Japan to Brew Sake in Space
- Editor OGN Daily
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
They're not serving sushi on the Moon yet, but if or when they do, Japan wants to try and ensure that sake will be on the table too.
In its endeavours to achieve this quaffable goal, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and DASSAI are sending a rice fermentation experiment to the International Space Station (ISS). With plans to establish permanent outposts on the Moon, food and drink is high on the mind of planners. After all, there's no shortage of stories from astronauts on the ISS finding that living off dehydrated food for a few months is extremely dull, so longer periods of time living on the Moon really requires a more interesting diet - particularly as there is a huge opportunity to live off the land. This means not only providing morale-boosting menus, but ones that can be put together from foods grown on the Moon itself.
Of course, man or woman does not live on bread alone. There must also be a beverage, so Japanese companies want to include the national drink of Japan, sake, to make life away from home a little brighter. The problem is that shipping sake to a lunar outpost would be prohibitively expensive, so the logical alternative is to figure out how to brew it a quarter of a million miles from Earth.
Dubbed the DASSAI MOON Project, the idea is to determine if it's possible to develop the technology required to brew sake under lunar conditions using rice grains imported from Earth and water from lunar ice. That sounds simple enough, but brewing sake is actually extremely complicated. But they are going to give it a go, and the requisite equipment (along with other supplies) is scheduled to blast off today to be delivered to the ISS.
The experiment will run for about two weeks after which 520 g (18.3 oz) of fermented sake mash will be frozen and returned to Earth. Back in Japan, part of the mash will be further processed into sake. This will make a single, exclusive 100-ml (3.5-oz) bottle of DASSAI MOON – Made in Space sake, which will be sold for ¥110 million (US$720,000). The proceeds will go to Japanese space development initiatives. Meanwhile, the remaining portion of the mash will be retained for scientific analysis, to help determine what needs to be done in Space next time to create the perfect brew.