This is a neat engineering achievement, but is it practical? What's the benefit of pouring the liquid out of a bag into this versus drinking out of the bag directly?
By having it open to the air you get a lot more of the aroma of the drink which is a bit part of how we experience taste. Mostly it's just a neat trick to demonstrate zero-/micro-G fluid handling and dynamics packed into a relatable form.
Principals like this are used in fuel/liquid handling in space already to make sure your tanks aren't pure chaos and your pumps don't run dry. A lot of rockets just do ullage burns with different motors to settle their fuel into the bottom of tanks but that's not possible for all fluids if you need to have them moving continuously or can't do burns just to settle them.
What's the benefit of using a coffee mug on earth? We risk spilling hot coffee on ourselves and things that can stain, we allow heat to escape to the air, and there is potential for something to get into and contaminate our coffee. And yet most of us probably have a decent collection of coffee mugs. Ergonomics and aesthetics, while perhaps not the very highest priorities, are nevertheless important.
Do you make it in the mug, or do you pour it into the mug after you make it? Why not pour it into a thermos? And why don't you exclusively drink prepackaged coffee?
> Do you make it in the mug, or do you pour it into the mug after you make it?
The difference is that I make it. On the space station, their beverages are pre-made and pre-packaged. You can see the bags in the linked article.
> Why not pour it into a thermos?
Huh? I generally drink out of a mug, not a thermos, but I've used thermoses as well. Again, this situation is different because I generally make my coffee. It's not pre-made and prepackaged.
> And why don't you exclusively drink prepackaged coffee?
Again, huh? Because the coffee I buy comes as beans. I have to add water, heat it up, etc. I sometimes I drink pre-made coldbrew and I do often drink that out of the package it comes in (the bottle/can).
The beverages are not pre-made. Like most of the food that goes up to the space station it is all dehydrated so that you are launching as little water as possible (and therefore additional mass). Water is recycled on the station as much as they can. So they have two methods for making coffee (that I am aware of):
On a space station this size, I'm not sure it's a feature - especially if it starts being used for a more varied selection of consumable liquids than just coffee.
Speaking of, how do they manage smells up there? Is "ISS smell management" someone's job at NASA?
They have filters in the air cycling that I assume include some sort of carbon filter for smell. However, astronauts have definitely noted that the ISS has "a smell"
Makes me wonder in how far you can actually. Wouldn’t the smell molecules also more or less stay roughly in the same space without convection and gravity playing their part?
They still have airflow on the space station. And since brownian motion does a fine job of spreading smells up against gravity on earth, I would guess that it works ok in space too.
