What's the Buzz on Alcohol in Space?

of space. The bottle contains two chambers, one for the champagne and the other for a valve that uses the carbon dioxide in the champagne to eject foamy little alcohol spheres, which can then be scooped into long stemmed glasses for sipping. Once inside the mouth, the spheres turn back huala into liquid champagne. This space champagne, as the Agency France Press reported, is envisioned as an amenity for space horsts, who someday may be taking pleasure trips with private space flight operators.

If future recreational astronauts do get the chance to savor some of the bubbly, it won't be the first time that alcohol has been consumed in space. The practice goes back to the early days of the Soviet space program, when the U S sr S doctors reportedly sent cosmonauts into orbit with rations of cognac. One former cosmonaut told NBC News. We used it to stimulate our immune system and on the whole to keep our organisms in tone.

Later on, cosmonauts were given a liquor containing jin sing, a root that's a traditional herbal remedy for improving energy and concentration. NASA, in contrast, generally has prohibited astronauts from drinking not just in space, but also within sixteen hours of a space launch, but the agency has wavered from

its teetotaling stance at times. There reportedly was a plan, for example, to allow the Apollo eight crew to drink a small ration of brandy to go with their Christmas meal of dehydrated bacon cubes and turkey gravy stuffing, but Commander Frank Borman decided that they should forego the alcohol. On the Apollo eleven trip to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, astronaut Buzz Aldrin did open a small plastic

container of wine. It was almost certainly the first food or drink consumed during the trip, but it was so that he, a Presbyterian Church elder, could take communion. According to NBC News, as former NASA food developers Charles T. Borland and Gregory L. Vatt detail in their book The

Astronauts Cookbook, Tails, Recipes, and more. NASA considered providing astronauts on the sky Lab mission in the nineteen seventies with sherry packaged inflexible plastic pouches was built in drinking tubes, but the idea was mixed for fear of negative publicity and because apparently the beverage, although perfectly palatable on the ground, filled the cabin with an intensely nauseating smell on a

test flight that approximated low gravity with free fall. And NASA report titled Living Aloft Human Requirements for Extended Space Flight contemplated the pros and cons of drinking on space flights and in future settlements on the Moon or other planets. It noted it is unlikely that alcohol as a social beverage will find its way into space, at least until

relatively large and stable settlements are established. Alcohol as a recreational drug may be keenly missed by space travelers, since there is evidence that alcohol plays an important social role in exotic environments. Generally, though, today's space travelers have to wait until they get back to Earth before they have a drink because of alcohol's chemical volatility. That is, its tendency to vaporize, astronauts aren't allowed to have it on

the International Space Station. We spoke via email with Daniel G. Huo, a spokesman at NASA's Johnson's Space Center. He said that this ban is due to quote the negative effects that alcohol can have on the water recovery system, which draws in water from a number of sources, including cabin condensation. The bed applies not just to beverages, but to any sort of product containing alcohol, such as aftershave or mouthwash.

There's another tricky issue about drinking in space. Not much is known about the effect of alcohol consumption on the human body in the space environment, which already is no to alter everything from the immune system to hand eye coordination. No official studies have been done, so we really don't know whether the space environment would intensify the intoxicating effect of alcohol, or how an orbital hangover would compare to

one that results from a bender on Earth. While we don't have much science on alcohol and space, for what it's worth, there has been research on the effects of alcohol consumption at high altitudes on Earth. In study, for example, some male subjects drink a quantity of one hundred proof

vodka adjusted to their weight. For a one pound man that's about seventy kilos, it was about four shots, and then they spent the day in a simulated twelve thousand, five hundred foot elevation environment that's about thirty eight hundreds. They were then compared to other subjects who didn't drink

and or who stayed at sea level. The drinkers experienced impaired performance on a battery of tasks, with older subjects performing worse than younger ones, but there wasn't a significant difference between drinkers at high altitudes and those who stayed

on the ground. Although not much alcohol has been consumed in space, researchers are studying the creation of it on the I s S. Scotch maker Art Begs set samples of unaged booze and wood up to study how whiskey might age differently in space, and Budweiser sent along batches of barley seeds in a scientific effort to understand the effects of microgravity on beer ingredients. Today's episode was written

by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tyler Clang. To learn more about the history and science of space, food and beverages, check out the episode of my other podcast Saver called ground Control to Major nom brain. Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other tipsy topics, visit our home planet has stuff works dot com, and for more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.