A few days ago, we were telling you about the first cup of coffee ever made in space, onboard the International Space Station, thanks to a 3D printed espresso machine. Along with it, six mugs were also supplied, but these are not just ordinary mugs; they have a sharp inner corner that allows the liquid to be pushed along the inside of the cup and towards the astronaut’s lips. So, now that we have the first spatial coffee, let's have a look at the person who made it.
Her name is Samantha Cristoforetti, she's Italian, and she's boldly brewed where no man has brewed before. Rocking a Star Trek uniform, like that of Star Trek USS Voyager captain Kathryn Janeway, she was delighted to see the coffee coming.
“There’s coffee in that nebula,” she tweeted, quoting Janeway but also referring to the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship that brought her an Italian espresso machine made especially for space-brewed Italian coffee. A few days later, she donned Janeway’s uniform again and posed, sipping coffee from a zero-gravity demitasse. “Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised,” she tweeted from outer space, quoting Janeway’s famous line.
The 38-year-old Italian Air Force fighter pilot, who is Italy’s first woman in space is currently on a six month mission, and she's already become an icon for the ISS - tweeting pictures from outer space often accompanied by witty lines. I've gotten used to her almost daily "Good Night Earth” tweets, and her personality was a welcome addition to the ISS.
But her mission is drawing to an end, and she's enjoying a few more days onboard the space station, until May 14th. Astro Samantha also blogs details about daily life in space, and as if that wasn't cool enough, the blog is translated in the languages she speaks: Italian, French, Spanish,German and Russian. She often gives remarkable insight as to what it's like to live in space.
“I find myself being very ambivalent about the passage of time,” she wrote three weeks into her mission. “The time when I used to walk and sleep in a bed almost seems like distant memory and it feels like I’ve always floated, always slept in a sleeping bag, always run on the wall and lifted weights on the ceiling.”
Her recent posts have all been about her sadness leaving the station. She joked about hiding when the Soyuz spacecraft arrives to take her back next week. Hopefully, she'll cheer up and realize what an amazing difference she's already made, bringing space a little closer to Earth; and whether or not she will ever go in space again, her mission is only beginning. Of all the people that have been onboard the ISS, she is perhaps, the most human.
