How To Make Espresso In Space 192
In a story that's sure to bring to the surface the long-debunked myth of an over-elaborate NASA quest to create a pen to operate in space, Wired reports that the coffee situation aboard the International Space Station is about to improve: the station will be getting a 20kg, custom designed Lavazza espresso machine, to be delivered along with Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. Among other differences from terrestrial espresso machines: the resulting beverage must be pumped into a straw-friendly bag rather than a demitasse. I wonder if there could be some way to adapt a (much lighter) Aeropress for space purposes, as a backup.
Putting the "Star" in Starbucks... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Putting the "Star" in Starbucks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Last I heard, it cost around $20k/kg to lift cargo to orbit. Add in the extra weight of beans vs instant, and the world will finally see (albeit from a distance) coffee even more overpriced than Starbucks'.
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Re:Putting the "Star" in Starbucks... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Putting the "Star" in Starbucks... (Score:4, Interesting)
The machine is a Lavazza. One would hope the beans are something else.
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It had better be kopi luwak for that price.
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The machine is developed by argotec. I would assume that the capsules are Lavazza.
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The astronaut going into space is an Italian. One would assume he would have advised the relavent space agencies on how to select the best coffee to send up there.
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well the italian aspect certainly explains why they would spend the 20kg on a coffee machine.
and it's a capsule machine. but it has pipes that could withstand 400 bar of pressure. Why? I haven't got the slightest clue. but that still doesn't explain the weight. for the dimensions the frame has to be half inch steel or some shit like that(they actually claim its for some backup system, the weight, I don't know if it has some fluid suckup machine or something in case it leaks).
on the other hand, since the cap
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My espresso machine is rated for 15 bar and probably weighs 2-3 kilos or so since it's made of heavy steel. 9 bar is pretty much the minimum to make espresso and actually get crema.
I assume it's been heavily over-engineered because having your espresso machine malfunction in space would make a horrible mess. If my espresso machine leaks, it dumps water and grounds on my counter -- in space, it would be worse e
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Maybe China...
Ok, that joke's getting old.
Re:Putting the "Star" in Starbucks... (Score:4, Funny)
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Lifting not required. The cow jumped over the moon.
You're right (Score:3, Insightful)
The feds should have spent that blowing up more civilians and occupying places that don't want us there. Over $5 trillion wasted, and Iraq is about to fall again. Fuck, I'll take coffee in space any day of the week over what that stuff is usually spent on.
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Agreed, it would be a better use of our money generally if they were working on a way to deliver coffee to individuals via orbital drops than some of the other things they waste it on.
Just like other coffee multinationals (Score:3)
I wonder if they will sell them special space-rated coffee beans at highly enflated prices in order to move any profits back to tax havens?
(See http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/targ... [ukuncut.org.uk] if you miss the joke)
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Well, at least that ISS coffee's price will have some kind of justification. If you want to see coffee that works like printer ink (from the price model as well as the taste), check out this [wikipedia.org].
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Short black with one (Score:4, Interesting)
How do they add sugar!!!
Look, I love coffee as much as the next guy but when they are replacing 20kg of scientific payload with a 20kg coffee machine (plus the pods and waste management), they might have their priorities a little skewed. If they'd spent the money on produging a better freeze dried espresso, all of humanity could benefit.
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I think they have spare capacity by now (but of course it does mean extra fuel).
Re:Short black with one (Score:4, Insightful)
Coffee is scientific payload. You don't want your experiments to fail because the involved researchers were under-caffeinated.
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once you start adding sweeteners and dairy products
Americans don't add dairy products. Instead they add this thing called "creamer" for which I have no idea how it relates to a cow.
Plus, given that the nostalgic view that Americans as a culture have with regards to coffee revolves around brownish sludge in a piece of glassware that wouldn't look out of place in a laboratory; I'm not even sure they're starting with coffee.
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Traditionally we use half&half (causing the rest of the world to ask for a translation; it's a thinner cream that's halfway between milk and whipping cream.) It's available in little ultrapasteurized single-servings as well as fresh.
But if keeping the dairy products refrigerated isn't convenient, there are powdered imitations that deserve the contempt you've expressed, and liquid imitations that are excuses for corn syrup and artificial flavors, and also non-dairy creamers for people who can't tolerate
Re:Short black with one (Score:5, Funny)
Instead they add this thing called "creamer" for which I have no idea how it relates to a cow.
I'm an Aussie, many moons ago I was in a bar in Amsterdam talking to a Dutch guy and a bloke from Chicago. The American asked "What's wrong with the milk over here, it goes off after 3-4 days in the fridge?", the dutchman and I nearly died laughing.
