posted on May, 18 2010 @ 07:46 AM
How about this then.
Coca-cola wanted to be the first soft drink in space, and asked NASA if they could fly on the shuttle. NASA's reply was that they could, under two
conditions. First, they would have to come up with a dispensing mechanism suitable for flight. If you just pop the top of a can, the internal
pressure from the CO2 would squirt the soda all over the cabin. Second, they would have to pay for the weight. For a six-pack, that came out to
$69,000. The cost didn't phase Coke, since they spend millions at the Super Bowl, World Series, etc. They decided to send two six-packs up.
Everything was on until about six months before the mission. Pepsi found out and filed a lawsuit, since there had been no opern compitition and NASA
is a government agency. Pretty soon, a whole bunch of other soft drinks filed suit. They ended up having a taste test, and surprisingly enough,
Coco-Cola won. Pepsi got to send there's up a couple of mission later, though.
When they make it to space, the crew said, "Hey, we don't have to drink Tang or fruit juices, we have Coca-Cola!" The cans looked like regular
12-oz cans, but only held four ounces of Coke, because the rest was the dispensing mechanism. They were pretty cool. On the top, there was a small
nozzle, with an ovoid red button, that when depressed would issue a small stream of the soda.
Well, one on the guys srayed a little Coke into the air to see what would happen. He got a surprise. It formed a sphere, with the foam coming off
every direction, since there was no glass holding it. All you could see was the foam. Soon, several "balls" of Coca-Cola were floating in the
middeck. One of the guys said, "Blow that ball of Coke over here and I'll see if I can catch it in my mouth. The other guy blew on the ball of
Coke, and it slowly floated over and the astronaut caught it in his mouth.
This was now more fun than eating, so they started blowing on the balls of Coke and catching the wandering spheres of Coke with their mouths. One of
the guys didn't blow quite right, and his breath caught the ball of Coke on the side. Instead of just floating over, it started to spin. With
centrifigal force added, the heavier syrup went to the "equator" while the lighter foam went to the "poles." Then the guys tried to see who could
make their balls of Coke spin the fastest.
Before long, one of the balls was spinning so fast that the centrifigal forces involved overcame the forces of cohesion, and the ball of Coke
detonated in all directions. Then the sticky syrup got everywhere, so they had to scrub down the middeck.
When they returned to Earth, the crews have to go through a lengthy de-briefing, that sometimes lasts longer than the mission itself. On the second
day of the debriefing, when they returned from lunch, one of the dull NASA managers began to show the middeck camera recording what they did with the
Coca-Cola. When the tape got to where the Coke ball exploded, he turned of the video and asked, "What did you gentlemen think you were doing?" One
of the crew piped up, "We were performing a middeck fluid dynamics expirement."
Well, one of the engineers at the back of the room was interested in how the Coca-Cola had behaved. Whitout telling what fluid it was, he wrote up a
paper and had it published under the name, "Fluid Dynamics in a Micro-Gravity Environment." It was published in a physics journal in Germany, I
believe.
Anyway, about a year after the mission, NASA publishes a review of all of the successful events of each space mission. When this was done for this
mission, one of the "successes" was a middeck fluid dynamics experiment resulting in the publishing of a scientific article. What NASA didn't say
was that it was all because the crew were blowing spheres of Cocc-Cola back and forth to each other so they could catch them in their mouths!