Space age restaurant coffee mug12/1/2023 It’s not hard to cheaply get it about 90% right.Įnjoy the obsessive detail… Enter Leander HOWEVER, for almost every uber-expensive ideal, I’ve indicated the Poor Man’s alternative that I personally use. As is the case with their products, Apple’s coffee is not for those with meager budgets…or without Monk-ish tendencies. Remember: Apple’s standards are notoriously high. In this guest post by Leander Kahney (author of Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products), you’ll learn the secret coffee ritual performed by Jony Ive’s design team. These sessions are where Apple has birthed some of the greatest products of all-time: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Try telling that to the astronauts at 5:30 in the morning.Jony Ive and his elite design team at Apple are coffee snobs. And rightfully so.Ĭoffee is the fuel that drives their brainstorming sessions, which are arguably the most important meetings in the design department. “These systems must work without gravity if they are to be used on the International Space Station – or on a spaceship en route to Mars,” he adds.Ĭompared to those other systems, "coffee is not in the critical path of operations," says Weislogel. The operation of many critical space station systems - air conditioning, refrigerators, toilets, cryogenic fuel tanks, medical treatments, the water supply, and everything else that involves liquids- depends on the ebb and flow of fluids. “We need to understand how fluids behave in any container.” “It’s not all about the coffee,” he says. For years they have been studying how fluids on the station climb the walls of their containers, turn corners, and perform other maneuvers that defy Earthly intuition. Weislogel and colleagues learned how to make the coffee cup by conducting 'capillary flow' experiments onboard the station. This oddball cup wouldn’t work on Earth, but it is a marvel in space. It pours out by the combined effects of your mouth, the wetting conditions of the fluid, surface tension, and the particular shape of the cup." "Basically,” explains Weislogel, “the liquid piles up right at the lip of the cup and keeps flowing as you sip. The zero-G coffee cup solves these problems by 'going with the flow': putting the strange behavior of fluid in microgravity to work. Or you could throw it out of the cup and suck down the scalding blob that forms in the air." “You could dip your tongue in the cup, and lick the hot coffee out. As a result, coffee tends to cling to the walls of the cup. In low-gravity environments like the space station, fluids tend to get ‘sticky.’ Surface tension and capillary effects, which are overwhelmed by gravity on Earth, rule the day in space. "It would be trapped at the bottom of the mug.” "If you tried to use a regular coffee mug, you might not get the coffee to your face," says Weislogel. What astronauts need is a “zero-G coffee cup.”įortunately, six of these wonders have been delivered to the space station as well.įluid physicist Mark Weislogel of Portland State University and IRPI LLC, who helped invent the cups, explains why they are necessary: No one wants to drink Italian espresso from a plastic bag, however. “Working together with the coffee company Lavazza and the Italian Space Agency, we have brought authentic Italian espresso onto the International Space Station.” “Our aerospace engineers have designed a coffeemaker that can function in microgravity conditions,” says David Avino of the Italian engineering firm Argotec. A long-awaited spin-off is an excellent cup of coffee in space. Advances in the understanding of how fluids behave in low gravity is key to spacecraft operations.
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