Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso

The 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 millionsBehold the ISSpressoAsking 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…