Wine in Space...

Article on tasting the wine that spent a yr aboard the Space Stationhttps://thetakeout.com/bottle-of-wine-sent-to-space-back-to-earth-taste-tast-1846066420

Definitive/authoritative comments to follow tomorrow.
Tom

The only fair comparison has to include tasters who have been in space the same amount of time.

Send a case of 2000 into space for a year and examine how the wine has changed. Interesting stuff. I presume barometric pressure is a significant factor. Not sure this is ‘real’ science but an interesting question nonetheless. I mean, Elon will need something to sip on Mars. [cheers.gif]

I would have thought bottle shock would have been substantial. Gravity must play some part. I dont know what pressure the ISS is kept at, but if it’s ground level atmosphere, then i dont think that part of the pressure should matter too much?

Relativity indicates that objects experience time differently depending on velocity, so if the wine travels fast enough it should taste younger.

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Haha, very true, if that’s not a reason for us to invent near-light speed travel, I dont know what is.

But on a serious note, relativity at the level of GPS is minute. It’s important for GPS because it’s a precision system, but apparently its about 45 microseconds a day - about 20 milliseconds a year :slight_smile:

Outer space wine suffers from too much ‘cosmic ray strike’ for my palate…
Even though most of that radiation is composed of mere high energy protons and helium nuclei. Luckily, the wine remained sub-Van Allen Belt.

I am drawing a blank. Which Was Not Was song references the Van Allen Belt? Or, was it Tonio K?

In low earth orbit, it’s about 28 usec per day, for a geosynchronous satellite about 4.5 usec/day.

Petrus:

Do these people have any idea what it costs to lift a case of wine into earth orbit? What a great demonstration of the bullshit that is the wine business.

SpaceX have it under $2k per kilo into low earth orbit I believe.

Bids are now being accepted at Christies for 1 space bottle and 1 regular bottle to compare:

I wondered this myself, not as expensive as I would have thought…however, don’t we have better things to do than send Petrus into space? Hardly seems to be a pressing issue to use valuable space on a :rocket:

The winner of the auction should be contractually required to blind taste them together. I would love to watch that

meh, reusability of rockets makes it a far, far simplier game. IIRC the new SLS system from NASA costs more per launch than to do the entire set of SLS missions by Starship Heavy, because of the projected reusability costs. I think Elon was looking at something like $1m per Starship launch, which is mindblowing.