 It's a question that comes up basically any time I'm out for drinks with colleagues or just people who know that I know space. Can astronauts drink on the International Space Station? Alcohol in space is what we're looking at today on Vintage Space. Alcohol plays a pretty significant role in Western cultures. When you meet somebody for the first time, you typically meet them over a beer. When you go out for dinner, you typically end the night with a drink. So does that carry into space? And alcohol is perhaps associated as being more integral to Russian culture than it is American culture. I myself have been to a number of weddings from the Russian side of my family that have featured a vodka bar. So perhaps it's unsurprising that the earliest records of alcohol in space come from the Soviet spaceflight program. In March of 1965, Alexei Leonov performed history's first extra-vehicular activity, EVA, or more commonly, spacewalk. But that spacewalk isn't actually the most interesting thing that happened on that mission. Problems during re-entry left the Voskhod-2 spacecraft spending the night in the forest. Rescue workers couldn't get to the cosmonauts through the thick forest and feet deep snow. Russian cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Pavel Beliyayev spend the night in the forest, hunkering down in their spacecraft while wolves howled in the background. What they did have was emergency rations and, apparently, two shots of vodka that Beliyayev had snuck on board. Apparently, the Russian spaceflight program has typically had a much more relaxed attitude to alcohol in space than its American counterpart, being NASA. Russian doctors have sent cosmonauts up into orbit with alcohol to keep them in tone and to neutralize tensions during missions. This was a more common practice during the era of the mere space station. On that station, American astronauts were guests and would stand by as their Russian counterparts toasted to a job well done or rung in a new year. But alcohol in space is not a uniquely Russian thing. Skylab was America's first space station, and it was made from a repurposed S4B upper stage of a Saturn V rocket. Even though it used repurposed Apollo hardware, Skylab ushered in a new era of comfort for American astronauts, including the first space shower. The food was very much improved on the Skylab program from the Apollo program, and there was even briefly a discussion of launching crews up with wine. There were even tastings for astronauts to pick what wine they wanted to launch with. It wasn't a medical concern that prevented NASA from actually launching wine on Skylab. It was actually a social and political thing. No one thought it would look very good for astronauts to be drinking on a government space station, and so wine was eventually removed from a flight diet. So for now, space is largely a dry zone. Whether or not astronauts occasionally sneak up a New Year's toast on the International Space Station is, well, at least not something I've been able to find evidence of. The rules will change in the future, probably depends on the commercial component. When private companies start launching private citizens into space, the rules will probably be far more relaxed. Or maybe not. Only time will tell. For now, the best we can do to merge a love of social drinking with a love of spaceflight is to drink a beer that has been brewed with yeast flown into space. And Enkasi's ground control has done just that. So what do you guys think about space as a dry zone? Can you foresee a change ever happening on a government level, or will it be something private spaceflight will bring to the fore? Let me know in the comments below, and as always, leave anything you'd like to see covered in a future episode, or any questions in the comments below as well. For daily Vintage Space content and a lot of modern space content, be sure to follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space, and with new episodes every single Tuesday and Friday, subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.