NASA’s Machines for Mars Make Beer Bubbly

Carbon-capture technology repurposed for breweries spreads and finds new applications. NASA’s Machines for Mars Make Beer Bubbly. In 2021, Maine Beer Company’s carbon dioxide supplier ran short on carbon dioxide.

“There was potential for our beer to go stale in the tanks,” said Dave Love, the brewery’s sustainability manager. “We wouldn’t be able to use CO 2 for any of our bottling, kegging, or centrifuge operations.” The solution the company settled on originated on Mars — or more specifically, in NASA’s plans for harvesting resources from the Red Planet. Now it’s saving money and reducing emissions for wineries, distilleries, power companies, helium producers, and more.

Beginning in the 1990s, the company Pioneer Astronautics won multiple Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts from Johnson Space Center in Houston to build systems that could generate resources on Mars. The technology could, for example, capture carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen to produce water for life support and methane for rocket fuel. These capabilities weren’t entirely new, but Pioneer’s systems were compact, efficient, and automated.

Later, Pioneer Astronautics founder Robert Zubrin created Pioneer Energy to rearrange these subsystems into technology for the oil and gas industry (Spinoff 2015, 2020).