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Sorry, but this anecdote fails at explaining any cross cultural confusion. Was he buying something that wasn't milk? Your setting is Amsterdam, is this funny because he was buying drugs, not milk? Was he buying old milk because he didn't understand the expiration system? Is it funny that someone would have the expectation that a refrigerator would keep something fresh for more than 4 days? Is the joke that he thought milk that smelled like milk instead of an industrial product was 'off'? I'm genuinely int
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Creamer is made using the other 'cows' in the field that aren't busy making the (real) milk ;-)
What's the main difference between American coffee (Score:2)
The coffee isn't subject to open container laws.
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It's a Lavazza machine.
So by your definition it should be absolutely impossible to drink it black. The question stands.
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Or floats :)
Re:Short black with one (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you like yours "black and bitter," have at it, but don't expect me to join you.
The idea is that good coffee isn't bitter.
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Personally, I prefer mine with cream and sugar because I find that for me it enhances the flavor.
Nope. Cream may bring out some flavors in the coffee that you can't otherwise taste, because it's fat and some of that stuff might be fat-soluble. But sugar can only ever hide the flavor in the coffee. Fetishism aside, if you come up with coffee that hasn't been sitting a long time and grind it fresh, there won't be so many undesirable flavors in it that need to be masked that way.
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I have had extremely good results using an Aeropress and good-quality beans that I grind myself. When done right, it makes coffee that has no bitterness at all, even if allowed to cool to room temperature.
Coffee that tastes as good as it smells is something everyone should try at least once in their lives.
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I cant find an exact figure but I know the cost to send it up on a SpaceX Falcon Rocket is a fair bit less than $10k per KG.
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yeah, I claim innocence of having any faults and that the government in this asian country censored the K. I mean k.
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You can get a decent cup of coffee from an Aeropress, and the upside is it takes up neither a lot of space nor a lot of mass. I think all told the whole thing is ~200g; it also makes some pretty good coffee.
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There's nothing dangerous about a floating bubble of boiling water, is there?
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Aeropress reccomends 175 F, which is still hot enough to cause third degree burns [wa.gov].
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I like to think that there's a progression of how to make good coffee (with the first items being the easiest to do):
1) use hot, not boiling water. Just wait about 90 seconds after boiling a kettle to get a suitable tem
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Fun fact: Deer park water coolers with a "hot" spigot put out ~175-180 degree water-- which happens to be the optimal Aeropress temperature.
And honestly if you're using an aeropress with proper temp water, whole beans etc are all not that important-- your coffee is already better than 80% of the stuff commonly drunk (drip, keurig). I have done fresh ground Jamaican Blue Mountain (from Trader Joes), and compared to pre-ground Kirkland columbian (3lb tub) and while JBM is definitely "better" its not really
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I do think that the freshness of the beans makes a big difference, but it's not easy for most people to get hold of freshly roasted beans without spending more money. Supermarket coffee beans are hopelessly stale (and don't even get me started the stal
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An aeropress doesnt rely on gravity, it relies on manually created air pressure. Attach a funnel / baggie to the service end of the aeropress, brew as normal, drink from your baggie.
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Re:Short black with one (Score:4, Funny)
And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords!
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Seems kinda extravagant (Score:4, Funny)
" to be delivered along with Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti " it requires a barista?
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Re:Seems kinda extravagant (Score:4, Informative)
I find this heartwarming (Score:2)
For some reason, I find the idea of having a shot of real, hot espresso in space heartwarming.
A little bit of home, when you're up so very high above it..
Air pressure (Score:2, Insightful)
They would have to boil the water in a pressurized container
You can't even get a good cup of tea or coffee on Mt Everest, let alone in space.
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They *are* in a pressurized container. The ISS maintains a pressurized environment equivalent to sea level on Earth.
Re:Air pressure (Score:4, Informative)
Normal air pressure on the ISS is 101.3 kPa (14.7 psi);[4] the same as at sea level on Earth. It would hardly do for astronauts to get the bends upon arrival at the ISS.
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Yes, but not for the reasons you think.
Pressure is not the issue, the vessel is pressurized (else the astronauts would asphyxiate quite quickly).
Gravity is the issue. They don't want boiling hot liquid dancing around in a space ship.
Hamster wheel solution (Score:3)
Crema? (Score:2)
In microgravity, this wouldn't separate out so the espresso would be a homogeneous dark brown foam throughout rather than the espresso we see down here on earth. I wonder what it'd be like.
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I was just wondering the same thing.
Bet it taste pretty good actually.
(Good luck getting fresh coffee beans)
Bag could make it Intravenous (Score:2)
Espresso at NASA (Score:2)
I don't know about in space, but here on Earth, I work at a NASA center and we have one of the best "underground" espresso clubs I have ever seen. Very sophisticated engineering techniques have been applied -- our machine gets serviced in the NASA machine shop sometimes.
You should see that place near launch deadlines. Poor grinder never gets a break!
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No need. They only send REAL men and worn into space.
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Then why the espresso machine? REAL men chew the beans.
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REAL men chew the beans.
Hard guys pass the beans through their own intestinal tract, Kopi Luwak style, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... [wikipedia.org] . . .
