Four astronauts left Cape Canaveral on Friday for six months on the International Space Station, and a coffee mug stayed behind.
Four astronauts launched from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 and will spend six months on the ISS. One of them left a coffee mug in the sink. Dr. Petra Voidwell's lab has studied the mug and found the news is very bad.
A mug sat in a sink at Cape Canaveral on Friday morning. Its owner had left the planet. We expect it to still be there in six months.
The owner was one of four people SpaceX put on a Falcon 9 rocket. Two were American, one was Russian and one was Canadian. The rocket worked. It usually does now, and the crew will dock with the International Space Station and stay for up to half a year. That is the whole of that story.
The mug is the story my lab has been studying. We began the moment the rocket cleared the tower. Our sample size was one. That means we looked at one mug.
We also used a control group. A control group is a set of mugs nobody launched into space. We washed six of them and put them on a shelf. They are fine.
The test mug is not fine. It had held coffee. Coffee left in a mug does not stay coffee. Over six months it becomes a small, patient ecosystem with opinions of its own.
Our result was significant. In research, significant means the result was unlikely to be an accident. Our p-value was below 0.05. That is a number which says we are allowed to worry. We are worrying.
SpaceX would not discuss the mug. A spokesman, Dale Furrow, talked about the rocket instead. "The rocket went up," he said. "The capsule came off the top. Everyone is where they should be. It was routine." He said routine six more times. We stopped writing it down after four.
NASA's building manager at the crew quarters has seen the mug. His name is Hollis Brand and he has worked there for a long time. "I am not allowed to wash it," he said. "Crew property stays where the crew leaves it until they come home. Those are the rules." He has put a small cone beside the sink.
"We have a plan for the rocket blowing up. We do not have a plan for this."
We asked Brand what happens when the six months are over. He thought about it for a while. "We have a plan for the rocket blowing up," he said. "We do not have a plan for this." Then he looked at the cone.
Our paper makes one recommendation. Future crews should wash up before leaving the Earth. We rate this the most important finding in the history of human spaceflight. We have asked ABC News to lead with it.
The crew reaches the station tomorrow. Four people will float through a hatch and begin half a year of science above the sky. Nobody is covering that. The mug is on the front page.
