Tea Blog

One of the perennial favorites at my own tea site is a video that shows an American astronaut “drinking” tea on the International Space Station with a pair of chopsticks. This is possible because of the way liquids behave in the weightless environs of space and may be the reason why it will be tricky for space travelers to ever be able to prepare themselves a truly good cup of tea. For more detail on the behavior of liquids in space than you’ll probably ever need, look here.

If you rode on the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, America’s first manned missions, you had to endure primitive conditions in more ways than one. Including the lack of hot water, which NASA claims was not introduced until the Apollo missions that first took men to the moon. Apollo 11 astronauts, the first to reach the moon, apparently got by without tea – with their menus listing cocoa, coffee, and a variety of fruit drinks and punches. Cocoa and coffee were also a standard ration on the Space Shuttle missions, but tea with sugar, cream or lemon was also available, as this extensive article on Shuttle eats and drinks reveals.

What’s not clear about these missions is exactly what type of tea was consumed on America’s space missions, though one suspects that it was perhaps not of a sort would pass muster with a tea connoisseur. Some indication of what passed for tea, circa 1981, can be from this snippet from the Smithsonian that describes the “space tea” on the Shuttle at the time (tea crystals and hot water in an accordion-shaped container – shaken, not stirred).

But will astronautical types ever have the opportunity to prepare themselves a truly good cup of tea, with loose leaves, boiling water, tea cups and all that sort of thing? Well, never say never, I guess, but I think it’s safe to say that there are a few substantial obstacles to that sort of thing. Like that aforementioned water in space thing.

As you may or may not be aware, the boiling point of water here on Earth varies by about 20° Fahrenheit as you move to 10,000 feet in altitude. Go to space and factor in the weightless issue and things really get tricky, as noted in this NASA article, which reveals, “a liquid boiling in weightlessness produces — not thousands of effervescing bubbles — but one giant undulating bubble that swallows up smaller ones!” While the article doesn’t specifically address how all this works with hot beverages it sounds a bit daunting, to say the least.

The good news, as revealed in this article about some recent NASA research, is that a “zero-gravity coffee cup” is apparently in the works, a development that could apparently be adapted rather easily to the fine art of tea.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.