When floating in a zero-gravity environment miles above Earth’s surface, it’s the little things that really bring you back home. And what could be more reminiscent of normalcy than a good cup of hot coffee? Of course, it’s these little luxuries that are perhaps the hardest to come by when you’re living large in the International Space Station, but in a new video, British astronaut Tim Peake shows us how they make do. Like most space food (or drink), it’s probably not quite as good as the real thing.
While various contraptions have been developed to better facilitate the actual consumption of beverages (most notably, an anti-gravity whiskey glass), getting the drink into the cup tends to be a little more difficult. And in the case of coffee, you can’t just boil water and pour it into some instant grounds — much less add milk and sugar. So instead, it all comes prepackaged in the now telltale silver container, with a label that reads, “coffee with cream and sugar substitute.” How delightful.
To actually make the coffee, the 43-year-old former army major demonstrates how he places the package into a machine that looks like it would be more at home in a doctor’s office than in a kitchen, whereupon hot water is added to the contents inside. And then, just like any other liquid aboard a spacecraft, Peake is able to drink the concoction through a straw. So no, it’s not a Starbucks frappuccino by any stretch of the imagination, but it gets the job done.
After Peake’s six-month tenure aboard the ISS, there’s no question that a nice, normally brewed cup of coffee will be first on the list of must-haves on good ol’ Planet Earth. Because sometimes, there’s really no substitute for waking up and smelling the coffee.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.