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

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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.