Texas brewery tries brewing beer and growing barley on ISS
A Texas brewery dubbed Starbase Brewing (no connection to SpaceX) has just completed an experiment on ISS where it tried to brew beer in weightlessness as well as grow barley in simulated Martian soil.
Starbase Brewing — unrelated to Elon Musk’s space company or its South Texas city of Starbase — sent its MicroBrew-1 and OASIS experiments to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX mission Aug. 1. They came back aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that splashed down eight days later off the coast of California.
…OASIS, short for “Optimizing Agriculture in Simulated Interplanetary Soils,” is the result of a partnership between the beer maker, Texas A&M AgriLife and Jaguar Space, a Colorado bioastronautics firm. According to Argroves, who launched the company in 2020, the goal was to grow barley in a mixture of Martian soil simulant with a byproduct of beermaking called Brewer’s Spent Grain and microbes.
The MicroBrew-1 experiment attempted to ferment beer, mixing “eight containers loaded with half wort — the sugary liquid extracted from malted grains — and half yeast.”
The company is far from manufacturing space-grown beer, but its founder seems focused on being the first brewery selling beer on Mars.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
A Texas brewery dubbed Starbase Brewing (no connection to SpaceX) has just completed an experiment on ISS where it tried to brew beer in weightlessness as well as grow barley in simulated Martian soil.
Starbase Brewing — unrelated to Elon Musk’s space company or its South Texas city of Starbase — sent its MicroBrew-1 and OASIS experiments to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX mission Aug. 1. They came back aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that splashed down eight days later off the coast of California.
…OASIS, short for “Optimizing Agriculture in Simulated Interplanetary Soils,” is the result of a partnership between the beer maker, Texas A&M AgriLife and Jaguar Space, a Colorado bioastronautics firm. According to Argroves, who launched the company in 2020, the goal was to grow barley in a mixture of Martian soil simulant with a byproduct of beermaking called Brewer’s Spent Grain and microbes.
The MicroBrew-1 experiment attempted to ferment beer, mixing “eight containers loaded with half wort — the sugary liquid extracted from malted grains — and half yeast.”
The company is far from manufacturing space-grown beer, but its founder seems focused on being the first brewery selling beer on Mars.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Our Irish Catholic mom used to love the saying: “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”
On the Space Station, it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes. So is it safe to say that every 90 minutes the Space Station crosses a time zone at the 5 o’clock hour?
This comment does not endorse drinking alcohol to excess.
Huh. Apparently the ISS’s 90 minute orbit is as measured from the ground, rather than sidereal. So, yeah, it crosses 1700 every ninety minutes, although it only takes 88.2 minutes to complete a circle (oval, yeah, whatever,) the other 1.8 minutes is catching back up to the Earth rotating underneath it.
Assuming the LLM I was playing with sourced the math correctly, which is never a certainty.
Man, I hate it when I’m dumb. Five o’clock would be relative to the sun, not the Earth. So it’d be closer to the 88.2 minutes, minus (or plus) a correction for the motion of the Earth.
It is absolutely mandatory that someone figures out how to brew beer off-planet. How else will future generations of extra-terrestrial humans be able to preface the doing of something dangerous/foolish with “Hold my beer?”
There is a theory that Humans evolved in a sort of para-symbiosis with cereal crops, because of the mind-altering capabilities, although no one has advanced a similar conjecture about potatoes. And, really, from the moment we pop out of the womb and our first thoughts are “What IS this cold, bright, place?! And why am I in it?!”, people want to alter their reality perception. Kids making themselves dizzy.
Now this is a good idea, growing all the ingredients to make alcoholic beverages in space.
I understand making alcoholic beverages is a no brainer no matter where humans go, it would happen eventually.
But is it really a good idea to make such a thing which would eventually be consumed where it was made which is a place where it is questionable that humans belong for any protracted amount of time?
Just like sex and drugs, how dangerous might it be for people to ingest alcoholic beverages in space?
And even given the possible dangers known and unknown producing and ingesting alcohol just like having sex and ingesting drugs it will without doubt happen wherever human beings find themselves whether it is officially approved of or not.
If the Russians can do it—we can.
They are less risk averse about a lot of things. Nothing short of hurricane force winds keep them grounded.
Jerry Lineger was spooked during that fire—I can’t imagine how terrified he would have been had he been on Mir when that Progress hit it at speed.
Thankfully they had a Brit instead.
There are worse things than a tipsy cosmonaut—like someone shutting down and going *non-functional.*
We saw that when the crew of a cruise liner abandoned ship and the band had to do everything.
I think they were Brits too..
It is an interesting question: What are the effects of being alcohol intoxicated weightless in orbit specifically?
And or on a planetary body with less gravity than the earth?
Cotour–
Key point in brewing beer– you need the right type(s) of yeast, and that needs to be originally brought from Earth.
On the other hand– ethanol can be chemically synthesized by reacting ethylene with steam and a catalyst, at 600 degrees F., at 50 atmospheres. Energy intensive but well understood process. But again, you would need to bring the ethylene & catalyst with you and construct a reactor-vessel.
—-
A good question would be: what actual pharmaceuticals have always been on the Space Station, and who is taking what drug for what condition?
“Common medical conditions observed during the short‐duration Space Shuttle flights and longer space missions on the International Space Station (ISS) are space motion sickness (SMS), sleep problems, pain (such as headache, back pain, joint and muscle pain), allergies, skin rashes and dermatitis, sinus congestion, and infectious diseases.”
“These conditions often require pharmacotherapy and, accordingly, drugs are prescribed and used in space under the assumption that they act in a similar manner as on Earth. However, evidence gathered both from single case reports as well as from the analysis of astronaut medical records suggests that this is not necessarily the case.”
“Drug Pharmakinetics in Space: What do we know?”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9314132/
Very interesting.
i used to make beer and wine just for fun.
Since yeast makes gas bubbles how do they plan on getting the bubbles to the “top” of the container in order to ‘burp’ them off so the vessel does not rupture.?