Why a sixth-grader wants to brew beer in space

Michal Bodzianowski, 11, is among the winners of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education’s six installment of its Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. Brewing beer is a test of a water purification process.

|
REUTERS/NASA/Handout via Reuters
Backdropped by Earth, the International Space Station is photographed by an STS-130 crew member on space shuttle Endeavour in 2010. A Colorado student has a science experiment that could put a microbrewery in space.

Mankind may be one step closer to getting extraterrestrial breweries – thanks to an eleven-year-old.

Michal Bodzianowski, 11, is among the winners of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education’s Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, which sends student experiments to the International Space Station. His project, "What Are the Effects of Creation of Beer in Microgravity and Is It Possible?,” will be ferried upward this November as part of the program's "Mission 4."

Bodzianowski, a sixth-grader at the STEM School and Academy
in Colorado’s Douglas County School District, says he wants to find out if it’s possible to brew beer in space, mixing crushed malted barley, bottled water, and yeast. It's an idea that he says could help in developing backup water supplies for future extraterrestrial colonies, since alcohol is lethal to bacteria. 

Indeed, for Bodzianowski, putting microbreweries in space has little to do with furnishing Martian taps. Instead, beer could be a safe drinking water substitute in the event of an off-world disaster that contaminates the brought-along water supplies, says Bodzianowski. That’s because the fermentation process kills off water contaminants.

“For example, if a project exploded and wounded people and cut off the power, and polluted most of the water, the fermentation process could be used to make beer, which can then be used as a disinfectant and a clean drinking source,” he writes, in his project proposal.

Beer has been produced before in space, albeit in small quantities. It has also been consumed there. In 2007, news outlets reported that a team of NASA astronauts had flown while intoxicated, prompting the agency to tighten its alcohol consumption policies. The news that astronauts drank alcohol in space was little surprise to Russian cosmonauts, though. In 2010, a retired Russian astronaut speaking at Moscow's Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics told reporters that cognac and ginseng liqueur had long been space staples for Russian space-farers. 

A total of 11 projects were selected for Mission 4, whittled from 744 submitted proposals. About 40 student researchers from grades 5-11 are listed as the principal investigators, co-investigators, and collaborators on the experiments.

The other winning projects include other experiments testing the effects of microgravity on bacteria. Those projects include one on bacteria decomposition, another on bacteria growth, and another on mold development on bread. Others veer toward assessing how mobile animals grow in space: how does the spotted salamander develop in microgravity? How do rainbow trout eggs hatch in orbit? Several other student projects abandon the animal kingdom for the materials sciences, investigating how metal oxidizes in saltwater in space and how silver crystal growth changes in a high-radiation environment. 

The winning experiments are scheduled to launch aboard SpaceX-3 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on November 11, 2013. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Why a sixth-grader wants to brew beer in space
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1008/Why-a-sixth-grader-wants-to-brew-beer-in-space
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe