Many institutional seminars are now online, offering the opportunity to have a potentially huge number of seminars available to all of us.Most recently we added the seminars page, where you can advertise live seminars or recordings.We could all be drinking that sludge we used to drink back in college to get us through finals, but we drink “good” coffee because there’s so much more to the coffee experience beyond simply a “Jolt” of caffeine…. I mean honestly…can you imaging what our poor pioneering astronauts have had to put up with so far? I have this mental vision of some little silver pouch that you nuke for 20 seconds and then stick a straw into the side (like a juice pouch) and suck this thick, black goo-like substance out of that “almost…but not quite…tastes entirely unlike coffee”. Of course as this article mentions, they do already have “coffee”…the issue is “good” coffee. Astronauts often require critical thinking and fast reflexes just to stay alive up there and in my mind, coffee has always been a part of that. ![]() Seriously, I have to agree with the general consensus that this is a very good idea indeed. Enter the secretive “Coffee Infuser.”Īs I’m sitting here sucking down my second cup of the day, the only thing I can really think of in response to this is “make mine a French Vanilla Cappuccino”. The biggest problems faced when wanting to percolate hot water through ground coffee in space are, a) there’s no gravity to draw the water through the coffee, b) liquids will float in globules and stick to instrumentation, and c) hot globules of water will create vapour and will probably be quite dangerous (after all, the last thing the ISS crew will need are scalding blobs of water flying around!). So, Daniel Rozen and Josue Solano came up with a solution. View the Telegraph news report on the “Coffee Infuser” » But this isn’t any ordinary coffee machine, it is a coffee percolator that works in zero g, dispensing with the need for instant microwaved coffee. In an effort to confront a personal grievance with his experiences in space, Franklin Chang-Diaz, a seasoned NASA astronaut who has flown on seven Shuttle missions and helped to build the ISS, has approached two students at the Technological Institute of Costa Rica to design and build a coffee machine. However, as we spend more time in space, there is an increasing desire for the creature comforts of home, especially if you have to spend six months on board a cramped and ( soon-to-be) crowded orbital outpost. After all, astronauts on board the ISS are bound to suffer some inconveniences whilst working on space they are strong, intelligent individuals who understand the sacrifices they need to make to belong to this exclusive group of space pioneers. So, in an effort to make life a little better for the current astronauts in orbit, Chang has asked two engineering students to design a machine that can percolate fresh-ground coffee in zero gravity… ![]() ![]() Did that make you feel any better? Or did it just make you crave the smell of real, freshly ground coffee beans you’re used to on Earth?įranklin Chang-Diaz, a veteran NASA astronaut who spent a lot of time on the International Space Station (ISS), knows all too well the taste of really bad microwaved space coffee. ![]() You put the instant coffee container into the microwave and heat up the sour, plastic-tasting brew. You probably feel a little home sick and you crave a drink that will pick up your mood, preparing you for a tough day of overseeing experiments in Kibo and keeping up with your station schedule for the day. Imagine: You’ve just woken up on board the space station half-way through your six-month mission in zero-gravity. Costa Rican engineering students invent a coffee percolator for use in orbit
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