The upcoming space station grocery run will be carrying caffeine to a complete new level aboard the supply ship of SpaceX is a real espresso machine direct coming from Italy.
SpaceX is scheduled to kick off its unmanned rocket with the espresso maker along with 4,000 pounds (or 1,800 kilograms) of science research, food and other equipment on Monday.
The experimental espresso machine is mainly intended for International Space Station (ISS) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy.
It was earlier scheduled to arrive in January, shortly after Cristoforetti reached at ISS. The main idea is to get some relief for Cristoforetti from the station’s instant coffee. But it ended up on the back burner after an ISS shipment from Virginia got lost in a launch explosion.
Italian coffee bigwig Lavazza joined forces with the Italian Space Agency and engineering company Argotec in Turin in order to provide a specifically designed machine for use off the planet. American space agency NASA has also certified its safety.
This will be the seventh station supply run since 2012 of California-based SpaceX. All these supply run has been carried from Cape Canaveral.
This is for the third time when SpaceX will make a landing attempt to its leftover booster vertically on an ocean barge. The previous two tests failed badly.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, wishes saving time as well as money by the reuse of the first-stage boosters that are normally discarded in the Atlantic Ocean. The space company is making a makeover of a former missile-launching site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station into a landing pad for the flyback boosters.
The time of the launch is 4:33 pm (2033 GMT) on Monday. According to the weather forecasters, the weather would be favorable at 60 percent for the launch.