From Space.com article, November 24, 2008:
NASA astronaut Don Pettit loves his coffee. So it comes as no surprise that he found a way to drink coffee from a cup, instead of the traditional straw, on his recent trip aboard the International Space Station. Drinking any liquid in the weightless environment of space could be a messy affair. With hot coffee, it could be a potentially scalding affair. So astronauts use silver pouches and plastic straws to sip anything from water to orange juice to Pettit's beloved space java. "We can suck our coffee from a bag, but to drink it from a cup is hard to do because you can't get the cup up to get the liquid out, and it's also easy to slosh," Pettit told Mission Control while sending a video of his new invention to Earth. Pettit used a piece of plastic ripped from his Flight Data File mission book and folded it into a teardrop-shape that's closed at one end. Surface tension inside the cup keeps the coffee from floating out and running amuck. "The way this works is, the cross section of this cup looks like an airplane wing," he said. "The narrow angle here will wick the coffee up." The result: space coffee in a zero-G cup. The theory behind the novel coffee cup is the same one used by rockets to draw fuel into their engines while flying through weightless conditions in space, Pettit said. "This may very well be what future space colonists end up using when they want to have a celebration and do a toast," Pettit said. Click here for a video of Don Pettit's space coffee cup.
Comments (1)
Cool!