LONDON -- Tim Peake might be facing 265 different experiments during his historic six-month stay on the International Space Station, but there was one thing the British astronaut was determined to perfect during the voyage: the perfect cup of tea.
Peake, like many a Brit, loves a good cuppa. He spoke to the NASA food lab, the people who create a lot of the astronauts' sustenance in space, to ensure he'd be able to get his hit during the trip - and he has a very special method for making the perfect brew.
"Tim loves a cup of tea," Libby Jackson, Astronaut Flight Education Programme Manager for the UK Space Agency (UKSA), told Mashable.
"He's asked the NASA food lab to put his favourite tea bags inside a drinks pouch so he can make his favourite tea up in space. The way that the drinks work in space is that you have a pouch and you fill that with hot water and his tea bag is inside that."
"However, we all know that to make a good cup of tea you don’t leave the tea bag sitting in there for too long because you’ll get stewed tea, so Tim’s been telling me that he’s come up with a method to decant his tea from one pouch to another pouch so he then has the perfect cup of tea in space."
Good to see he's got his priorities right.
Last tweet before launch - GO for flight! Thanks for all the good luck messages - phenomenal support! #Principia pic.twitter.com/8jbxejHEEe— Tim Peake (@astro_timpeake) December 15, 2015
Peake takes off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:03 a.m. Tuesday in a Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft and is due to reach the ISS at just after 5 p.m. - the perfect time to put the space kettle on.