Hot topics and lukewarm opportunities for soft matter science up in the sky*

I will first discuss some topics in soft matter that truly deserve to be investigated in microgravity conditions, focusing in particular on spontaneous restructuring processes in colloidal gels, referring to our recent experience with the NASA ACE T10 mission too, and on thermal forces in complex fluids. I shall then present the new opportunities given by the ESA COLIS facility for optical correlation spectroscopy to be installed on the ISS in a couple of years. Finally, however, I shall also point out some limiting factors that tend to cool my enthusiasm towards space experiments in our field.