In the lead-up to the 60th anniversary of the first human voyage into space with the International Day of Human Space Flight on 12 April, I ask the all-important question: what does tea in space taste like?

Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realised what it was. “Is there any tea on this spaceship?” he asked.

In Douglas Adams’ popular science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, last man Arthur Dent finds himself thrown into an intergalactic adventure after an alien race destroys the earth. The first comfort he reaches for is a cuppa, but he first has to describe what tea is to the Nutri-Matic drinks dispenser. What he gets at the end of the process is “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”.

It’s not surprising that Arthur’s beverage bears only a passing resemblance to tea. Even if it were a perfectly standard cup of tea, the reduced gravity conditions of space cause fluid shift in the body and one of the symptoms of this is partial blockage of the nasal passage, reducing astronauts’ ability to smell, a key part of taste.

Secondary to that is the inability to heat water above about 60°C on the International Space Station (ISS) due to the effects of microgravity causing it to become dangerously superheated, which means extracting flavour from most types of tea would be difficult. And that’s before we talk about the source of the water: recycled moisture from breathing, shower runoff and yes, urine.

The solution has thus far been to provide astronauts with powdered tea to which they can add ‘hot’ or cold water. The Americans offer what looks like a space version of a black tea, whereas the Chinese have more recently developed a ‘pu’er cream’. The astronauts of the Shenzhou XI even had Yunnan tea plants as part of their agricultural cargo as an experiment to see if they grew better after a stint in space.

But the most interesting tea in space experiment came from Japan, which ended up being less about tea as a beverage and more about the physics of whisking matcha in microgravity and the cultural interpretation of the chanoyu tea ceremony on the ISS.

Donning a colourful scarf as a kimono substitute and using a modified flask-like vessel as a tea bowl, astronaut Satoshi Furukawa conducted the experiment for art and science, discovering that you can in fact make tea in space and the matcha foam comes naturally. Unfortunately he wasn’t allowed to actually drink the matcha (he pretends in the video), so we don’t yet know what effect those bubbles make on the flavour of the matcha.

As for the genesis of the experiment, Professor Yoichiro Kawaguchi of the University of Tokyo says he designed it because he was “always thinking about the future of tradition”. He too, has been thinking of what tea in space could mean beyond its place as a beverage. “When you become weightless, it’s not just a simple expansion of the senses, it’s a new expansion that doesn’t exist on earth. In a sense, I think that this may lead to the birth of a new sixth sense.”

Want more? Check out the Teacup Galaxy thanks to photos captured by NASA.

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 6 April 2021. Mailchimp no longer allows external links to the original newsletter.