Space Cola Wars

The competition began in 1985 during the STS-51-F Space Shuttle mission, when astronauts tested specially designed soda cans from each company to see how the carbonated drinks would perform in microgravity.

Over the next decade, Coca-Cola continued developing enhanced space-rated soda dispensers that flew on subsequent shuttle missions to further study the effects of carbonation and taste perception in weightlessness.

In a heavily publicized marketing experiment, astronauts aboard STS-51-F drank carbonated beverages from specially designed cans from Cola Wars competitors Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

The experiment was delayed until Pepsi could develop its own system, and the two companies' products were assigned to STS-51-F.[3] ...the Coke can had had a lot of work put into it, and was designed to dispense a beverage without stirring up the liquid.

[6] BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, developed the Fluids Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus-1 (FGBA-1) in cooperation with Coca-Cola.

[7] According to the University of Colorado Boulder, "FGBA served a very pertinent role in validating engineering techniques for the containment, manipulation, and transfer of supersaturated two-phase fluids in microgravity which was a relatively uncharacterized problem at the time and is a significant challenge outside of just carbonated beverages".