Starbase Brewing, which is unrelated to Elon Musk's SpaceX or its South Texas city, brewed beer and grew barley in space.
A SpaceX capsule that brought four astronauts back to Earth this month also carried home a payload for an Austin brewer -- the first beer made in space and the first barley grown in simulated Martian soil.
Starbase Brewing -- unrelated to Elon Musk's space company or its South Texas city of Starbase -- sent its MicroBrew-1 and OASIS experiments to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX mission Aug. 1. They came back aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that splashed down eight days later off the coast of California.
Since then, the brewer's experiment teams have sent the results for analysis, according to Nate Argoves, the 34-year-old founder and CEO of the fast-growing company that hopes to be the first beer maker on Mars.
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"It looks like everything worked as we expected," he said.
The company funded the projects itself.
While space-brewed beers aren't headed to stores anytime soon, customers can find Starbase Brewing's space-themed brews at H-E-B and other stores across Texas and Florida.
OASIS, short for "Optimizing Agriculture in Simulated Interplanetary Soils," is the result of a partnership between the beer maker, Texas A&M AgriLife and Jaguar Space, a Colorado bioastronautics firm.
According to Argoves, who launched the company in 2020, the goal was to grow barley in a mixture of Martian soil simulant with a byproduct of beermaking called Brewer's Spent Grain and microbes.
The idea came from Harrison Coker, a Texas A&M University doctoral candidate and NASA fellow who had reached out to Argoves. He thought the spent grains might help grow crops on Mars because the red planet's soil, or regolith, is crushed rock with few of the nutrients and microbes necessary for plant growth.
It's a similar concept to the plot of "The Martian," the 2015 movie in which Matt Damon's character is stranded on Mars and forced at one point to mix human waste with the planet's soil to grow potatoes. And, as in the movie, the theory has merit.
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Coker has been using Starbase's spent grain in tests at an A&M greenhouse that has about 20 different crops growing with the mixtures.
For the space experiment, the partners created a miniature nursery with 16 containers of different mixtures of the soil simulant, spent grains and microbe blend.
"Every single seed (in OASIS) germinated," Argoves said. "There was a risk that some of the seeds might not germinate. We weren't sure."
The company and A&M expect to begin sharing their findings in the coming months.
Other experiments have tested barley, yeast and fermentation in space, including several done in conjunction with big brewers including Molson Coors Beverage Co., Budweiser Brewing Co. and Japan's Sapporo Holdings Ltd. However, MicroBrew-1 appears to be the first focused on how microgravity and cosmic radiation impacts brewing and fermentation.
"Nobody's ever fermented anything like that in space before," Argoves said. "It's long been a goal of Budweiser ... and I think we have beaten them to it."
Starbase also collaborated with Jaguar Space on the experiment, which consisted of eight containers loaded with half wort -- the sugary liquid extracted from malted grains -- and half yeast.
Once at the space station, Astronaut Jonny Kim turned a crank that mixed the contents and began the fermentation process, Argoves said.
"It seems like it worked," he said.
Now, the samples are headed to the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the Technical University of Munich for analysis.
The research will help scientists understand "how microgravity affects fermentation at a cellular level," said Dr. Luis Zea, CEO of Jaguar Space and lead researcher for MicroBrew-1. "The insights we gain could shape the design of life-supporting systems for future space missions, while also advancing bioprocessing technologies here on Earth."
But don't start looking for Starbase's space-brewed beer yet. The company can't commercialize the brew per its agreement with ISS National Laboratory.
"I think, eventually, one day will be possible," he said. "We'll certainly explore that avenue and see what we can do, but we have to abide by NASA's regulations around commercializing stuff."
A Georgia native, Argoves studied computer science in college and picked up home-brewing as a hobby to make "cheap beer" for himself and his friends.
While working in software development during the pandemic, he started the company -- then known as Boca Chica Brewing -- as a side project. The idea took off, prompting him to leave his day job and move to Austin.
It "really spiraled much larger than I ever expected it to get," he said.
While many craft brewers are struggling, Starbase has doubled its distribution each year since opening. It's on track to deliver 1 million cans this year. Argoves expects that to double next year.
The company employs six people at its Austin headquarters and the beer is made by a brewer in Louisiana. Argoves said the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain issues complicated his search for a brewer based in Texas, though that could change.
"I did recently meet with a brewery here in Austin that looks like they will have capacity," he said. "The long-term goal is just to do it all in house."
The brand has become a favorite among aerospace companies and other space businesses. It's hosted parties and crawfish boils for Firefly Aerospace Inc., Intuitive Machines Inc., and afterparties for the Astro Awards, an annual event in Austin.
It also supported Space Center Houston's Moon2Mars festival and Texas Space Day at the state Capitol.
Starbase's bright packaging features cartoon astronauts, spaceships and Mars-scapes. Its offerings include Occupy März amber lager, Of Kölsch I Still Love You, Terraformer red ale, Starhopped India Pale Ale and Lucky Launch Day Lager.
The themes play on some of SpaceX and Elon Musk's jokes and ideas. Argoves acknowledges the parallels, but said the branding isn't connected.
"We're kind of cartoonish and colorful and they're very like sleek and black and white," he said. "So, we try to differentiate ourselves in in some ways."
The company hasn't faced the backlash that Musk's firms have seen since the billionaire stepped into politics with the Trump administration last year, but it occasionally encounters "haters."
"I think we're just different enough," he said. "There are a lot of other things called Starbase ... it's like a sci-fi term."
The brewery formed years before SpaceX's city of Starbase incorporated and changed its name when the company town was incorporated earlier this year.
Argoves said he hasn't met Musk and doesn't know whether the billionaire is aware of his brand. And he can't say if he does business with SpaceX, which muzzles its business partners with non-disclosure agreements.
"We work with a lot of different space companies, and you know, we do distribute a lot of beer in South Texas," he said.