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Microgravity Coffee Cup

Posted by timothy on from the shattering-all-my-conceptions dept.

BuzzSkyline writes "Despite the fact that astronauts have been eating and drinking out of tubes for decades, it's actually possible to drink from an open-top cup in space. Astronaut Don Pettit recently downlinked a video that shows him slurping coffee from a cup he kludged out of plastic sheet. It appears to work pretty much like a cup on Earth, even in freefall aboard the International Space Station, thanks to capillary action."

1 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:that's great by optimism · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    TFV shows the cup being filled. Looks pretty easy.

    But it's no real achievement. He replaced sucking liquid from a comfortable round straw, with sucking liquid from a knife-edged container. The straw is much more practical and usable.

    This article just reinforces the fact that today's human astronauts are a terrible waste of time and money.

    We never have the ~really~ smart guys up there, because the smart ones run the numbers and don't like a 1% chance of dying on a rocket ride (actually the space shuttle had an even worse fatality rate). So the guys we send right now are highly programmed robots. Let's just send mechanical robots, until we can make it safer and cheaper.