Beer in Space

At eleven, my question of whether beer can be brewed in microgravity flew to the International Space Station, made the evening news and ended up in the Congressional Record.

In the fall of 2013 I was a sixth grader at STEM School and Academy in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and my class entered the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. Every team wrote a proposal for a small experiment that would ride to the International Space Station. Mine asked a simple question: can you brew beer in microgravity, and does it come out any different?

The idea was less silly than it sounds. Fermentation is one of the oldest ways people made water safe to drink, so a crew far from Earth might care whether yeast still does its job up there.

Selected

On October 8, 2013 the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education announced Mission 4. Out of 744 proposals, mine was one of the experiments picked to fly. Everything sat sealed in a small tube, with the ingredients kept apart until an astronaut mixed them on orbit, and a matching tube stayed on the ground so the two could be compared.

That week the story got away from me. It ran on ABC World News and Fox News, Al Jazeera America had me on for a live interview, Jay Leno made a joke about it in his monologue, and Gazeta Wyborcza wrote it up in Poland, where my parents are from.

The coverage, October 2013 to July 2014: ABC, KRON, Fox, Al Jazeera America, WJLA, Jay Leno and the Smithsonian.

Flight

The launch slipped through the winter. The experiments finally flew on Orbital Sciences' first Cygnus resupply mission, which left Wallops Island, Virginia on January 9, 2014. The samples came home in March. The programme published my account of watching the launch, My Greatest Moment of My Life So Far, and the title still holds up.

The Congressional Record

On July 3, 2014 Representative Mike Coffman entered a tribute into the Congressional Record. It names the flight as SpaceX-3 in December 2013, the plan at the time it was written; the ride in the end was the Cygnus in January.

The printed tribute to Michal Bodzianowski by Rep. Mike Coffman, Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, July 3, 2014.Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, p. E1105 (opens in a new tab)

Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, Mission 4

Tribute in the Congressional Record,

“Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to recognize Michal Bodzianowski for his achievement of winning the "Student Spaceflight Experiments Program" and successfully launching his experiment into space.”

Rep. Mike Coffman, of Colorado, in the House of Representatives. Congressional Record, Vol. 160, p. E1105, July 3, 2014 (opens in a new tab)

At eleven, his question of whether beer can be brewed in microgravity was picked from 744 proposals for the International Space Station. It flew on Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus in January 2014 and came home in March.

In the news 18 items

Twelve years on I write software for a living, and this is still where it started.