San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Science connects Napa to NASA
same type of hyperspectral cameras as NASA, currently flying over 500 properties per year in California.
Thomas Bougetz, winemaker and proprietor at Bougetz Cellars, began his career as an engineer at NASA. After several years working in high-tech, he shifted gears, got a degree in oenology, and started a winery. He sees a distinct parallel between winemaking and space exploration.
“When you really dig down into how to make wine, it’s just a lot of science,” Bougetz said. “Once you understand the science of wine, just like the science of flying in space, it’s pretty straightforward.”
Brooks, a 30-year veteran of NASA, agrees.
“Making great wine takes attention to detail, long hours, teamwork and a little luck — which sounds a lot like what made our NASA projects successful,” Brooks said.
Kate Rubins took her career in the opposite direction of Bougetz and Brooks. Raised in Napa, she ascended to the stars, becoming the 60th woman to fly in space.
Rubins said she always dreamed of being an astronaut, but got sidetracked in high school by a fascination with microbiology. She went on to do undergraduate research on HIV-1 at the Salk Institute, obtained a PhD from Stanford, and then, working with colleagues at the US Army and the CDC, developed the first model of smallpox infection. She later headed up a research lab at MIT studying African viral diseases.
“I was the one with a subscription to Sky and Telescope magazine as a kid,” Rubins said in a NASA interview, “while my friends were reading Tiger Beat. I’ve always been fascinated with science and exploring our world.”
In 2008, NASA announced it was looking for more astronauts. Rubins (along with 3,500 other candidates) applied. She was one of 14 accepted. Years of training followed. She was assigned to the 48th expedition to the ISS, which commenced in 2016. She spent 115 days in space, did two spacewalks, and became the first person to sequence DNA in space.
It’s 254 miles from Napa to the ISS (if it is passing straight overhead) — a rather short distance when one considers the historical distance between the two-thousand-year-old art of winemaking and twenty-first century space exploration. Yet both are united in being human endeavors that can unite generations in unexpected ways.
“Winemaking was something I
Two very different countries — the tiny Republic of Georgia, site of the oldest known winemaking on Earth, and China, where wines from grapes are rather new and surging in popularity — are both exploring the future of wine in space.
In 2016, China reportedly sent grapevines (Cabernet sauvignon, merlot and pinot
could share with my children and grandchildren and now great grandchildren,” Brooks said. “Teaching them about the life of the vine and processing of the grapes has brought me a lot of joy. I think people are impressed by NASA’s work, but it’s hard to let them participate in it directly. I share the products of my current noir) into space in an experiment to develop strains that could survive the country’s harshest climates. The idea was that increased exposure to radiation in space might trigger mutations to develop greater resistance to cold, drought and viruses.
And Georgia is leafing through the country’s state-run grape library, searching among work with friends and family on a daily basis.”
Meanwhile, winemaker Andy Schweiger reported that his son Gerry has just finished his first year studying aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.
“His dream is to work for Space X or NASA, to help put the first people on Mars,” he said.
its over 450 native and 350 foreign varietals to find grapes that could thrive in Martian soil and radiation, when the time comes to terraform the Red Planet.
“If we’re going to live on Mars one day, Georgia needs to contribute,” Nikoloz Doborjginidze, founder of Georgia’s Space Research Agency, told Smithsonian magazine. “Our ancestors brought wine to Earth, so we can do the same to Mars.”