[Reddit]

When Samantha Cristoforetti became the first Italian woman in space last week, she boarded the International Space Station with the goal of achieving another first – to install an espresso maker that functions in space. And it turns out it was quite the engineering feat.

The Italian coffee company LavAzza spent months creating a machine that could produce the perfect shot of caffeine, after the last Italian onboard the ISS, Luca Parmitano, said the only thing he missed back on terra firma was decent coffee – and so the ISSpresso was born.

Partnering with Argotec, a specialist space-food firm, LavAzza’s engineers developed a microgravity capsule brewer, presenting their final machine to the Italian Space Agency in the hope of getting it inside the ISS. Here is how it works:

Boiling the water isn’t an issue, the ISS is pressurised to match sea level on Earth. But the risk of coffee grounds floating around the capsule meant the whole thing had to be self contained, as well as electrically guaranteed to not short out some other vital piece of equipment on the spacecraft.

How the ISSpresso works [LavAzza]

The suped-up coffee maker has gotten some serious upgrades; for instance, the plastic steam tube in a regular LavAzza is built to withstand nine bars of pressure. The ISSpresso can take up to 400.

The biggest difference between the new machine and the regular one down here is that the coffee doesn’t end up in a small white cup – it’s squirted into seal bags so that coffee droplets don’t scatter around the station.

And good news for any potential Irish astronauts out there – LavAzza says the ISSpresso also make a good cup of tea.