Space Coffee: Astronauts Are Getting a Fancy New Espresso Machine

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) get 15 or 16 sunrises per day, but, for a long time, they didn’t get to wake up and smell the coffee.

That’s because coffee is distributed and consumed like all other beverages in space—freeze-dried and served in a pouch that has much more in common with a Capri Sun than with a steaming ceramic mug.

But that situation is finally improving, and the only thing it took was hosting more Italians from orbit. The SpaceX Dragon rocket scheduled to launch on Tuesday will carry a new kind of espresso machine to the ISS, called, fittingly,the ISSpresso.


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