War! The balance of power in the Cola Wars has been shifting under the ruthless assault of the challenger brands. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere. In a stunning move, the once-dominant Coca-Cola Company has swept into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is planning to send its signature beverage into orbit. In an attempt to stop their arch-rivals from claiming cola supremacy for all time, the underdogs at PepsiCo have launched a desperate mission to ruin the publicity coup…

The Space Cola Wars

Today’s episode takes us back to the time in American history known only as the Cola Wars.

If you’re not a veteran of those dark days, you may be utterly confused by everything I just said. Unfortunately, this episode is not about the Cola Wars as a whole, just one particular skirmish. If you want to know more, “You’re Wrong About” has a pretty good episode about the topic and I’ll link to it in the show notes. If you don’t want to know more, you just need to know that for several decades Coke and Pepsi were locked in a battle for market dominance and both sides were taking it way too seriously. By the middle of the 1980s things were really getting out of hand.

The Pepsi Challenge claimed that in blind taste tests folks preferred Pepsi to Coke, though their experimental controls left much to be desired. Coke struck back by unveiling a new formula mimicking the flavor of their rival, which seems a lot like conceding defeat to me. Both sides assembled armies of celebrity pitchmen and spokespersons to plead their case. (Coke had Bill Cosby. Pepsi had Michael Jackson. Neither choice seems great in retrospect.)

Then, in 1984, Coca-Cola made the announcement that they hoped would destroy their hated rivals once and for all: that Coke would be the first cola in outer space.

Promoting your product by tying it into the space program was not exactly a new idea. Companies had been doing it since the Soviets shot Sputnik into orbit in October 1957, and food companies were no exception. Anything that could be dehydrated, powdered, freeze dried, or even just wrapped in aluminum foil was marketed as a space-age food revolution. That included ice cream, pop rocks, instant mashed potatoes, and even granola bars and textured vegetable protein.

Of course, almost none of these products actually had anything to do with the space program. Astronaut ice cream, for instance, is so dry and powdery that it would actively cause problems on a space flight. TANG actually did go up in a Gemini capsule, but John Glenn never actually got around to drinking any.

Actual astronaut foods tended to be anything that could be homogenized into a smooth paste, crammed into an aluminum tube, and irradiated to the point where it would be shelf-stable for decades. They tended to be nutritious but not exactly flavorful, though NASA’s food scientists were always working hard to fix that.

Space presented several unique problems for beverages. In microgravity liquids form into free-floating spheres held together by surface tension. When that surface tension gets broken by contact with a solid, the liquid tends to spread out and form a thin film over that solid. Given that the interior of space capsules is filled with expensive and extremely fragile electronics, free-floating liquids were a recipe for disaster. As a result astronauts tended to sip their water from concertina-style collapsible containers with squirt valves.

Usually it was just water. Sugary beverages and solutions tended to freeze solid when exposed to hard vacuum, and reversing that process during spaceflight was often difficult if not impossible.

Things began improving in the 1970s when astronauts began spending less time in capsules and more time in pressurized modules and space stations. That at least made it possible to enhance your water with powdered beverage bases, which was good news if you liked TANG and Country Time Lemonade.

In 1984 it finally became possible for astronauts to enjoy the most quintessentially American of all beverages: one that was effervescent and ebullient; sweet and sugary but with discordant tones of battery acid; refreshing in small quantities, actively detrimental to your health in large quantities; where once-natural ingredients had been replaced with chemicals you could not identify; and produced by a rapacious corporation that never let morals or ethics get in the way of crushing the competition and making money.

You know. Coca-Cola.

Coke had its work cut out for it. If beverages in outer space were problematic, carbonated beverages in outer space were extra-problematic. In microgravity gas bubbles don’t separate from fluids. It turns out you need gravity for that. Instead the bubbles just stay where they form, giving you a big foamy sphere that splatters everywhere when disturbed. Even if you could consume it safely, the gas also just stayed put in your stomach making you queasy. Even hermetically sealed soft drink cans weren’t safe, because the extreme and fluctuating conditions they would be exposed to could make them violently explode.

Fortunately for Coke they had Dr. Ashis Gupta, their Director of Special Projects. And he loved a challenge.

Dr. Gupta and his team of beverage scientists began mulling over the problem and tossing around possible solutions. It took them a year and $250,000 but in the end they came up with the Coke Space Can.

From the outside the Space Can looked like a squat soda can with a little plastic toy tank turret on the cap. If you were being uncharitable, it looked a little like a can of Barbasol. (That’s shaving cream.)

