If you love the cold vacuum of space and also beer, well, there’s probably a competition you’d like to enter.
Vostok – a collaboration between Sydney brew lords, 4 Pines, and space engineering company, Saber Astronautics – is offering one lucky person the opportunity to be part of their space beer research and development team, which involves testing a space beer bottle in zero gravity. Sign me the fuck up.
Ok, you won’t actually get to travel to space, but you’ll get the next best thing – a parabolic flight that recreates weightlessness, so you can float around as if you were in space. Better yet, you get to drink beer at the same time. You bloody beauty.
Birthed seven years ago, Vostok wanted to create the world’s first beer to be drunk in space, so they created patented bottle technology and tested it on ZERO-G flights. In case you were wondering, yes, beer is safe to drink in space.
While they probably could have put the beer in one of those squeezy bags astronauts usually drink out of, the bottle – which is in the final testing stages – allows drinking in the traditional sense. In other words, you could use it to drink a beer in space the same way you would on earth.
Once perfected, the company plans on manufacturing them on a large scale, which will be perfect for the space tourism industry. Sure, space isn’t exactly an affordable outing just yet, but it certainly isn’t as far off as you’d think.
The flight is valued up to $US20,000 ($25,684 AUD) and the competition open to residents of Australia, the UK, and the US. It includes a return flight from any of these locations to Cape Canaveral, Florida, accommodation for three nights, and a seat on the research flight.
If you’re keen to feel weightlessness and have some bevvies at the same time, you can enter here with a 50-word essay on which beer you’d most love to drink in space and why. You also need to make a pledge that you’ll buy one of the bottles for 90 US bucks ($115.60 AUD) when they’re available in April via the Vostok Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.
How does the bottle work, you ask?
“A space beer bottle is a lot like a small spacecraft fuel tank,” Saber Astronautics CEO, Jason Held, said in a release. “In space you can’t ‘pour’ a liquid without special technology, so we pioneered the important bits at Saber Astronautics to make pouring feel natural.”
“Then we worked with industrial and creative designers to make the final bottle beautiful for people on Earth too. The result is you will be able to take a beer on your flight and view our big beautiful round Earth while tipping back a cold one just like you can at home.”
I’ve never felt like a beer more in my life. Good luck, space beer hopefuls.
