An ingenious invention has emerged on crowdfunding site Kickstarter with the aim of allowing astronauts to enjoy a martini while surveying the vastness of space, without blobs of the beverage floating into the air. The Zero Gravity Cocktail Project has been spearheaded by the Cosmic Lifestyle Corporation (CLC), an organisation formed in 2014 with the aim of designing domestic products for space. Made up of experts in fields as diverse as mixology, engineering, space and design, the zero gravity martini glass is the first of several projects planned by the group aimed at improving the comfort of astronauts and future space travellers and to “inspire people to dream big about living in off-world.” Introducing the product on its Kickstarter page, the Cosmic Lifestyle Corporation said: “This product combines the beauty of the classic Martini glass with the physics of space science. If you take away gravity a liquid becomes something different. It’s sticky. Surface tension keeps it clumped together into blobs. If you shatter that blob, dozens of little blobs scatter everywhere. Then it sticks to your clothes, your skin, everywhere. It is hard to clean up. The current space technology solution for managing liquids is simple: keep it in a bag. Squeeze bags are ubiquitous. You use them for camping and travel. They are practical. They are also ugly, and you cannot smell the liquid, which is important for things like coffee, tea, and cocktails.” The design of the glass is such that it allows a space traveller to “enjoy the aroma of the drink, yet keep the fluids under control”, with your mouth completing the connection “like a straw”, it said. The ambitious designers even suggested that the product could help inspire a future in which space hotels are in orbit are a reality, and where settlements on other planets are places that people can “relax and enjoy the experience of a quality drink”, despite being in a zero gravity environment. The complex glasses are printed using 3D machines, with it currently taking 15 hours to print one glass.