Looks can be deceiving, though. The can was not regular aluminum but solid steel. And it wasn’t just a receptacle for fluid. Inside were two plastic bags: one full of cola, which was placed inside another bag filled with carbon dioxide. By pressing on a button valve on the lid, an astronaut opened a passage that allowed cola to escape from the first bag. That decreased the pressure in the bag, and since the can was a sealed system that forced the second bag to expand, which in turn put pressure on the first bag and pushed more cola through the valve. This created an steady and easy-to-drink stream of cola with minimal splatter and leakage.

Essentially it was an aerosol can full of soda. That sounds like a pretty obvious solution to the problem in retrospect, but it really isn’t all that obvious if you don’t know the solution. Their solution was quite ingenious.

Coke filed for a patent on the can design, and then reached out to NASA to talk them into making the Space Can part of the space shuttle program’s regular food options.

The agency was surprisingly open to the possibility. Of course, the can would have to be tested before anything could be approved. They would also not give Coke special treatment. Testing the can would have to follow all the standard rules and regulations. That meant going through the regular approval process for experiments, and if the experiment was successful, allowing the agency to have free and unlimited access to the underlying technology so it could develop its own space cans.

That was fine by Coke. Dr. Gupta drafted a formal proposal for testing the Space Can, the Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation (CBDE), and submitted it through the usual channels. It sailed through the approval process and was scheduled to go up in April 1985 on the Space Shuttle Discovery’s STS-51-D mission.

For everyone involved this was a win-win situation. Coke would get their can tested and some much-needed publicity. NASA would also get publicity, which they desperately needed as interest in the space program was on the wane. Real scientific principles would be tested, and the technology behind the Space Can seemed like it might have applications outside of Coke’s very limited interests. For the astronauts it would be a fun diversion, a silly way to unwind after an otherwise very stressful mission.

The problem was everyone who wasn’t involved. Which is to say, Pepsi.

When Pepsi saw the press release Coke put out about the CBDE, their board of directors went ballistic. There was no way in hell they would allow their arch-rivals be the first and only cola in space. That would be the advertising coup of the century.

Fortunately for Pepsi it had friends in high places. It had tremendous local influence in Florida, where the company (and the space program) were headquartered. And nationally, well, CEO Don Kendall had been a staunch supporter of Richard Nixon in the 1950s and had been politically active in Republican circles ever sense. The company leaned on its contacts, and it wasn’t long before NASA got word from the White House ordering them to take Coke off the STS-51-D mission.

Coke was furious, but it may have been for the best.

In addition to the CBDE, the STS-51-D mission was also NASA’s first attempt to get media coverage by sending a normal civilian into space. The civilian in question was one Jake Garn, a retired US Navy pilot from Utah. Who also happened to be a United States Senator and the chairman of the committee that oversaw NASA’s budget. Garn was given a largely do-nothing job as a payload specialist and a test subject for on-board medical experiments.

NASA’s idea was not well-received at the time. The media commentary was particularly savage, especially a week of Doonesbury comic strips that went right for the jugular. It didn’t help that during the mission Garn vomited so much that afterwards the agency’s scale for space sickness jokingly became “the Garn Scale.”

So, yeah, Coke may have dodged a bullet there. What soft drink wants to be associated with a queasy stomach? (Even flat ginger ale isn’t enthused by the idea.)

The Challenge

With the immediate problem dealt with, Pepsi executives pointed to a boilerplate line in NASA’s press release indicating that they were open to listening to other soft drink companies if they had competing ideas for beverage dispensers. They demanded a chance to send their own space can up alongside Coke’s.

Coke was still furious. They argued that they had a contract with NASA guaranteeing that Coke would be the only soft drink to go up on the space shuttle. They didn’t, actually. But they did have a point. Coke had theoretically earned its spot on the shuttle by following procedure, while Pepsi was openly using political influence to cut the line and no one seemed to care.

NASA did care a little, actually, but it was also trying to make sure it didn’t lose its funding. They fell back to an old agency policy from the early days of the space race: “If NASA uses a product, the vendor or supplier may advertise that fact, but that ad copy can never be written to imply an endorsement.” That meant no exclusive for Coke. In the end, the agency agreed to let both companies send space cans up at the same time, just to shut them up.

Mind you, Pepsi didn’t actually have a space can yet.

