Cheers! French wine, vines headed home after year in space
- by Jake Bell
- in Research
- — Jan 14, 2021
Astronauts on the International Space Station said goodbye to a dozen bottles of French Bordeaux wine after it flew back to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon on Tuesday.
Dragon was launched on December 6 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, arriving at the station just over 24 hours later and achieving the first autonomous docking of a United States commercial cargo resupply spacecraft.
The target had been the Atlantic Ocean, but poor weather shifted the arrival to Florida's other side.
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They will not open any of the bottles until the end of February.
Gaume went on to say that climate change will force agricultural products - like grapes - to adapt to harsher conditions. Through a series of space experiments, Space Cargo Unlimited hopes to learn by stressing the plants in space and use that knowledge to create more robust and resilient plants on earth. It was at at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, May 30, 2020, and was the launch of NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard.
More news: Indiana Guard Troops Going To DC To Aid Biden SecurityIn a press release, SCU clarified that the objective of the experiment is to investigate how space radiation and the microgravity environment affect wine components during the aging process. After the launching event, several months of chemical testing and research will succeed. He's going to be among the fortunate few to take a drink. The 320 Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon vine snippets, called canes in the grape-growing business, were launched by SpaceX last March.
So far, only SpaceX is the shipper that is capable of returning items from space back to Earth fully intact. That's when the company will pop open a bottle or two for an out-of-this-world wine tasting in Bordeaux by some of France's top connoisseurs and experts. "Dragon will conduct a deorbit burn at 7:37 p.m. EST to begin its re-entry sequence into Earth's atmosphere", NASA said in a statement.
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