Along with being insanely awesome, having a permanent, human-inhabited structure such as the ISS orbiting Earth gives us the opportunity to just put stuff in space simply to see what happens to it. NASA’s got the whole plants-on-the-moon thing covered, leaving the ISS available for more important work… like observing, and eventually tasting, zero-G whisky.
As CNET’s Eric Mack reports, back in 2011, a “space research” firm by the name of NanoRacks asked distillery Ardberg for some vials of its finest concoction so it could send them up to the International Space Station. Now, with three years of maturation under their belts, the samples will be sent back to solid ground in early September.
Once within Earth’s warm embrace, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the experts will be doing with it:
After landing in Kazakhstan, the extra-terrestrially aged booze will be rushed to a lab in Houston, where Ardbeg says a team including the whiskey’s creator will “proceed to unlock the mysteries of maturation, through the study of the interaction between Ardbeg-crafted molecules and charred oak, both in micro-gravity (in orbit) and normal gravity (in Ardbeg’s Warehouse 3).”
Talk about one heck of an anecdote. “Oh yeah, I’ve tasted whisky from outer space. It was OK…”
[CNET]
Image: Okko Pyykkö / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0