Can we make a beer in space? For that matter, can we drink a beer in space?

twitter/@Zero_G_Drunk                                                             facebook/bottlestoregalactica 

Or, “you can’t play beer pong in zero-G”

So we’ve established getting alcohol into space can be a costly endeavor. Now we need to look at the difficulties of making our alcohol up there and being of an antipodean nature I thought we would begin, as you always should, with beer.

The first issue that sprang to mind was carbonation – the fizz that makes it all worth while. Unfortunately, in a zero gravity environment, carbon dioxide bubbles do not rise to the surface and burst as there is no surface; there is no up or down. They remain randomly distributed throughout a solution – even after swallowing. This can have adverse effects on you insides, the least of which is the dreaded ‘wet burp’, where you will be belching as much liquid as you will gas since there is no buoyancy to the gas and therefore no separation of gas and liquid.

On the more serious side of health concerns you have the buildup of gasses in your stomach and intestine that can’t escape. I once vaguely remember having to settle an argument in a bar over whether or not you should feed horses beer, as their digestive systems mean they can not burp to release the built up gas and this can rupture their stomach linings and cause serious injury. I can’t remember how this argument started, or why one aggrieved party so badly wanted to get a horse drunk, before you ask. A quick google search later revealed this to be true, however, so we can only assume such a similar buildup in the human body over a long drinking session could cause similar gastrointestinal distress if you were unable to expel excess carbon dioxide in the traditional fashion (the loud belch followed by a high-five).

The victor of this particular argument then asked me what the best cheese to use to hide a horse. The answer was ‘marscapone’

So perhaps no lagers or pilsners in space. Well what about low carbonation or hand-pulled beers, ales and stouts and porters? An Australian brewer and a private astronautics firm have joined forces to create a low-carbonation stout called Vostok Space Beer that they say is perfect for drinking in space. They have tested it by drinking it on a microgravity flight in the upper atmosphere – a high-atmosphere aircraft that flies in parabolic arcs to achieve short periods of weightlessness due to fluctuating g-forces (a style of flight affectionately named the ‘vomit-comet’ by astronautic enthusiasts), replicating a zero gravity environment. In the below video you can see the test in action:

 

There has also been a collaboration between the Russian academy of sciences, Okoyama University and Japanese brewing behemoth Sapporo, creating a beer brewed with barley grown on the International Space Station, imaginatively called ISS Space Barley Beer. Unfortunately they only made 100 liters of it, and limited it to a single tasting event for thirty lucky couples in Japan.

So they have been making beer for space, and beer with ingredients from space, but can you make beer in space? The first thing to note is that yeast is incredibly easy to cultivate; all it requires is some form of sugar or starch, natural or synthetic, plus a little heat, to create ethanol – the good stuff. Since it reproduces via anaerobic respiration, it doesn’t even need oxygen to create alcohol, so in theory you could even create alcohol in an absolute vacuum.

Indeed NASA has done research on the humble yeast bacteria Candida albicans, albeit not for the purpose of beer. The yeast spores were included on a recent space flight in special incubators, in order to measure how spaceflight affects potentially infectious organisms. The results were somewhat surprising though – yeast appears to ferment more efficiently in a zero gravity environment then on earth – there was a lower live cell count in the samples that had been through the zero gravity spaceflight than those that had been brewed on earth as control samples.

While there has been given no official explanation for this, one theory is that in an environment without gravity, much in the same way that carbon dioxide is evenly distributed in a carbonated solution, yeast cells would be evenly distributed throughout a solution with the ‘wort’ (a brewers terms for the pre-fermentation mix), as opposed to on earth where settling would occur and all ingredients would end up on the bottom of a vat.

So not only could we make beer on space, we would witness a much more efficient fermentation process. And with low-carbonation stouts and porters, space travelers could receive much needed iron and calcium, minerals that are present in large amounts in certain stouts, as well as a higher caloric content. Anyone traveling in zero-g for long periods of time experience loss of bone density and body mass and need intense amounts of vitamin therapy to counteract this effect - and would you prefer a handful of pills or a couple of pints a day to keep you healthy and happy? (I'm aware some of you would have said both, but we will leave the effects of barbiturates in space until a later date)

So we could make beer in space – but is it economically viable to bring the ingredients for the job into space? I’ve taken a recipe for a fairly generic stout, as this requires no carbonation, and extrapolated out the measures for a 100 liter batch – call it a micro gravity micro brew.

Generic Stout -

Recipe for 100 liters:

• 9.2 pounds klages / 4.8 kg
• 0.7 pound chocolate malt / .31 kg
• 0.7 pound roast barley / .31 kg
• 1.1 pound 80L crystal  / .5 kg
• 3/4 stick brewers licorice  / .25 kg
• 2.2 ozs. fuggles / .05 kg
• 1.2 pound brown sugar /0.54 kg
• Wyeast London ale yeast (let’s call it 2 grams)

To calculate how much water is needed for the mash I found this awesome online calculator that takes into account all the variables when it comes to brewing – very handy for the home brewer here on earth, too.

