To Boldly Go Where No Beer Has Gone Before
Mike Laur - October 10, 2013
Colorado Students To Make Beer History Using Space Station Experiment
Colleen O’Connor of The Denver Post reports that a 6th grader and his class in Highlands Ranch are behind an upcoming space experiment that will make beer in space. It’s really a story worth checking out, full of hope, promise, youthful exuberance and a little bit of beer - in space.
The lad leading the effort, eleven-year-old Michal Bodzianowski, beat out other students to win the prize of launching his experiment ("What Are the Effects of Creation of Beer in Microgravity and Is It Possible?") into space in December, where it will orbit onboard the ISS.
Again the story in the Post is excellent reading, but you gotta love the kid. I guess if Mom and Dad are good with their sixth-grade son making beer, I’m good with that too. He’s got the right attitude, as writer O’Connor notes:
“Michal, who came up with his idea after reading a book called "Gruesome Facts" that explained about why beer was so popular in the Middle Ages.
"It was a punishment for crimes, that you couldn't drink beer," he said, "and most people didn't survive (that) because the water was contaminated."
Pondering how alcohol killed bacteria in the water, Michal thought this might also work for future space colonies.
Beer, he wrote in his design proposal, is "an important factor in future civilization as an emergency backup hydration and medical source."
In space, if a project exploded, wounded people and polluted most of the water, he theorized, "the fermentation process could be used to make beer, which can then be used as a disinfectant and a clean drinking source.”
Actually, there have been earlier attempts by Coloradoans to make beer in space.
A 1998 experiment developed by Boulder biochemists at University of Colorado and sponsored by Coors focused on fermentation in microgravity, using tiny samples of wort that were pitched with yeast once on-orbit inside Space Shuttle. While the big objective was to determine microgravity’s effects on life in space, it turns out that Yeast are perfect candidates for space flight - small, lightweight, and they would bring their own food - so they were chosen for the mission. But their sample sizes limited extensive post-flight analysis. “It didn’t taste very good”, lamented researcher Kirsten Sterrett.
According to a NASA story, Sterrett performed a protein analysis on the beer and the yeast, measured the beer's specific gravity, and "repitched" the yeast by brewing subsequent batches of beer with it. By all of these measures, the space-beer appeared to be essentially the same as beer brewed on Earth. Other findings:
“The behavior of the yeast was somewhat puzzling, though. The total cell count in space-borne samples was lower that of "control" samples brewed on the ground, and the percentage of live cells was also lower. One of the yeast's proteins also existed in greater amounts in the space-brew.??“Sterrett's experiment couldn't suggest reasons for these changes, but the overly abundant protein bears some resemblance to a general stress protein.??“The low cell count was particularly surprising, says Sterrett. In space, yeast cells remain evenly dispersed within the "wort" -- a brewers' term for the pre-fermentation mixture of water, barley, hops, and yeast. Ideally, this would give the yeast cells better access to nutrients in the wort compared to similar mixtures on Earth, where the weight of the cells causes them to pile at the bottom one on top of the other.”
It turns out, though that microgravity has a pleasant effect on fermentation. And another experiment flown on ISS Expedition 4 in 2002 was enabled again by yet more Coloradans. BioServe is a NASA-funded program, and mostly run by the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Their Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus - also used in the Coors experiment - was flown for two months, this time sponsored by Bristol-Myers Squibb to test bacterial growth processes in space. They weren’t trying to make beer. They wanted to enhance the production of cancer-killing actinomycin D antibiotics, so a cozy little home inside a CGBA circling the earth at over 18,000 miles was chosen as the perfect spot.
From A NASA release about this mission.
“Space flight has a stimulating effect on microbial antibiotic production, with increases in specific productivity of up to 200 percent... In some instances, the flight samples had not yet even reached peak production rates by the end of the mission. Space flight pharmaceutical research such as this introduces the possibility of minimizing some of the effects of gravity from the cell and its environment.
“Until the International Space Station became operational, research on this phenomenon had been limited to short-duration flights onboard a Space Shuttle. The objective is to determine if these stimulating effects continue to change over time as the exposure to space is increased from under two weeks to more than two months. A secondary objective is to assess whether the organisms adapt to the weightless environment, and if so, if any potentially beneficial changes in the antibiotic compound structure might occur as a consequence.”
Young Michal’s experiment will ask similar questions, but also throw hops into the mix in hopes of producing something that is more beer-like than lab-like. His hope is to determine the efficacy of actually making real beer in space, and help use beer to improve living conditions in space environments.
JAXA, Japan’s space agency, helped launch an experiment to determine microgravity effects on barley sprouts. Successive generations of these space-grown sprouts were used to brew special batches of Japanese beer, but again researchers agreed: “It didn’t taste very good.”
To Boldly Go Where No Beer Has Gone Before
Of course, space has a long history in modern beer art and science, even if beer doesn’t have a long history in space. Space technology is used every minute of every day in breweries, brewpubs, taprooms and beerbars around the world. Just a few examples of space science hard at work making beer better include:
- Farmers rely upon GPS-guided equipment to grow better, cheaper crops, including the barley, corn and rice that goes into beer.
- Satellite Imagery gives farmers a leg up on knowing when to water, when to harvest, and when the weather is coming. It looks cool, too.
- Advanced research into purifying water onboard manned spacecraft has led to dozens of innovations and technologies that make water cleaner and purer
here on Earth.
- To assemble the Saturn V engineers developed new ways to build things never built before. Orbital welding was born of the need to connect intricate, complex piping on-site, and is used today to build facilities for brewers like Odell’s expansions in Colorado and North Carolina.
- Ultra-precise microspheres, manufactured in the weightlessness of space, are still used today to calibrate the calibrations, and keep accurate measure of all things small like yeasts in beer.
- Process management and system engineering were computerized, evaluated and re-evaluated to improve efficiency, refine workflows and make sure nothing fell through the cracks.
- Satellites rely upon solar energy, and the advances in photovoltaic design developed for space are harnessed here on earth to bottle and package beer at places like New Begium Brewing.
- Science, engineering, technology and math needed to remotely guide giant spacecraft and subtle rovers led to huge breakthroughs in understanding how to control machines in brand new ways, and keg-handling robots were born.
- When it comes time to sell beer, space technology helps out again - through air-curtain refrigeration developed in partnership with NASA, keeping the beer cold while saving energy and money at locations like Alfalfa’s in Boulder
The world could always use a good beer, and it takes good brewers to make it. Perhaps young Michal and his classmates are off to new horizons in brewing science, and it is exciting to see science, technology, engineering and math education actually come to life, in a Space Station experiment no less. Cheers to the frontiers of space!
