Posted by Cyclodextrins turn up in unexpected places. One of them is a NASA engineering paper on how to keep astronauts supplied with water on a future lunar outpost – where cyclodextrin-encapsulated, powdered alcohol gets a brief but intriguing mention.
Every kilogram counts
The paper, Impact of Water Recovery from Wastes on the Lunar Surface Mission Water Balance, was written by John W. Fisher, John A. Hogan, Gregory S. Pace and Kanapathipillai Wignarajah of NASA Ames Research Center and partners, and published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the Constellation-programme era. Its subject is dedicated to the question where water comes from and where it goes on a long-duration lunar base.
Because delivering payload to the lunar surface is extremely expensive, the authors build a full water balance for a four-person outpost: drinking and hygiene water, urine and humidity condensate recycling, brine processing, water recovered by drying solid waste, water lost through spacesuit cooling during EVAs, and even water produced by fuel cells from propellant left over in the lander’s tanks.
Dry food, wet recycling
One of the levers the authors examine is the water content of food. If the base can recycle water efficiently, it makes little sense to launch it from Earth inside food and drinks. The paper estimates that switching from fully hydrated meals and liquid beverages to low-moisture food and powdered drinks, reconstituted on site with recycled water, could cut the launch mass of the food supply by up to about 74%.
It is in this section, discussing how far powdered beverage technology has come, that cyclodextrin makes its appearance. The authors note in passing that recent studies even point to the possibility of freeze-dried alcohol, in which the alcohol is first taken up by cyclodextrin before freeze-drying.
What the paper does not say
Before anyone starts writing headlines about lunar beer: the remark is a single sentence, given without a reference, and used only to illustrate that almost any beverage can nowadays be supplied as a powder. NASA did not study alcohol consumption on the Moon, exact alcoholic beverage (e.g. beer) is not mentioned at all, and the mass-saving calculations deal only with ordinary powdered drinks. Cyclodextrin-based alcohol is an aside, not a mission requirement :-).
Still, it is telling that when engineers wanted an example of how sophisticated drying and encapsulation have become, they reached for a cyclodextrin inclusion complex.
Why cyclodextrin and alcohol go together
Ethanol molecules are small and volatile, which makes it hard to hold in a solid. A host–guest approach solves this neatly: the hydrophobic cavity of a cyclodextrin can accommodate ethanol and other volatile molecules, reducing their evaporation and allowing them to be turned into a stable, free-flowing powder that releases its guest again on contact with water.
Powdered alcohol itself is far from new. In Japan, Sato Foods Industries was already selling encapsulated alcohol in the 1970s, mainly as an ingredient for food processing – for instance to mask odours and keep meat and fish juicy. In the United States, General Foods patented alcohol-containing dextrin powders in the same decade. The topic returned to the headlines in 2014 when the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved labels for Palcohol, a powdered spirit. The company kept its recipe secret, but commentators widely assumed that cyclodextrin encapsulation was the most likely route. The product also triggered strong public concern and legislative efforts to restrict powdered alcohol in several US states.
The same principle – encapsulating volatile flavour and aroma compounds to protect them during drying and storage – is routine in the food industry, and it is exactly what makes cyclodextrins attractive for long-shelf-life space food as well.
Sources
- Fisher, J.W., Hogan, J.A., Pace, G.S., Wignarajah, K.: Impact of Water Recovery from Wastes on the Lunar Surface Mission Water Balance, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NASA Ames Research Center) page 14. accessed on 20 October 2026 (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100033687/downloads/20100033687.pdf)
- The Surprising History of Making Alcohol a Powdered Substance (Smithsonian Magazine)
- Powdered alcohol: seriously, a health risk we don’t need (The Conversation)
- US 3,956,509 – Alcohol-containing dextrin powder (General Foods)
- US 4,454,165 – Preparation of alcohol-containing powders (Sato Foods Industries)
Image created with the help of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant