Ahead of my Time or Someone Stole My Idea!

The summer of 1995 or 1994 (I cannot exactly remember and I’m not going to dig through papers to find out) I got to spend 6 weeks at a NASA workshop in Maryland with other teachers. For a science nerd how great could that be! We were divided into 6 teams and had two of the NASA people in each group and the ‘long term’ goal for the week was to come up with an idea of a project to send up on the space shuttle and space station.

I want to say I suggested this one, but it may have been another teacher on the team and as the “Torii Teller” at MCS Iwakuni would have said, “Alcohol was involved.” Our team was kicking around lots of ideas during the first supper and I suggested sending up yeast and brewing beer in microgravity. Other ideas were suggested but eventually our group decided this one interested us the most. And as I said, alcohol may have been involved, so…

‘Microbrewery in Microgravity’ became our proposed project. We had some of the best slogans. “The oldest technology and the newest technology.” “Does it taste as good going down after it has been up?”

We went with it. Again alcohol may have been involved, but really how would yeast perform in microgravity? Would the alcohol stay around the cells and inhibit their growth instead of separating out by density as on earth?

So we presented our project to the class and … the teachers were, “We can’t do that!” The engineers were all, “I volunteer for the taste testing when it comes back to earth.”

We used it for practice on how to set up a project proposal and that was really the point of the class, except!

Today I read on-line that twelve bottles of wine were sent into space to ‘age’ for fourteen months and have come back to see how wine ages in space.

And the real kicker, they are selling one of the bottles and expect it to fetch $1,000,000 at a Christie’s sale. “The bottle is one of a batch of 12 that European startup Space Cargo Unlimited sent into orbit as part of research into how food and drink matures in space.” Oh, if I only had the property rights for the idea! Click on the link above to read the article.

I was just too far ahead of my time.

And teachers…reminder…there are no bad ideas!