One of the greatest excesses of the cola wars happened as Nasa was transitioning from the prestige-driven Apollo programme toward the era of commercial spaceflight, which has been dominated by companies willing to land a Nokia 4G/LTE communications system on the moon or launch a mannequin-driven Tesla Roadster into space.
To Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo, the commercially minded shuttle programme was a perfect marketing opportunity. Nasa those days was on the cutting edge of technology and was working with major private companies to launch their satellites and conduct space-based research using the space shuttle fleet.
But when it came to what it fed its astronauts in orbit, the agency had work to do. Beverages were a particular concern. Nasa wanted astronauts to drink more fluids while in space and the shuttle’s lack of refrigeration made drinks less appealing.
That made the agency receptive when Coca-Cola proposed testing zero-gravity carbonated beverages as a possible way to improve drinks on the shuttle. In June 1984, Brian Dyson, the Coca-Cola North America president, said in a speech that the company was negotiating with Nasa to install vending machines on “future space stations and shuttles”.
The company’s proposal to Nasa was a research project that fell outside federal bidding rules. But Dyson’s remarks had left the impression of a commercial relationship with Nasa.
That quickly got the attention of PepsiCo. Max Friedersdorf, PepsiCo’s vice-president for public affairs, wrote a letter to Nasa in which he insisted that his company be given a chance to compete with Coca-Cola to supply carbonated refreshment to orbiting astronauts.
A month later, Nasa wrote to both companies that the project had been terminated. But Nasa remained interested in building a drink container, and a few months after the Pepsi uproar had subsided, officials reached out to Coca-Cola to rekindle the project. However, the agency had a long list of technical requirements that the Coke container needed to meet in order to fly on the shuttle.
Consuming soda in space presents numerous technical challenges. Astronauts usually drink water or rehydrated powdered drinks from plastic pouches, which aren’t suitable for containing carbonation. Soda needs a rigid container with a dispensing valve that lets astronauts drink without releasing a sticky spray that can be dangerous inside a delicate spacecraft.
The development process was elaborate and costly. Then, weeks before it was to blast off, Johnson Space Center grounded the cola test from the shuttle flight. Nasa lawyers in Washington told Coca-Cola that officials in Houston had not followed the correct procedures for flying the containers.
But Coca-Cola kept working behind the scenes to book its container on a July 1985 spaceflight and more important, exclude PepsiCo. Then Coca-Cola publicly announced it would be flying on the shuttle, before Nasa had agreed. That opened the door for PepsiCo. Four days after Coca-Cola completed its deal with Nasa, PepsiCo signed an identical agreement.
After all of that effort, PepsiCo’s containers would be sitting next to Coca-Cola’s on the same shuttle. The flight got off the ground on July 29, 1985. A number of hours into the flight, orbiting more than 160 kilometres above Earth, the astronauts, drank the first soda in space, which happened to be Coke.
For all the political combat leading up to the flight, the cola test was largely ignored. A Nasa webpage on the mission refers ambiguously to “technology research”. Coca-Cola mentions its plaudit as the first cola in space, and its subsequent orbital soft drink research in the 1990s, only sparingly.
PepsiCo refers to the event briefly in a historical timeline. And in the 40 years since the soft drink space race, carbonated beverages have never found a regular place on the Nasa menu.
NYTNS