Coffee in Space: NASA, Espresso, and the ISS

Drinking a hot cup of coffee is one of the simplest pleasures on Earth — and one of the hardest problems in orbit.

For most of the Space Age, "coffee" on a spacecraft meant a pouch of freeze-dried granules, a squirt of hot water, and a straw. Functional, yes. Enjoyable, not really. Astronauts of every nationality complained about it for decades, but nobody complained louder than the Italians. During his five-and-a-half-month stay on the International Space Station, astronaut Luca Parmitano told interviewers the thing he missed most wasn't sunlight, solid ground, or gravity. It was a decent espresso.

That complaint eventually reached the right people. In Italy, missing your espresso isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a design problem worth solving. What followed was a genuine engineering project, and really two projects in one. Someone had to build a machine that could brew real espresso in zero gravity without turning the cabin into a hazard. And someone else had to solve an even stranger problem: how do you actually drink it once it's made?

Both turned out to be harder, and more interesting, than they sound.

In microgravity, hot coffee doesn't pour, settle, or rise into steam the way it does on Earth. It just clings to itself in a floating blob, waiting for somebody's face to get close enough.

Why Coffee Behaves Differently Once Gravity Leaves the Room

On Earth, gravity does most of the quiet work of drinking coffee for you. It pulls liquid down into a cup, keeps it sitting flat while you carry it around, and lets steam rise up and out of the way. Gravity is also what makes brewing methods like drip coffee or a French press work at all — water falls through the grounds, and the grounds settle to the bottom.

None of that happens in orbit. Without gravity, a floating blob of hot liquid is held together only by its own surface tension — the same force that lets a water droplet bead up on a countertop instead of spreading flat. Let that blob get loose in a spacecraft cabin, and it doesn't fall. It drifts, breaks into smaller droplets, and can find its way into eyes, electronics, or air vents. Steam doesn't rise either, since "up" isn't a meaningful direction anymore.

This is exactly why coffee on spacecraft has always been sealed inside a pouch, rehydrated through a valve, and sipped through a straw. It isn't tradition. It's damage control.

Building a Machine That Could Brew Espresso in Orbit

Solving the brewing side of the problem fell to an unusual team: Italian coffee company Lavazza, Turin-based aerospace engineering firm Argotec, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). Their project, underway by 2014, became known as ISSpresso — the first espresso machine engineered specifically to operate on the International Space Station.

A normal home espresso machine would be a genuine hazard in orbit. It relies on hot water forced through grounds under real pressure, and in a sealed cabin, a leak of scalding, floating water is a serious problem rather than a mess to wipe up. ISSpresso's engineers replaced the usual plastic components with steel tubing built to handle far higher pressures than the coffee actually needs, added a protective shield around the brewing chamber, and designed the system as a closed loop so hot water and finished coffee stay contained in sealed pouches rather than an open stream. The machine heats water to roughly 167°F (75°C) before pushing it through a standard Lavazza espresso capsule — hot enough to extract real espresso, but well short of what a machine on your counter might use.

ISSpresso reached the International Space Station in May 2015 aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule, timed to coincide with the six-month mission of Samantha Cristoforetti, ESA astronaut and Italy's first woman in space. She installed the machine and brewed the first real espresso ever made off the surface of the Earth. It turned out to be more versatile than advertised, capable of brewing tea and rehydrating soup as well as coffee — but coffee was always the point.

The Cup Problem: Solving How to Actually Drink It

A working espresso machine only solves half the problem. Even perfectly brewed coffee still has to get from a container into a person's mouth, and a straw-and-pouch setup doesn't exactly recreate the experience of holding a warm mug.

The unlikely answer began years earlier, in 2008, when NASA astronaut Donald Pettit was running a fluid-physics experiment aboard the ISS and got tired of drinking everything through a straw. Using scavenged Mylar sheeting and Kapton tape, he built a crude open cup, pinched into a teardrop shape along one seam. The shape mattered more than the material: it relied on capillary channel flow, the same effect that lets a paper towel pull up a spill against gravity. Along the narrow, sharply angled corner of the cup, surface tension pulled the liquid steadily toward the rim, letting Pettit sip it almost the way he would on Earth.

Physicist Mark Weislogel and his team at Portland State University refined the shape further, replacing the improvised Mylar version with a properly engineered, 3D-printed design as part of a NASA investigation nicknamed the Space Cup. In May 2015, Cristoforetti tested the refined cup on camera, sipping espresso from ISSpresso while looking out through the station's cupola window. The photo went everywhere, and Wired later named the Space Cup one of the most cleverly designed objects of that year.

Pettit's original 2008 prototype earned its own small piece of history along the way: the patent covering it, shared with Weislogel and two mathematicians who had studied the underlying physics decades earlier, is recognized as the first patent ever granted for an invention made entirely in space.

Skeleton Brew Tip

Even in orbit, water temperature is a safety decision as much as a flavor one.

ISSpresso brews at about 167°F (75°C) — noticeably cooler than the roughly 195–205°F (91–96°C) most brewing guides recommend on the ground. That's not really a flavor choice. It's a safety margin: cooler water is a smaller hazard if it ever gets loose inside a spacecraft cabin.

You don't have that problem on your countertop, so there's no reason to brew that cool. But the underlying lesson holds up fine down here: water temperature isn't just a technical detail, it's the difference between coffee that tastes bright and balanced and coffee that tastes scorched or flat. Getting it right is worth the extra ten seconds with a thermometer, whether you're standing in your kitchen or floating past a cupola window.

Coffee in Space at a Glance

First space espresso machine	ISSpresso
Built by	Lavazza, Argotec, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI)
Arrived at the ISS	May 2015, aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule
Brew temperature	About 167°F / 75°C
First cup poured by	ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti
Drinking vessel	The Capillary Cup ("Space Cup"), shaped to move liquid by surface tension alone
Cup origin	First built by astronaut Donald Pettit in 2008; refined by Mark Weislogel's team at Portland State University
Claim to fame	First patent ever granted for an invention made entirely in space

From the Coffee Chronicles

It's a strange kind of comfort, knowing that even a space agency with a near-unlimited engineering budget couldn't shortcut its way past the basics: get the temperature right, protect the coffee from its environment, and give people a decent way to actually drink it. Those are the same three problems every home coffee setup is quietly solving, just without the steel tubing or the cargo run.

Continue exploring:

• How Storage Affects Flavor
• Build Your Coffee Corner
• Cold Brew at Home

Skip the coffee shop. Make something better at home — gravity included, free of charge.