Future space tourists might be able to toast the view from orbit with fine champagne, after designers came up with a high-tech bottle made for knocking back bubbly in zero gravity.
The Mumm champagne house teamed up with designer Octave de Gaulle, who has specialized in conceiving of everyday objects for the final frontier, to develop the space-age bottles.
Journalists from several nations were to try the champagne yesterday during a flight taking off from the French city of Reims, in the heart of champagne country.
Photo: AFP
The specially equipped Airbus Zero-G plane was to make a series of parabolic maneuvers, climbing steeply before plunging down to create 20-second spurts of weightlessness.
The target audience is not astronauts, who are not allowed to drink alcohol on the International Space Station.
However, the coming wave of sub-orbital and orbital space tourism promoted by private operators such as Virgin Galactic and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin could prove an ebullient audience for cosmic connoisseurs.
“They won’t have to be performing any professional tasks onboard, so they’ll probably be able to drink a bit of alcohol,” said astronaut Jean-Francois Clervoy, who heads the company that operates the Airbus Zero-G.
In zero gravity, the challenge is quite simply to get the wine out of the bottle.
“You could imagine drinking it with a straw,” said physicist Gerard Liger-Belair, who consulted on the project — though it was unlikely you would ever find a champagne fan stooping to such an indignity.
In search of a more elegant solution, about three years ago the Mumm team turned to De Gaulle — a great-grand-nephew of former French president Charles de Gaulle — who came up with a bottle divided into two chambers.
The champagne is in the upper portion, while below is a finger-
controlled valve that uses the champagne’s own carbon dioxide to eject small amounts of wine that emerges as foam.
The next trick was to stop the wine from streaming across the cabin, for which Octave de Gaulle created an aluminum strip that forms a ring over the top of the bottle to capture a bubbly sphere.
“Then you rotate the bottle and the foam sphere is released,” he said in his Paris workshop.
Drinkers can then scoop the wine out of the air using a tiny yet long-stemmed glass that resembles an egg cup.
Clervoy said the moment the foam turns to liquid in the mouth is a sensation that cannot be matched on Earth.
“It’s really magical because the champagne lands not just on your tongue, but on the palate, the cheeks — the gastronomic sensations are magnified,” he said.
Mumm is now looking for a partner, either a public space agency or one of the private upstarts.
Octave de Gaulle plans to refine his prototype, and who knows, one day astronauts might be able to ring in a new year while on a mission.
“There has always been a bit of alcohol in space, even if it’s officially prohibited,” he said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not