Water needed for fermentation and brewing:

          32.77 Gallons/ 124 liters / 124 kg  

(assuming the water is of standard concentration and mineral content so the liter-to-kg ratio is 1:1)

So 100 liters of beer would weigh about 126 kgs in raw materials to take into space – if we take the cost to weight-by-kg ratio we established previously, we see that one kg of material costs some $103 USD. The weight of 100 liters of beer, in transporting raw materials alone, would be $12978 USD – or, if you break it down into per 568ml imperial (read: proper) pint, $737 USD per pint.

Of course if you’ve ever worked behind a bar pulling pints, you know there can be up to 20% loss from a single keg from wastage and spoiling (and the inevitable cheeky Martian bartender mumping a free pint after the bar is closed.) Taking this into account, you are looking at a purchase cost of $921 USD per pint.

To make an industry standard 30% purchase cost on tap beer (overheads on a space station can’t be cheap), you are looking at paying more than $3000 a pint to your deep space publican, maybe $2500 at happy hour prices.

And can you even drink beer in space? In the posted video above we can see that the Vostok beer test subject is having some difficulty in drinking in zero g – there is no up or down, so naturally the liquid in the glass is not affected by gravity. So how can we drink in space?

In association with a company called Bio Serve, the Coca-Cola company helped to develop a drink delivery system to pour a serve of a carbonated drink that can be consumed in zero gravity. According to the press release, “They (the Coca-Cola Company) have a lot of technology that they develop for future ways of providing their drinks anywhere and everywhere."

So I’m not the only one thinking ahead, apparently…

                            Image courtesy Bio Serve

In the picture above you can see the collapsible bladder inside the traditional PET coke bottle, creating a sealed and constant controlled pressure around the fluid and preventing the carbonation from separating from the cola. You can see the carbonation in the actual bag is more a foamy mess than a traditional coke as we know it – the carbon dioxide has nowhere to rise to, and therefore remains distributed throughout.

It is described merely as ‘palatable’, so perhaps not the most shining endorsement. It also does not tackle the issue of the ‘wet burp’, either. (In regards to other drinking methods for space, there will be a later blog post detailing the how and how-nots of the whole business)

Another interesting factoid I’ve come across is the fact that anyone who spends an extended amount of time in space loses some of their sense of taste – strong flavors are preferred by astronauts according to NASA, so big, spicy and bold flavors are the way to go. Another mark against lagers, and definitely something to think on as we continue looking into the science of drinking in space.

So in summary, beer in space is over priced, mostly stout and you won’t be able to taste it as your tongue has stopped working. Much like back in university, then.

Next up, Can you distill spirits in space?

How to get booze from our planet to your new home in the stars

twitter/@Zero_G_Drunk                                                            facebook/bottlestoregalactica  

The first thing it is important to establish in this potential future we are assuming in this blog is that the technology for space flight is limited to what is currently or potentially available to us in the foreseeable future. This is not the Starship Enterprise, there will be no beaming a case of Sauvignon Blanc to your new lunar home, there is no Stargate or Event Horizon to speed things up. Alcohol is only finding it’s way to space via two methods: shipping it long haul on a shuttle or making it on hand once you are up there.

The first issue is the packaging: glass. My initial thought was that glass would not be able to survive the extreme pressures of leaving earth’s atmosphere and would shatter, but on further research they might just survive. An average manned shuttle crew feels around 3.5 gs of force when they leave the atmosphere- that is, they feel force equivalent to 3.5 times that of Earth’s gravitational field.

If we take that a glass bottle of standard thickness weighs around a kilogram when full (an average 750ml bottle of wine or spirits – no table service or methuselahs on the moon just yet), then that bottle would experience a force of 9.81 Newtons under the force of Earth’s gravity, and therefore 34.335 N when leaving the atmosphere. Glass has a relatively high practical tensile strength of 27MPa-60MPa, and has high compressive strength – glass bottles usually break when sharp force is applied to one point, but in this situation pressure would be applied equally to all sides of the bottles at once. For this exercise we will assume the bottles have a tensile strength of 30MPa, but when we convert our Newtons to MPa the force is only equal to 0.34335Mpa, so nowhere near enough to shatter a glass bottle through force alone.

This of course assumes the glass bottles are packed correctly and are not rattling and impacting one another or anything else, as this would alter the equation.

Phew – that was a lot of science. I promise it won’t always be like that!

So we could get glass bottles to space; but the next issue is how much physical space they take up on the way there, and recycling them once we get there. Glass bottles with a long neck are handy to grab when you are behind a bar or pouring one out for your fallen homies, but aren’t the best for maximizing storage space. While a spaceship might look big while it’s standing on a launchpad, 80% of it’s body is fuel and liquid oxygen (LOX) to achieve the monumental task of escaping earth’s gravity – to reach escape velocity (that is a speed fast enough to escape a bodies gravitational pull) for a planet with earth’s mass an object must be travelling 11km per second -  or nearly 40,000 kilometers per hour.

