All this talk of colonizing the Moon or Mars is exciting, but it’s about time we stopped to think about the important questions related to humanity’s next big journey. Matt Damon showed us we can grow potatoes on Mars, so the next logical step is to figure how we can get an ice cold brewski to wash those space spuds down.
Enter a team from the University of California who hope to discover if it’s possible to brew beer on the moon…for science, of course.
The team hopes to use their experiment to learn more about how yeast behaves when on the moon’s low gravity environment, something that’s important not just for brewing beer, but also for developing methods to make bread and drugs in space. It’s questions like these that need to be answered if we are ever going to realize our goal of achieving a self-sustaining human colony away from Earth.
“Our canister is designed based on actual fermenters,” said the team’s leader, Srivaths Kaylan (via The Telegraph). “It contains three compartments, the top will be filled with unfermented beer, and the second will contain the yeast. When the rover lands on the Moon with our experiment, a valve will open between the two compartments, allowing the two to mix.”
The extreme microbrewing experiment has made it onto the shortlist of 25 candidates who will compete for a spot on India’s TeamIndus spacecraft. TeamIndus is one of the five remaining candidates in the running to win Google’s Lunar XPrize, which will see $20 million awarded to the first privately funded spaceflight program to land on the moon. If the University of California team is successful in securing a spot on the project, it will start brewing its first mini-batch of moon beer shortly after the spacecraft’s planned December 28th launch.
