Captain Kathryn Janeway led the USS Voyager through many harrowing lost-in-space adventures. She was the first female Starfleet captain to take the lead role in a "Trek" series. Janeway is fictional, but she is an inspiration to many women interested in space. European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, the first Italian woman in space, took a moment to celebrate Captain Janeway at around 250 miles above Earth.
Cristoforetti is currently aboard the International Space Station. She tweeted a selfie on April 17 while dressed in a "Star Trek: Voyager"-style red and black uniform with a purple turtleneck. The image shows her pointing a thumb at SpaceX's Dragon supply capsule.
The tweet reads, "'There's coffee in that nebula'... ehm, I mean... in that #Dragon." The line is a reference to a famous Janeway quote where she charts a course into a nebula while joking about finding coffee there. Remember, the coffee supplies on the Voyager, stuck far from home, had dwindled to nothing.
The reason Cristoforetti settled on that particular "Trek" reference is that Dragon delivered a rather special piece of equipment: an espresso maker developed for space, dubbed the ISSpresso. What we have here is a spectacularly geeky collision of a famous sci-fi series combined with an actual astronaut and a helping of strong coffee. Space selfies don't get much better than that.
