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.
I’ve read the timelines. I’ve followed the Starship updates, the launch window calculations, and the debates about in-situ resource utilisation, subsurface ice extraction, and whether Arcadia Planitia is the right place for a 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, and existing there in an ordinary, unremarkable, daily-life sense, the first question my mind goes to isn’t “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 what you need to know about whether life on Mars would really be life.
Where things 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 plan had been a handful of uncrewed Starship landing attempts first, with crewed missions in later windows.
So Mars isn’t happening next year, and 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. In the meantime, I’d like to talk about the café.
The first problem: growing the beans
Coffee grows in a narrow band around the equator, the “coffee belt”, at specific altitudes, in specific soils, with specific amounts of rain 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, or regolith to be precise, contains perchlorates that are toxic to plants at high enough concentrations. There is no rain.
Even so, 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. It would be difficult, controlled and deeply engineered, but possible.
Coffee in a Martian greenhouse is a longer shot than most crops. The plant is particular. It needs stable temperatures, humidity and filtered light. But a colony meant to last has to build controlled environments that can sustain many kinds of food production. A pressurised greenhouse on Mars, with grow lights tuned to what coffee plants need and carefully managed temperature, humidity and CO2 levels, is science fiction for now. It won’t always be.
I like to believe that 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’s mineral content and temperature change the cup in ways that even excellent beans can’t overcome. Water that is too hard can taste chalky and dull the brightness. Water that is too soft tastes flat. Specialty baristas obsess over water chemistry, which seems excessive until you taste the difference.
Mars does have 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 and making it safe to drink, then making it suitable for coffee, is an engineering challenge. It’s a solvable one.
The mineral profile of Martian water would be unlike anything used to brew coffee on Earth. Nobody knows yet what that does to the cup. It might be poor. It might be extraordinary. It might produce a flavour with no equivalent anywhere in the known coffee world, something new that comes 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
This is where I let myself imagine freely, because the engineering belongs to other people and the imagining is my job.
The first Mars café, and I believe there will be one, because people can’t sustain a civilisation without third places, without somewhere to sit with something warm and be briefly free of obligation, would be underground, or built into a hillside and shielded from radiation by metres of regolith.
If there are windows, they would look out on a rust-red landscape under a dusty, butterscotch-coloured sky that turns bluish near sunset, on a day about 40 minutes longer than ours. The light would be different. Mars is farther from the sun, so the light is noticeably dimmer. The plants inside, and there would be plants, because people need green things around them even more than they need coffee, would sit under grow lights that approximate Earth’s spectrum.
The coffee would be extremely expensive for the first decades, either carried from Earth at a staggering cost per kilogram or grown in small quantities in a pressurised greenhouse that took a generation to perfect. It would be rationed, treasured and shared with ceremony.
That makes coffee culture on Mars very different from today’s culture of abundant, instantly available cups on every corner. It would look more like the older traditions: the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, the slow Turkish pot, a ritual that treats the drink as rare enough to deserve attention.
Scarcity would make it precious, and that might make it more truly itself than anything we make here on Earth.
Do I think it will actually happen?
Yes, though not soon. The timelines have shifted enough times that I’ve stopped attaching myself to particular years. SpaceX has delayed, NASA is planning, China is moving, and the technology is hard, the funding is complicated and the politics are unpredictable.
But the direction is set. Humans will live on Mars eventually. That isn’t because it’s easy or inevitable in some cosmic sense. It’s because a small number of people are committed to it, with the mix of resources, stubbornness and vision that tends to make improbable things happen.
What life there actually looks like is still being worked out: the habitats, the food systems, the social structures, and the culture that emerges when people start over somewhere entirely new. All of that is still to be invented.
I do know one thing about it. Wherever people have gone, for as long as they have been people, they have 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
Will humans colonise Mars? Probably, eventually, yes.
Will that colony have good coffee? That’s the part I’m genuinely unsure about, and that uncertainty, more than the engineering, the timelines or the geopolitics, is what keeps me interested in the question.
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 →
