This is another of my occasional posts on the general theme of “how would you do such-and-such in low or zero gravity?” Lots of things which we take for granted down here on the surface of the Earth become surprisingly difficult or awkward if you find yourself in the microgravity of orbit, or on the surface of a body where the gravitational pull is very much less than what we enjoy here.

Today’s topic is pouring beer, and originates from the annual Grasmere Sports Day – an event held on the Sunday of the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of August. As you can see, it was a sunny day – even a hot day – and these have been in short supply ever since. But that day was hot, and we had the task of running a beer tent where people would expect cold lager right through the day. (Or any of several ales, or fruit cider)

Now, the business of making the kegs cold was handled by means of what was basically a very large cold-water bath – cooled down with a heat exchange loop overnight, then kept that way through the day. A reflective tarpaulin kept the sun (mostly) off, and the refrigeration loop did the rest. All that part would not be appreciably different in low gravity – keeping things cold in space is not generally a problem in the situations I have in mind (I’m not planning on colonising Mercury any time soon).

Let’s think what happens next, The drink is pushed from the keg to the dispensing unit by gas pressure. This might be the pressure of gas generated during fermentation, or some extra assistance from a CO2 or mixed-gas cylinder, and typically is a mixture of the two. Again, no problem here at all. Gas will push liquid along a tube in lots of gravity or none, basically because gases are compressible and liquids are not. So on Earth or in orbit, the beverage is pushed through a series of tubes from keg to hand-pull or font. No problem there.

But then we get to the actual presentation to the person wanting the drink. Here on the Grasmere Sports field, the drink poured downwards from the hand-pull or font into the waiting glass. Liquid at the bottom, little bubbles rising nicely towards the surface, a suitable amount of foam on the top. Everyone was happy. But now translate that into orbit. Out here, there’s no up or down worth speaking about. The liquid is propelled straight out of the delivery tap. It splashes on the sides or far end of the glass you are holding there, and then (probably) just bounces out again. There’s no gravitational incitement to remain in the glass.

You mop up the mess, think about it, get a container which has a lid, and try again. That’s fine – the lager now remains where you wanted it instead of drifting all around your living space. Except it has no motive for remaining at the bottom of the container, since there are no gravitational clues as to what is the bottom. My suspicion is that it would break up into a number of large blobs, fusing and separating rather like an old-style lava lamp. Now suppose you got yourself a transparent container so you could still see the head… what’s happening here? The bubbles aren’t rising to the top… because there is no top. My guess – and it is a guess – is that the internal hydrostatic pressure would mean that bubbles go out from the inside of each disjoint blob of fluid towards the surface. If I’m right, then each blob will have its own set of bubbles going out radially, and each will have a roughly spherical head surrounding the liquid. It’s a fascinating thought. How would you drink such a thing? Two ways, I suspect: either you’d use a straw through the lid and suck up each blob in turn, or you’d choose a container that you could squeeze like a toothpaste tube. Not so visually exciting as quaffing your pint out of a glass, but at least you’d get to have the drink.

It’ll be a while before we face that problem for real, but my suspicion is that the brewing of beer (or an equivalent beverage) will follow very hard on the heels of any human colonisation of the solar system at large. And it’s certainly worth including in a near-future science fiction story – I put a little bit of detail into Far from the Spaceports about the Frag Rockers bar out among the asteroids, but back then I hadn’t had the chance to consider it in more detail. But there were little details like “You’ll need to go to Frag Rockers to get anything decent. Regular fermentation goes weird in low gravity. But Glyndwr has got some method for doing it right. He won’t tell anyone what.” Maybe one of the books in this series will explore the matter in more detail.

That’s it about fermentation today, but I was intrigued to read that NASA have been experimenting with the manufacture of cement up in space – see this link for a description together with some comments on structural differences between the same stuff made on Earth and in orbit, or this link for my own ramblings about the process a few weeks ago.

And finally, condolences to the Indian space agency ISRO for the loss of signal from the Vikram lander, during the final stages of approach. The orbiting observatory part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission is still working as expected.

A few weeks ago I blogged about lightsails, and in particular mentioned the Planetary Society’s spaceship LightSail 2, which was launched specifically in order to test this technology. The idea was relatively simple – get a small satellite, about the size of a cereal box, into earth orbit, then deploy the sail and see whether the orbit can be controlled using solar radiation alone.

Now, this isn’t really the sphere of operations that you would generally consider a lightsail – they function at their best when on a long journey and can build up momentum second by second. Here in Earth orbit, the overall effect is to make the orbit more elliptical – one part of the orbit is raised in altitude, but another part is lowered, and at some point the little satellite will encounter too much resistance from the atmosphere and will come down, burning up as it does so. The advantage of doing it so close to home is that there is hardly any signal lag, so controlling the sail’s angle, and tracking the consequences of changes, is very much easier.

To cut a long story short, the experiment worked. After a couple of weeks, the orbit had been raised around 3km. That doesn’t sound much, but it’s enough to show that the whole thing is controllable. A lot of analysis has been carried out on the orbital changes – you can imagine that as the satellite goes around the Earth, the angle relative to the sun is constantly changing. It was important to show that the observed changes were the result of ground commands, not just the random effects of sunlight shining at odd angles. So the orbital data has been heavily scrutinised, and came out successfully at the end.

The extended mission period also gave the ground control team experience in how to best use the constantly changing angle. By the end of those two weeks of deployment, they had learned what worked well and what didn’t. It’s good experience for this kind of mission, but as I said earlier, a more realistic use-case would be to go on a transfer trajectory to a more remote destination – say Mars – and on such a journey. the angle between sail and sun would not vary anywhere near so much.

The experiment will continue through the rest of August, maybe a bit longer, and anyone who wants to see the current status can go to http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/lightsail-solar-sailing/lightsail-mission-control.html which gibves all kinds of geeky information as well as a neat map showing the current location of LightSail 2.

While talking about space news, it’s certainly worth mentioning India’s Chandrayaan 2 mission. That has just left Earth orbit, and aims to soft-land about 600km from the Moon’s south pole in about a week. The approach used is similar to that of Israel’s Beresheet, in which a series of gradually elongated elliptical orbits around the Earth is eventually traded at a transfer point to a series of gradually diminishing orbits around the Moon. The lunar south pole is thought to be the most promising location for water ice, lurking on the surface in deep shadow areas and hence available very rapidly for human use. Proving that this really is – or maybe is not – the case is an important step towards building a permanent settlement on the Moon. The landing itself is scheduled for early September. The main mission web site is at https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan2-home-0 and here’s a short video describing it.

Hopefully I shall be saying some more about that in September. But inevitably at present, the question for this blog is what these events have to do with fiction. My own vision of the future exploration of the solar system has spaceships using an ion drive rather than lightsails, since I expect these to be faster, and more effective in the volume outside the asteroid belt, as solar radiation drops off. But I can easily image automated lightsail ships being used for cargo which is not time-critical – not unlike how we send some freight by air and some by water today.

But the lunar south pole has been suggested many times as a good place to build a base, going back at least to Buzz Aldrin’s Encounter with Tiber. I makes perfect sense to me, and it would be great if Chandrayaan 2 was able to directly confirm that water ice is there.