The Cosmic Lifestyle Corporation (CLC) describes life in space cleverly in the video for its new Kickstarter campaign, “The way they live [in space] is kind of like a glorified camping trip.” For that reason, the 5-member startup was formed because, as space travel and living begins to truly take off, how researchers, Mars colonists, and asteroid miners live will need to be made increasingly more comfortable and affordable. And CLC wants to be the first company to provide lifestyle products for space and, through their crowdfunding campaign, the company is beginning with the Zero Gravity Cocktail glass.
With a scene from 2001 and other sci-fi flicks, the CLC campaign video illustrates the ultimate goal of the company: fully-functional products that bring space dwellers a level of comfort reminiscent of life on Terra. The Zero Gravity Cocktail glass is their first product, which is meant to improve liquid consumption in microgravity. As a fluid dynamics test, the glass, if brought or printed aboard the ISS, could be used to test the possibilities of an open air container in space, a martini glass that doesn’t spill its drink in every direction across the space station.
The startup is already making some progress towards a series of ultimate goals. The CLC has conducted at least one parabolic flight test, through ASTRAX in Japan, to demonstrate the feasibility of their design. With their Kickstarter funding, the team – made up of a space enthusiast, a robotics engineer, a “celebrity mixologist”, and an expert prop maker – they hope to pursue further testing. First they’ll use the Portland State University Drop Tower to capture data in two second increments of weightlessness, before moving onto more parabolic flight tests. Then, you’ve guessed it, they hope to print their glass above the ISS with the Made In Space Zero G Printer.
And they’ve got an impressive advisory board to help push them in the right direction: “Richard Garriott: video game legend and private space traveler, Jonathan Knowles: senior advisor to CEO and CTO at Autodesk, Timothy Bailey: parabolic flight instructor, Yuri’s Night Advisor, blogger for GeekDad and MAKE, John Spencer: Space Architect and Space Tourism advocate, and Jessica Riley: strategic marketing and organizational strategy expert.”
In the past, I’ve been extremely cynical about technological predictions for the future, as technological innovation has been slowed through patents and industrial occlusion. The greed of the top 1% has funneled technological innovation into fossil fuels and warfare, redirecting this progress away from the improvement of the human condition towards death and destruction. But, as the open source and Maker movements continue to spread, with the price of electronics and the means to manufacture goods dropping rapidly, innovation is taking place at the grassroots level, sometimes pressuring large corporations to at least feign an embrace of open source practices. And, with all of the impressive tech emerging in the past few years alone, including everything that Andrew covered in his REAL 2015 coverage, I think that we may begin to see a change. It may just be possible that those dreams of space hotels could become a reality and that CLC will be at the heart of consumer goods for cosmonauts.
My only question is, why don’t they just print the cup aboard the ISS right now? Without all of that funding?
To learn more and to see a video of the ASTRAX team having a lot of fun with the 3D printed martini glass in microgravity, visit the Kickstarter page here.
