friend’s fourth-floor walk-up).
My sister had the opportunity to talk to Jim Lovell at his son’s restaurant, coincidentally called Lovell’s, near her house in Lake Forest IL. She asked him if astronauts really drank Tang®, but apparently they did not. She was mildly crushed.
If I were Lovell’s kid, and I owned a restaurant, you better believe there’d be Tang® on the menu. There’d be 2-for-1-Tang®-screwdriver-specials in front of the Big Screen every time there was a televised space launch.
This whole thing is making me giggle quite merrily. Imagine: Good coffee in space.
The machine should also work under gravity, so maybe they can market it and sell it for us land lubbers.
According to some science (I read it in Nat’l Geo so who knows), caffeine does make one smarter by dilating blood vessels in the brain: more blood, more oxygen, better thinking. So perhaps any science they do will be a decimal percent better.
Since I have afib, I forego caffeine…woe is me 🙁
I’ve always had a thing for women with guy’s names (and, no, I don’t care to know what Dr. Freud may have made of that). I bear the psychic scars of various Alexes, Sydneys, Frankies, and Jos.
So Sammy C., once you’ve got the bugs worked out of that espresso machine, [thumb to ear, pinkie to mouth, in pantomime:] “call me.”
EA Janeway line. Excellent!
Oh, oh…and Theo’s next birthday present!! 😀
It’s about time our heroic astronauts got the type of accommodations found at even a middling Hyatt out by the airport.
Why isn’t there a Star Trek series airing right now? Seriously, the show has inspired so damn many people, and now with the new movies it has reached even more. We need more Star Trek on TV!
Well, talk about yer overachievers! 🙂
If you’re going to make coffee in space, espresso is clearly the way to go, since drip or (shudder) perked coffee would be even more difficult.
Brava!
Now as for ‘no up and down’ – that’s not true for the ISS since it’s so close to earth; down is toward the earth and up is away from it. The ISS (~300 – 400km altitude) still experiences about 88% of the gravity we’ve got at sea level. The problem on the ISS is that everything is in perpetual freefall (the ISS is falling as quickly as any object dropped) so funky things happen especially when dealing with not-so-viscuous liquids. Now let’s ask an astronaut (or cosmonaut) what happens when they blow up a balloon and simply let go to allow the balloon to drift on its own – which direction does the balloon drift?
Does anyone know what it’s like to actually swallow and digest food and drink in a low-gravity situation? How much of what we do when we move food down our neck tube and into the tummy sack is dependent on gravity? Or is it mainly peristalsis? So many things one considers normal are really just normal to us, situated in this mind-bogglingly unrepresentative part of the universe.