SpaceX delayed. NASA is planning. I’m wondering about something more important: what happens to the morning cup when a day lasts about 24 hours and 40 minutes.
I want to be upfront about my angle here.
I’ve read the timelines. I’ve followed the Starship updates, the launch window calculations, the debates about in-situ resource utilization and subsurface ice extraction and whether Arcadia Planitia is the right place to put the first settlement. I find all of it genuinely interesting.
But when I try to imagine humans actually living on Mars — waking up there, starting their days there, existing there in the ordinary, unremarkable, daily-life sense — the question my mind goes to first is not “how will they breathe?” or “what will they eat?”
It’s this: who’s making the coffee, and what does it taste like?
I think that question tells you everything worth knowing about whether life on Mars would actually be life.
Where things actually stand in 2026
For context: earlier this year SpaceX said it would put more of its near-term focus on the Moon, pushing its Mars plans back from the 2026 launch window Musk had talked about before. The earlier idea had been a handful of uncrewed Starship landing attempts first, with crewed missions in later opportunities.
So Mars isn’t happening next year. Possibly not this decade, in the crewed sense. But the conversation hasn’t stopped — NASA and others are still working on the technologies that will eventually be needed to land humans there.
It’s coming. The question is when. And in the meantime, I’d like to talk about the café.
The first problem: growing the beans
Coffee as we know it grows in a narrow band around the equator — the “coffee belt” — at specific altitudes, in specific soils, with specific amounts of rainfall and sunlight. The Ethiopian highlands. The Colombian mountains. The hills of Coorg. Every cup you’ve ever had came from somewhere in that belt, shaped by conditions that took centuries to understand and cultivate.
Mars has none of those conditions. The atmosphere is about 95% carbon dioxide. The average temperature is around minus 60 degrees Celsius. The soil — regolith, technically — contains perchlorates that are toxic to plants in high enough concentrations. There is no rain.
And yet: plants have already been grown in space. NASA’s experiments on the International Space Station have produced lettuce, radishes, and chile peppers in microgravity. Scientists have been studying how to grow crops in simulated Martian soil — and with treatment to reduce the perchlorate levels and the addition of nutrients, it looks possible. Difficult, controlled, deeply engineered — but possible.
Coffee in a Martian greenhouse is a longer shot than most. The plant is particular. It needs consistent temperatures, humidity, filtered light. But if you’re building a colony that intends to last, you’re building controlled environments capable of sustaining all kinds of food production. A pressurised greenhouse on Mars, with grow lights tuned to what coffee plants need, with carefully managed temperature and humidity and CO2 levels — it’s science fiction right now. It won’t always be.
I choose to believe someone, somewhere in the planning of the first Mars settlement, has already had this thought. Possibly more than once.
The second problem: water
Brewed coffee is roughly 98% water. The water matters enormously — its mineral content, its temperature, its quality affect the cup in ways that even excellent beans can’t overcome. Water that’s too hard can taste chalky and dull the brightness. Too soft and it tastes flat. Specialty baristas obsess over water chemistry in ways that seem excessive until you taste the difference.
Mars has water. That’s one of the more exciting findings of the past couple of decades — orbital studies suggest that at Arcadia Planitia, one of the leading candidate sites for a first settlement, ice may sit less than a metre below the surface. Extracting it, purifying it, making it safe for human consumption — and then making it coffee-appropriate — is an engineering challenge. But it’s a solvable one.
The mineral profile of Martian water would be unlike anything used to brew coffee on Earth. What that does to the cup, nobody knows yet. It might be terrible. It might be extraordinary. It might produce a flavour profile that has no equivalent anywhere in the known coffee world — something genuinely new, born entirely from the chemistry of another planet.
A Mars-specific coffee flavour. I find that idea quietly thrilling.
What the café would actually look like
Here’s where I let myself imagine freely, because the engineering is for other people and the imagining is what I’m here for.
The first Mars café — and I believe there will be one, because humans cannot sustain civilisation without third places, without somewhere to sit with something warm and be briefly free from obligation — would be underground. Or built into a hillside, protected from radiation by metres of regolith above it.
The windows, if there are windows, would look out onto a rust-red landscape under a dusty, butterscotch-coloured sky that turns bluish around sunset, in a day that runs about 40 minutes longer than ours. The light through those windows would be different — Mars is farther from the sun, so the light is noticeably dimmer. The plants inside — and there would be plants, because humans need green things around them even more than they need coffee — would be under grow lights that approximate Earth’s spectrum.
The coffee would be expensive. Extraordinarily expensive, for the first decades — either carried from Earth at staggering cost per kilogram, or grown in small quantities in the pressurised greenhouse that took a generation to perfect. It would be rationed, treasured, shared with ceremony.
Which means the coffee culture on Mars would be nothing like our present culture of abundant, instantly available cups at every corner. It would be closer to the original culture — the Ethiopian ceremony, the slow Turkish pot, the ritual that understands the drink as something rare enough to deserve attention.
The scarcity would make it precious. And that might make it, in the end, more truly itself than anything we make here on Earth.
Do I think it’ll actually happen?
Yes. Not soon — the timelines have shifted enough times that I’ve stopped attaching to specific years. SpaceX delayed. NASA is planning. China is moving. The technology is hard and the funding is complicated and the politics are unpredictable.
But the direction is set. Humans will live on Mars eventually — not because it’s easy or inevitable in some cosmic sense, but because a small number of people are committed to it with the specific combination of resources, stubbornness, and vision that tends to make improbable things happen.
What life there actually looks like in practice is still being written. The habitats, the food systems, the social structures, the culture that emerges when you put humans somewhere entirely new and let them start over — all of that is still to be invented.
But I know one thing about it. Wherever humans go, for as long as they’ve been human, they’ve found a way to make something warm and sit with it. Around fires. In clay pots. In steel tumblers. In pressurised Martian greenhouses, eventually, with water that tastes like another world.
The morning cup will find a way. It always has.
The question I’m actually asking
Do I think humans will colonize Mars? Probably, eventually, yes.
Do I think that colony will have good coffee? That’s the part I’m genuinely uncertain about. And that uncertainty — more than the engineering or the timelines or the geopolitics — is what keeps me interested in the question.
Because any world worth building is a world with a decent cup in the morning. And I’d like to know what theirs tastes like.
Your turn
If we make it to Mars, what’s the one Earth thing you’d want someone to figure out how to bring along?
coffee is already taken
Tell me in the comments →Read next: Around the World in Eight Cups
