Olive Oil Heads to Space on Bezos Rocket

Summary

Jeff Bezos plans to send olive oil into space on a Blue Origin rocket to study how zero grav­ity affects food, specif­i­cally olive oil and yeast bac­te­ria growth. The exper­i­ment is rooted in a high school in Greece and aims to poten­tially make Mediterranean diet prod­ucts the food choice for astro­nauts and pas­sen­gers of com­mer­cial space flights in the future.

Jeff Bezos, the bil­lion­aire founder of Amazon and noted space buff, plans to send olive oil into space in an exper­i­ment to deter­mine how zero grav­ity affects food.

Under the plan, a pay­load of Messinian prod­ucts, includ­ing Kalamata olives, olive oil, figs and raisins, will be car­ried beyond the atmos­phere on a Blue Origin rocket.

The date of the launch has not been released.

The National Herald, an English-lan­guage news­pa­per owned by Greek news­pa­per Ethnikos Kyrix, reported that the plan has its roots in a high school in Greece.

Blue Origin, the aero­space man­u­fac­turer and space flight ser­vices com­pany founded by Bezos, declined to com­ment about the exper­i­ment to Olive Oil Times.

Takis Papadopoulos, a teacher at the Bougas high school acad­emy, told the Herald that the pur­pose of the exper­i­ment is two-fold: ​“first, to observe the behav­ior of olive oil and specif­i­cally to exam­ine if olive oil will main­tain its liq­uid shape once it has left the earth. We know that water does not main­tain its liq­uid form in space and it will be inter­est­ing to see how olive oil behaves. And sec­ond, the behav­ior of yeast bac­te­ria growth in space, bread mak­ing abil­ity in space.”

Papadopoulos said he pro­posed that his stu­dents par­tic­i­pate in the exper­i­ment when he met the chief engi­neer of Blue Origin at a con­fer­ence in Holland.

The food is expected to spend only seven to eight min­utes in zero grav­ity. But Papadopoulos believes that will be suf­fi­cient to gather ini­tial data on how the food reacts.

And if all goes well, Papadopoulos is hope­ful that ​“the Messinian prod­ucts that are the base of the Mediterranean diet will be the food for the astro­nauts as well of the pas­sen­gers of com­mer­cial space flights for many years to come.”

Also play­ing a role in the exper­i­ment is Takis’ brother, Periklis Papadopoulo, who is a pro­fes­sor of Aerospace Engineering at San Jose State University in California. Periklis Papadopoulo is involved in an ini­tia­tive to build a space­port in Kalamata.

Blue Origin, founded in 2000, aims to dra­mat­i­cally lower the cost of pri­vate space travel. The pri­vate com­pany takes an incre­men­tal approach — mov­ing from sub­or­bital to orbital flight. The com­pany focuses on the devel­op­ment of rocket-pow­ered Vertical Takeoff and Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehi­cles.

No Blue Origin vehi­cle has yet orbited the earth. The company’s first manned mis­sion into space is planned for this year.

News of the olive oil exper­i­ment comes as Blue Origin under­takes a major expan­sion of its head­quar­ters out­side Seattle, adding a 236,000-square-foot ware­house com­plex and 102,900 square feet of office space, accord­ing to Geekwire. Blue Origin is also build­ing a 750,000-square-foot fac­tory near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

• The National Herald


• Geekwire