The Laughing Wolf: Space Commercialization: Flavors and Fragrances

July 18, 2003

Space Commercialization: Flavors and Fragrances

The usual caveats apply. One additional caveat is that the commercial space center that is behind this offered me a job and I gave verbal acceptance. The job then got put on hold, and has remained that way. So, I have no particular axe to grind for the center or the research being done through it, nor do I have one against it despite all that has happened and what it has cost me. You, the reader, need to know this though in the interests of full disclosure.

This one remains one of my all-time favorite success stories in terms of commercial space research. Not only because it was such a success, but because of the about-face it caused at NASA HQ. So many people, so many highly placed people, at NASA HQ were against this that you just knew it had to be good. Boy, was it ever.

For those just coming into this, go back and read the previous posts (here, here, here, and here) for the basics on microgravity and the effects of gravity. They apply to other things as well, and as it turns out they have a profound and unsuspected impact on plants. Most NASA-funded research had focused simply on if plants could grow in space, and not on much else. It took commercial research to break away from the fundamentals and look at such things as flavors, fragrances, and if things could grow from seed to seed.

Today, we are just going to look at flavors and fragrances, both because it is a fun subject and because it is a tremendous area of commercial potential. The fun is obvious, and for the commercial potential all you have to do is go and do some fairly basic research. Look at the figures on how much is spent on cosmetics each year. Look at how much is spent on perfumes and fragrances separate from cosmetics. Then look up as best you can how much is spent on flavorings. Can you say billions and avoid the temptation to avoid saying bill-yuns and bill-yuns? I knew you could.

Yet, this is a bit of a trick question. Most of the major flavor and fragrance houses are privately held operations. This means no Dun and Bradstreet, SEC filings, or other standard sources of information. From what I have found, and what others have reported, however, it appears that no matter how you divide things up, flavors and fragrances is a multi-billion dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. alone, much less world-wide.

So it should be no surprise that commercial research from this sector got a hostile reception at NASA HQ. No one there took it seriously, and it is still the subject of ridicule in some uninformed quarters of headquarters. Unlike other commercial research, which simply had to show the money, what you are going to read had to show spectrographic and other data to convince the bureaucrats to take them seriously.

This began because of a discovery made, not surprisingly, outside of NASA. In the course of any research you do something called a literature check. That is to say, you decide to be smart and see if anyone has done any research and publication on a topic before you go too far. In this case, researchers at International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) realized in doing a literature check that none of the fundamental researchers funded by NASA – or any other space agency apparently – had ever checked to see what happened to the essential oils in plants in space.

Essential oils provide all flavor and fragrance. Period. This makes them of strong interest to any flavor and fragrance producer, much less to end users like parfumiers, food companies, etc. As a side note that seemed to escape the attention of a lot of boffins and bureaucrats, it also makes a heck of a difference in how foods taste, as subject of no small importance to astronauts. In other words, no one had ever thought to check to see if plants grown in space for food would even taste good.

Once the people at IFF had made this discovery, they began working to do an experiment to get an answer. Now this was an interesting process, given the intensely competitive nature of this business and the corresponding need for secrecy. The did persevere, however, and flew an experiment on STS-95.

Until three days before launch, I could not tell you much about the experiment. The secrecy clauses IFF needed prevented that, and it is one of the few times in the history of NASA that not all information on an experiment was freely available to anyone who wanted to look. You had to actually, gasp, sign non-disclosure agreements and do other things to see it. This was new and troubling to some at NASA, but supporting commercial research does require such.

What they flew as a rose. A special rose with a well-documented scent. The hypothesis was that they would get a shift in the scent, as the essential oil shifted a bit in response to the changes that took place in the plant because of microgravity. For those that don’t know it, there are a large number of such shifts that take place in any living organism.

In animals, such as humans, the most obvious is the shift of fluids in the body. The next time there is a launch, ours, theirs, or anyone, take a look at the crew as the obligatory march to the vehicle is shown on TV. They look perfectly normal. The trick is, find a shot of them a day or two after launch. The polite term is chipmunk cheeks, which is a fair descriptor of the bloated and puffy faces you will see. This is because all of the fluids in the body that are normally pulled down by gravity have been released. The net result is that they move up, causing the puffiness and bloating, and this continues until the body gets rid of the “excess” fluid.

Plants go through similar changes. Normally, plants are gravitropic, which is a fancy way of saying the roots go down and the plant grows up in response to gravity’s pull. In microgravity, they become phototropic, meaning the plant will grow towards a light and the roots vaguely away from it. Want to have some fun? Move the light around. There is a lot more to this, but the simple explanation will do for now.

IFF expected to get, at best, just a shift in the essential oil, and therefore in the fragrance. Even a slight shift would have been great, since the shift could then be the subject of a combinatorial chemistry exercise to rapidly profile thousands of potential changes based off that shift. Instead, I regret to say they did not get a shift.

They got an entirely new scent, one the rose had never before produced on Earth. Talk about hitting a home run…

The largest problem, other than convincing the doubting Thomas’s at NASA HQ, was that the next possible flight for them was almost five years away. That is the way the commercial ball bounces, sort of, at NASA. Even so, IFF was ecstatic. The new scent was quite nice, and in my highly biased viewpoint a much nicer scent. The ground-based scent was thick and cloying to me, while the space-based scent was light, crisp, and clean.

That particular scent has found its way into a perfume or two, and even was reported to show some potential as a flavor enhancer, like a spice can be. Not bad for a simple experiment to get pretty much a yes or no answer. Yes, it would produce a shift. No, it would not produce a shift.

So, is this the magic bean that will open up the beanstalk of commercial space operations? Maybe. Again, there has only been the one successful experiment. The follow-on experiment was on STS-107. No other similar commercial research has been done.

Is there a tremendous amount of potential here? You bet there is. Is this an area a commercial space operation should consider? Yes.