Japanese liquor company testing alcohol aging in space

SpaceX stays grounded, as does one other U.S. provider, Orbital Sciences Corp., which suffered a launch explosion final October in Virginia.

The availability ship incorporates nearly 10,000 kilos of cargo, together with the six liquor samples. The replacements embrace spacewalking gear, an emergency respiration package, rest room wiring and elements for the water recycling system.

A liquor company is going where no distiller has gone before and that is space.

Russian as well as American astronauts on the ISS (International Space Station) are having a hard time agreeing on how their urine should be handled. “There’s always an adventure right around the corner with the water system”, says Carter, a 27-year NASA veteran. But Alex MacDonald, program executive for NASA’s Emerging Space Office, wants a new first for private space exploration: privately-owned space stations. Those standard practices carried over to the American side of the space station, which was launched in 1998. Iodine is a good choice as a disinfectant but it needs to also be filtered out before any of the crew members drink the water.

The Russians, however, rely on a different go-to: silver, which in its ionic form is a powerful antimicrobial agent. Unlike iodine, silver doesn’t have to be filtered out of the water. Layne Carter, the water subsystem manager said that it tasted just like regular bottled water.

Condensate is the collected breath and sweat of the crew, shower runoff, and urine from animals onboard the station. The reason? NASA takes Russian urine, too. But Bloomberg reports that a more pressing difference in the two sections” processes centres around a less fun fact: “The NASA crew are collecting the urine from all of the ISS crews, including our Soviet space neighbours.