The boys down in Pepsi R&D dropped everything to work on the new project. The company also enlisted the help of Enviro-Spray Systems, a subsidiary of a paint company. The space can they came up with used two separate packets of sodium bicarbonate and citric acid, which were combined to create more gas on the fly rather than just relying on pressure changes to force the cola through the release valve. It did have one thing in common with Coke’s: it looked an awful lot like a can of hair mousse. That wasn’t a coincidence, either. One curious astronaut realized the Pepsi label was only a sticker, and peeled it off to find the logo of another company underneath.

Somehow, repurposing an existing can cost Pepsi a reported $14,000,000. That seems ridiculous, especially when you consider that Coke’s can was developed from scratch and only cost $250,000. The answer seems to be that the Coke figure only includes the cost of developing the can itself, while Pepsi’s figure almost certainly includes other expenses like advertising, marketing, and lobbying.

Now that both companies had cans ready to go, the CBDE experiment was back on. It was scheduled to go up on the Challenger as part of the STS-51-F “Spacelab 2” mission in July 1985.

During the long months of delay, though, NASA had begun having second thoughts. They had wanted the additional publicity that Coke would bring to the program, but once Pepsi became involved to drag the CBDE into the Cola Wars the atmosphere changed, becoming sensationalistic and circus-like. It was too late to back out, but they could certainly throw cold water on the cola companies’ advertising plans.

The experimental protocol was revised. During the tests the cans would be covered so astronauts could not see the logos. No photographs would be taken of astronauts with the cans, or of the tests themselves. After the mission there would be no public discussion of how the space cans performed or if the astronauts enjoyed their contents. The companies would be provided with data collected from the astronauts through questionnaires and nothing more.

The cola companies were not happy about that and began pressuring the agency, which could not make up its mind to cave or show some spine. First they relented and allowed the tests to be photographed. Then they said the tests wouldn’t be photographed, but the cans would be uncovered. Then they said there could be photos but no video.

These changes happened on an almost daily basis, and every one had to be communicated to the astronauts-in-training as they completed their final launch prep. Every minute spent on this silliness was eating up time that could be devoted to other, more serious experiments that were to be run during the mission. The day before launch, payload specialist Loren Acton could take it no longer. When the legal department came in to give them a list of the latest changes, he snapped.

“We’ve been getting ready for this mission for seven years. It contains a great deal of science. We have a very short time to talk about the final operational things that we need to know. We don’t have time to talk about this stupid carbonated beverage dispenser test. Please leave.”

The lawyers left, and the astronauts got back to more serious business.

The scene at Cape Canaveral on July 29, 1985 was wild. The cola companies’ street teams worked the crowd, handing out t-shirts; Coke’s said, “Drink Coca-Cola” and Pepsi’s said, “One giant sip for mankind.” Ads ran in every television market, in every time slot.

Coke’s Dr. Gupta was on hand for media interviews, and could not hide his excitement. “Do you know why I’m excited? Because when you have something that you believe in, something that you know is fantastic, you want everybody to know about it. This is it.”

His Pepsi counterpart, Tom Williams, Vice-President of Technical Services, was more restrained, noting that right now outer space was a very small market but one that was “symbolic on how we view the future and future generations.”

The Challenger launch went off without a hitch.

Once in space, the astronauts decided they would run the Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation first, just to get the damn thing out of the way. The crew had been divided into two teams; the Red Team would test the Coke cans, and the Blue Team would test the Pepsi cans. It was decided the Red Team would go first, since Coke had approached the agency first. Eight hours later it was Pepsi’s turn.

Though the agency had earlier decided not to report the results of the tests, the astronauts were not shy about sharing how it had gone. Unsurprisingly, Coke’s thoughtfully engineered Space Can worked pretty well, dispensing an even stream of mildly carbonated cola. Pepsi’s slapdash space can served up too many bubbles, making the fluid borderline undrinkable.

How about flavor? Well, there were no winners in that department. The space shuttle didn’t have a refrigerator, because refrigeration creates condensation and in microgravity loose droplets of water are a big problem. That meant the cans were warm. Mission Commander Bob Fullerton put it succinctly: “Warm cola is not on anybody here’s favorite list of things.” The astronauts had taken a few sips from their drinks, but no one was eager to finish an entire can.

The attempt to recreate the Pepsi Challenge in space had fizzled out and fallen flat.

Aftertaste

That was, more or less, that. The Space Cola Wars were over.

Two of the empty space cans were donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Every now and then you can see them on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. (Not right now, though.) The rest went back to their respective companies.