. . . and then chew them.
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No need. They only send REAL men and worn into space.
What the hell's a "worn"?
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A worm/human hybrid-- they are similar in a lot of ways to to Dougal Dixon's Homo caelestis, but as with a lot o Biopreperat's work, the ethics are a bit muddled, so the worn program tries to keep a low profile.
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funny, I'm mainly a tea drinker but the pansy coffee drinkers at work can't take the smoked lapsang souchong and colonial black tea I like, say they're too strong
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Should introduce them to the coffee my mom used to make. The recipe for it ends in "and if the horseshoe sinks you didn't use enough coffee".
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My brother always said his friend's family would make several pots of coffee per day, but not empty the old grounds until night. Just put a new scoopful on top. So the coffee got progressively more robust throughout the day.
Re:yuck epresso (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh, that sounds like the coffee made in Sweden or Finland.
It's always funny to see people from around europe and north america try to drink coffee as made in Sweden or Finland, while Swedes and Finns generally regard coffee made by anyone else as too watery.
When I was in Kosovo, with the Swedish KFOR unit, we had some people from the US 502nd PIR come over to to our PX/café to try our coffee, and most of them had to thin it out to drink it, they weren't used to having it that strong. And they didn't believe us when we told them that it was not a special military brewing, but instead just ordinary brewing as most swedes who drink coffee would appreciate it.
Common complaints from tourists is that even McDonalds and Starbucks coffee in Sweden is way too strong.
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After being exposed to Turkish coffee, my reaction has been "if the spoon falls over, your coffee's not strong enough."
But even when diluted by emigration to America, some parts of Scandinavian coffee culture remains. My experience with various church groups has been that the Lutherans (and spinoffs of Swedish Lutheranism) make better coffee than the Methodists I grew up with, and Southern Baptists make worse coffee (they're really iced tea people.)
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Ah. Now I get it why mom said the only good coffee she ever got (aside of her own) was during our stay in Sweden.
Personally, I do without coffee. But she pretty much couldn't exist without her 3-4 liters a day.
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Fair enough, trying lapsang souchong was my worst tea experience of my whole life. Was like kissing a girl that smokes (also something I won't do ever again).
Re:yuck epresso (Score:5, Insightful)
I never got the whole syrup thing. Coffee needs no flavoring. It has a flavor already. Its flavor is called COFFEE.
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but combine with the other divine flavor and caffenie/theobromine agent in the universe, and you have mocha
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Mochas make a bitchin' backup plan for when you're out of fresh milk. Just buy some sweetened condensed milk on sale, it will keep unopened nigh-eternally without separating like irradiated milk will. The down side is that it's sweetened, so you can only use it for sweet things... like mochas :)
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Coffee needs no flavoring. It has a flavor already. Its flavor is called COFFEE.
Is that you, Sid? [userfriendly.org]
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No. But I can very well relate to him. I'm old, jaded and can remember the times when life was good and code was C.
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Thanks, you're sweet.
But I am. Let's face it, when your answer to an all-night coding marathon to create some cool toy is that you'd rather take a nap, you're old.
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Well, it's like the old joke with the bulls ... let's walk down and fsck them all.
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Denis Leary - Coffee flavoured coffee [youtube.com].
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Might be better to go with........dabs......in......spaaaaaaaace
Seriously though, would be easier on the air filters. Also.... doob and coffee....doob AND coffee. Its like yin and yang man.
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All nice and dandy, but now we have to find a way to produce Earl Grey Tea, too.
And don't you dare come along with teabags!
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>calls people plebs for adding crap to coffee
>drinks macchiato
Coffee black, or go home.
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People usually dont appreciate advertising on slashdot. Im sure you have great goals for this thing, but this isnt the place for spam. Go to kickstarter, indiegogo, or another crowdfunding site if you're looking for donations.
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NASA makes drinking water from piss up there. I wonder if it has repercussions for the taste buds.
I guess it provides some perspective on someone getting caught on surveillance taking a whiz in the office coffeepot.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with pods, it all comes down to the quality and freshness of coffee in the pods.
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Not doubting you but it doesn't matter what the ambient pressure is kept at.
This will be an entirely enclosed system. That mean it can be presurized independent of the local atmosphere. Steam escaping would condisate potentially causing problems not to mention gravity anr floating water. So it is enclosed and likely already able to handle its own pressure containment.
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It's a pressure vessel full of sweating and breathing people with the outside skin temperature probably in single digits of Kelvin most of the time. Condensation is already a given. Dealing with escaped liquids (like balls of water+ethylene glycol coolant the size of someone's torso as was seen on Mir) was part of the design criteria before construction of the first module commenced.
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It's a pressure vessel full of sweating and breathing people with the outside skin temperature probably in single digits of Kelvin most of the time.
You mean, on average? http://science.nasa.gov/scienc... [nasa.gov]
Condensation on cold spots (Score:2)
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