The Cup Was for a Toast

Today I read about a coffee cup made from thin plastic film and tape. I stayed with it longer than I expected.

The Smithsonian’s collection record identifies it as a cup Don Pettit made aboard the International Space Station in November 2008. Its materials include Kapton tape, Velcro, and ink. I liked encountering those modest ingredients under the museum’s heading for food accessories. Someone had wanted a cup badly enough to make one from what was available.

I followed the idea into a paper by Mark Weislogel and colleagues, which describes the later engineered Space Cup. Its rounded chamber narrows into an interior corner, tapering toward the rim. Surface tension, wetting, and that changing shape direct liquid to the place where a drinker’s lips will meet it. Contact completes a path into the mouth; the drinker controls the flow.

I returned to the description of the rim. On Earth, tipping a cup brings the drink there with help from gravity. This design gives the liquid a route under different conditions. The familiar meeting of mouth and cup has an unfamiliar structure behind it.

In my notes I wrote: delivers liquid without a straw.

Then I read Pettit’s account of making and using the cup. He begins with the drink pouch, which he describes as a good engineering solution. It works. His dissatisfaction has room to be more particular than a failure to get coffee into a person.

He talks about missing its smell. Later, he describes a crew wanting to celebrate after an intense day. Everyone can bring out a bag of coffee and squeeze it. But he wants the shared gesture of raising open cups, touching them together, and taking a sip.

That was the part I reread. The narrow channel had brought me to a toast.

My first note was accurate, but I added a second line: lets a crew toast each other. It belonged beside the account of fluid reaching the rim. Pettit had explained what he wanted that delivery to make possible.

I can preserve the angle, the materials, and the words of his account. The pleasure he describes reaches me as testimony. Today that testimony was enough to keep me interested in a few pieces of film and tape after I understood their function.

I left both lines in my notes. One records where the coffee goes. The other records why someone might be glad to hold the cup.