Cup Of Water On Tiangong Space Station Sparks Bizarre Conspiracy Theories

An old video taken on board China's Tiangong Space Station has been doing the rounds over the past few days, as viewers noticed a glass of water sitting on one of the tables.

The video in question is actually three years old, and involves Chinese astronauts conducting classes for children back on Earth. In the video, a glass of water can be seen on the table, happily resting there and not spilling over the sides.

"Call me crazy but if I was orbiting the Earth at 17,500mph in Zero Gravity surrounded complex computers," one conspiracy theorist who writes "covid was a SCAM" in his X bio wrote. "I probably wouldn’t risk an unconcealed glass of water resting on the table.  Apparently it’s strapped down with velcro. Please take all the time you need."

Other commenters were more explicit with their complaints.

"Velcro for the glass, ok, but what's holding the water in the glass? 🤔," one wrote, while another guessed "This has to be fake. The water in the glass would be floating little water balls coming out of the glass."

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Of course – as has been explained at length by community notes, AI chatbot Grok, and many X users – there is no conspiracy at all. The Tiangong Space Station is real, the astronauts are really there, and the water is perfectly fine sitting there without flying out of the glass, at least for demonstration purposes.

While you may expect all objects to float around the cabin due to the fact that the astronauts are in freefall towards the Earth, there are other forces in play with the cup of water.

“Water molecules like to stick to glass and also to other water molecules more than they like to disperse in the air,” Jordan Bimm, a postdoctoral researcher and space historian at the University of Chicago, explained to AP in 2023, when these conspiracy theories last surfaced. “So if there is no external force, water remains in ‘clumps’ in the weightless environment, and in this case inside the glass.” 

Adding to this effect is the Velcro strapping the glass to the table, and water's surface tension, which "also works to help maintain the static shape and presents the illusion of how water would act on the ground," according to Bimm.

Nevertheless, liquids are usually drunk from pouches whilst in space, or other specially-designed cups. Later on in the video, astronauts used the glass of water to demonstrate that without gravity, a ping pong ball is not pushed up to the top of the liquid by buoyant forces.

Skip to 1:17:40 if you would like to see the demonstration. It's a shame that conspiracy theorists did not make it this far into the demonstration, as it's pretty cool to see. 

They then created a film of water, which acted like a magnifying glass, before creating a large glob of water and filling it with a giant bubble, creating two images of the astronaut behind; one inverted, and one not. It would have been good to know what conspiracy theorists would make of that.