To give you and idea of how much fuel is used to get out of the atmosphere, the space shuttle Discovery had a payload of 24,400kg to reach lower earth orbit – and only 3810kg to reach geostationary transfer orbit at the ISS. So four-fifths of a shuttle is used up by fuel – there is really not much space to stash a sneaky carton of brews.

Wine and spirits would probably have to be transported in a square packaging solution – think a tetrapack, those foil-lined plastic containers you can buy milk in sometimes. These tetrapacks can be stored much more efficiently, stacking them in square lots so there are no unused areas. This solution also works on the other end – and empty bottle of wine or spirits weighs around 400g, whereas an empty tetrapack only weighs 15-20 grams, and can be broken down flat for transportation once empty, making it much easier to return the empty packages for recycling on earth (this example is applicable to alcohol consumption on space stations and orbital hotels; hopefully we will have recycling centers at any planetary colonies).

Getting any item out of the atmosphere of a planetary body is a question of weight versus thrust – and how much fuel is needed to solve this equation, and just how much that costs.

Let’s take the Russian Soyuz-2 rocket.  It weighs 305 tons, 270 of which is fuel – again, nearly four-fifths. It uses a mix of aviation kerosene and liquid oxygen to power its rockets; this mix costs them $123,000 USD at current market prices. So this means it costs $403 per ton – not too expensive, right?

But if you look at it another way, there are more than seven tons of fuel for each ton of spacecraft – So each ton of cargo costs an additional $3103 to get it just to a low earth orbit. That means it will cost you $3.10 to get a bottle of wine to space, in fuel costs alone.

Not bad.

But if we look at the associated costs, we can see that the average costs of a NASA launch (based on the cost of the space program since it’s inception up until 2011 divided by the number of shuttle launches) is around 1.5 billion USD. So if we go back to the Discovery, the fuel to cargo ratio was 24,400kg to 3810kg. So per kilogram of cargo, it cost $103. That’s $103 per bottle of wine or spirits, or $52 per 700ml of tetrapacked spirit.

So pretty pricey to get booze into space.

I think we should look at making it up there, instead.

An Introduction

Bottlestore Galactica

 Or, how (and what) to drink in space, the final frontier.

twitter/@Zero_G_Drunk                                                            facebook/bottlestoregalactica  

After the first moon landing in 1969 there was a flurry of speculation and theorizing made about the possibility of humans inhabiting celestial bodies other than earth, and the challenges associated with the realities of living in what is essentially a lifeless environment. Where would we live? How would we eat? Where does the poop go?

While the reality of the huge budget and scientific constraints set in and dashed hopes of holidaying on the moons of Jupiter for many years, we’ve recently seen a resurgence in investment from the private sector with an eye on commercializing space flight and developing interstellar tourism and the possibilities of colonization within our solar system. From Virgin interstellar to LightSail-3, it seems that the private sector may again trump the public and the dream of space travel and colonization of other planets in our solar system and beyond might become a reality.

This raises a whole new set of questions and ethical quandaries on issues from regulation and ownership rights to pollution, power and the logistics of supplying a demand more than 380,000 miles away from earth. This is not the blog to discuss those issues. This blog will discuss the issue of getting sauced in space.

Alcohol has not only been a part of every major civilization for the last nine thousand years, generating more than one trillion USD annually, and it is inexorably tied to the hospitality field. Familiarity and personal luxuries are major drivers in helping individuals acclimatize to a new environment, so it is safe to assume the comforting and socially lubricating presence of alcohol would be vital in establishing a new foothold in space, whether is be a hotel in the ISS or a terraforming base on Mars.

But the obvious issue is you can’t pop down to the corner store for a six pack when you are hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. So how will we drink in space? What will we drink in space? Can you shake a cocktail in zero gravity? Will a beer stay carbonated during space flight? How are we going to get fresh lime juice on mars? Can you do a layback in five times earth’s gravity? Can you distill a spirit when there is no atmosphere? How the bloody hell am I going to handle this hangover in an elliptical orbit of the moon?

This blog will attempt to answer all these questions and more, providing potential solutions to the meaty problems of drinking in space, as well as suggesting what you should drink, how you should drink it and how to make your own space-man (or lady) drinks at home.

This blog is purely hypothetical, where we will be making assumptions based on the best possible data, research and popular theories available, combined with information about the science of creating and consuming alcohol. Expect wild ideas and content deciphered from illegible scribbles on sodden cocktail napkins, and much like the popular science magazines of the early twentieth century that said we would all be living in dirigibles by now, remember that none of this will probably ever come to pass.

Maybe.

But if it does, remember you read it here first.