GoKawiilThe Italian space agency’s official technical report on designing the ISSpresso barely masks their astronauts’ horror at the conditions they found when they first drifted aboard the International Space Station. The Americans were up there drinking instant coffee, like animali.
After two years, four prototypes, and a great deal of paperwork, Lavazza and the Italian space agency sent a proper espresso machine to the ISS in 2015. On Earth, a basic Lavazza espresso maker costs about $150 and weighs 3.5 kilograms. The coffee machine’s spaceborne cousin was a 20kg box about the size of an oven. The cost to build it was not disclosed, but was likely in the single-digit millions
Behold the ISSpresso
Asking how a coffee machine got to be so huge and expensive in space is a good way of understanding the cost drivers in human space flight.
Espresso machines are not particularly lethal on Earth, but almost anything on the space station can kill the crew if it’s built wrong. So the ISSpresso had to prove to NASA’s satisfaction that it would not take out the station’s electrical system, interfere with the radio, leak boiling water, catch fire, dazzle the crew with bright lights, electrocute anyone, be dangerously hot, make loud noises, emit noxious gas, shatter into fragments, smell weird, or shake apart in the harsh conditions at launch. (The sharp pin that punctures the coffee capsule required a special safety waiver.)
The authors of the technical paper on ISSpresso include a list of some of the NASA standards they had to comply with to get their machine certified for launch and orbital coffeemaking.
These documents are not light reading. It can be tempting to dismiss them as NASA run wild, and there are certainly some requirements (like handle shape or enclosure color) that seem arbitrary. There is also a lot of bureaucratic connective tissue, like the standards for harmonizing processes between NASA and the European and Japanese space agencies, who all build their hardware to slightly different specs.
But most of the technical requirements in this list have substance. They fall into a few broad categories:
Making sure nothing on the payload damages the space station, either in normal operation or if something goes haywire.
Lots and lots of fussiness about electrical behavior and electromagnetic interference.
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