Astronauts aboard the International Space just received a case of wine that is out of this world.
A Luxembourg-based wine company launched 12 bottles of red wine to the craft that will be aged for an entire year ‘in the name of science’.
The goal of the experiment, by Luxembourg’s Space Cargo Unlimited, is to develop new flavours and properties that will take the tipple into a whole different universe.
The wine flew up aboard a capsule that blasted off from the US over the weekend and arrived at the space station on Monday.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure,” Nicolas Gaume, chief executive and co-founder of Space Cargo Unlimited, said.
NASA is opening the space station to more business opportunities like this and, eventually, even private astronaut missions.
The Cygnus capsule that docked on Monday contained multiple commercial ventures. Also on board was an oven for baking chocolate chip cookies, as well as samples of carbon fibre used by Italy’s Lamborghini in its sports cars.
Budweiser has already sent barley seeds to the space station, with an eye to becoming the beverage of choice on Mars.
And as for high-flying wine cellars, this isn’t the first. A French astronaut took along a bottle of wine aboard shuttle Discovery in 1985, though the bottle remained unopened in orbit.