As far as Pepsi was concerned, a stalemate was as good as a win. After all, their primary goal had been to spoil Coke’s PR stunt, and they had done that. Their subsequent forays into space more or less confirmed that, as far as they were concerned, the Space Cola Wars had been about publicity. In 1996 they paid the Russian space program $5,000,000 to take an oversized Pepsi can to the Mir space station and film some cosmonauts manhandling it during a spacewalk, just so they could use the footage in a advertisement. (At the time, the most expensive television commercial ever filmed, which is astonishing given how cheap-looking and forgettable it is.) Later their fast food subsidiary, Yum! Brands, followed in their parent company’s footsteps by launching a KFC Chicken Zinger into the stratosphere and plastering the Pizza Hut logo on the side of Russian booster rockets.

Coke tried to salvage some of their dignity by declaring that their can had been tested first, making them the first cola in space. The choice of which cola to try first had been arbitrary, but that didn’t stop the company from running ads touting their product’s “out-of-this-world taste.”

Coke’s later forays into space, though, showed that they were actually the Real Thing. They got a patent for the Space Can (which Pepsi did not bother to do), then set about improving it based on the feedback that they’d received. They heard the astronauts’ complaints and designed a special refrigerator for the cans, a real challenge because it needed to be compact, low-power, and use conduction rather than convection to ensure minimal condensation and reduce the chance of water droplets escaping into microgravity. The revised Space Cans and refrigerator went up to Mir in 1991. Cosmonauts Anatoly Artsebarsky and Sergei Krikalev could enjoy the pause that refreshes while Coke’s beverage scientists watched from mission control.

It didn’t end there, though.

Dr. Gupta’s team at Coke subsequently spent $750,000 to develop the next generation of space beverage technology: the Fluid Generic Bioproccessing Apparatus, or FGBA. This was no mere soda can, this was a whole soda machine designed to store and refrigerate several liters of Coke and Diet Coke, which could be dispensed into special Fluid Transfer Units (FTUs).

If you want to make it sound more scientific, the FGBA was an experiment designed to “validate engineering techniques for the containment, manipulation, and transfer of supersaturated two-phase fluids in microgravity.” And also maybe to see how gases and liquids separate in zero gravity, how astronauts store fluids in space, and how caffeine affects the cardiovascular system.

The FGBA was given a slot in the SPACEHAB-3 research module, which was taken into orbit by Discovery as part of the STS-63 mission from February 3-11, 1995. The STS-63 lacked the carnival atmosphere, legal hand-wringing, and aggravation of the previous mission and consequently the astronauts seemed way more into the experiment. Payload Commander Bernie Harris welcomed the experiment as a way to liven up the shuttle program’s typically bland meals. Mission commander Jim Weatherbee expressed interest in seeing how the carbon dioxide gas would settle in his stomach. (He should have asked mission specialist Mike Foale, who could have told him that the bubbles just settle in your stomach and make you queasy, and who was glad to be exempted from the test for just that reason.)

Once again Gupta and his team took the results of the experiment to heart and began working on the FGBA-2. The new unit no longer held pre-mixed beverages, but combined syrup and soda at the time of dispensing. It also dispensed Powerade, too, if you wanted to pretend you were being healthy. They even redesigned the FTU to increase its capacity, added a a baffle system to stop the liquids and gases from separating, and redesigned it to resemble Coke’s classic hobble skirt bottle.

The FGBA-2 was given a slot in SPACEHAB-4, which was taken into orbit by the Endeavor as part of the STS-77 mission from May 19-29, 1996. Unfortunately it experienced operational problems and on-site troubleshooting failed to resolve the issue. The experiment was declared to be a failure.

After that, Coke’s interest in outer space began to wane. Patent applications indicate their beverage scientists were still thinking about the stars, but the company itself seemed to have decided space was a distraction from more important projects. (More important projects like caffeinating the heck out of Mello Yello and calling it Surge, in an attempt to steal market share from Mountain Dew.) The FGBA-1 is now an exhibit at the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, and the FGBA-2 is on display in the Astronaut Hall of Fame at the Kennedy Space Center.

That isn’t to say Coke’s foray into space was a total failure. The innovative valve designs used in the construction of the Space Can and FGBA have proven useful in other projects, and the rapid carbonization technology used in the FGBA-2 eventually found use in modern consumer devices like the Sodastream gathering dust in the back of your pantry.

Don’t weep for Coke, though. The company’s brands give it a combined 46% market share of the soft drink industry.

Meanwhile Pepsi is steadily losing market share to Dr. Pepper, of all things. That’s a huge comedown for a challenger brand that used to pal around with Michael Jackson and E.T. The company desperately needs to do something to turn its fortunes around, some sort of… dare I say it… moonshot?

Something to think about.