Coffee in Space: and what true confinement means!
MT: the lock-down has certainly given me more time to read and think and I was lent a book called ‘Endurance: A Year In Space, A Lifetime Of Discovery’, by my Dad. Let me clarify that: it wasn’t written by my Dad, he loaned it to me: the author was US astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
I thought it might offer a good insight into what true confinement feels like and that it might put our own restrictions into perspective. It does and it does! For example, Scott missed nature most of all, but even in the midst of all this, we can go or look outside and appreciate nature and the blossoming of Spring more than ever.
Inevitably for Cafe Allez, this was bound to lead onto coffee and I’ve just read about Scott’s bewilderment (as a US citizen!) with the lengths his European colleague Samantha (and the European Space Agency) went to, to get a decent coffee in space: “Apparently when you have Europeans in space, you also have to have good coffee – the instant stuff just isn’t the same”. Amen to that!
It transpires that the machine in question cost over $1M USD and there were only 10 espresso packs on board. So next time you complain about the cost of a Caffe Latte at Cafe Allez! … it’s all relative!.
On further reading, I found that the machine was jointly developed by Italian firms Lavazza and Argotec. There was one remaining fault. The ISSpresso still had to be brewed in a bag and then sucked from a straw. So, to cement the next giant leap for coffee in space, Portland State University developed the zero-G coffee cup to work alongside it, with the cup replicating aspects of Earth’s gravity so the astronauts could enjoy it more.
The ISSpresso is not a drink we’ll be introducing in the ‘shop post-lockdown, but it was a fascinating insight and made me think of how pivotal good coffee is to our lives… how many treats give us so much satisfaction for so little guilt? And, unless you’re in space, for so little cost?
Check the link to get NASA’s take on coffee in space!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWuEVSCw8B8
