The First Cola in Space: A Fizzy Leap Beyond Earth
When humans began venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere, they brought with them some of the most essential tools of survival — oxygen, food, water, and communications systems. But as space travel evolved from the realm of necessity into the domain of possibility and comfort, a new question fizzed to the surface: could you drink a soda in space?
The answer arrived, fittingly, during the bold, brand-heavy era of the 1980s, when marketing met zero gravity. In 1985, Coca-Cola became the first soft drink consumed in space, aboard the ultimately ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger. It was not merely a publicity stunt (although that was certainly part of it); the event was also a scientific experiment in human consumption and fluid dynamics under microgravity.
At first glance, soda in space might seem like a simple matter — after all, if astronauts can drink water from pouches, why not cola? But carbonation makes things complicated. On Earth, carbon dioxide gas rises out of a soda as bubbles, escaping upward due to gravity. In space, there’s no “up,” and the gas doesn’t separate naturally from the liquid. That means the bubbles stay suspended, and if you were to gulp the drink, you’d swallow a foamy slurry of gas and liquid that could cause discomfort — or worse, lead to a phenomenon astronauts dubbed the “wet burp.”
Coca-Cola worked with NASA to develop a special “space can” — a pressurised container that looked a bit like a hairspray bottle, with a complicated valve-and-nozzle system to allow controlled sips of the soda. Pepsi quickly followed suit with its own zero-gravity version, and both were brought aboard Challenger’s STS-51-F mission. Each can held just over 6 ounces of soda, and the astronauts tested both during the mission.
Reviews were mixed. Some astronauts found the taste tolerable, while others noted that the carbonation didn’t feel quite right in their stomachs. But that wasn’t the point. The mere presence of cola in orbit was a significant step in understanding how humans might one day live — not just survive — in space.
Beyond the novelty, the experiment offered insights into how liquids behave without gravity and how everyday human comforts might be reimagined for extra-terrestrial environments. It also opened the door for future studies on food, digestion, and pleasure in space. Today, astronauts enjoy a much wider variety of flavours and treats on the International Space Station, but it all started with a fizzing curiosity: could a Coke go cosmic?
