Grow your own food in space? UK researchers think it could be done
A Shenzhou 17 taikonaut eating beef dumplings 'flying' to his mouth in space. /China Manned Space Engineering Office
Is there food on Mars? Almost certainly not. And the problem of feeding a crew of astronauts as they travel to Mars during a journey that would take years is fast from insignificant.
UK-based researchers think they have the answer. They are trying to create the conditions for astronauts to grow their own dinner in space using a handful of cultivated cells and a bioreactor.
Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, Director of the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein and Microbial Food Hub at Imperial College London, says crews could grow their own food, fuel and even pharmaceuticals en route to the Red Planet.
According to Ledesma-Amaro: "An astronaut consumes between half a kilo and 1.5 kilograms of food per day and every kilogram we ship to space can be $20,000. So imagine every meal can be something like $10,000.
"So what if we just make the food we need in space instead of bringing it from Earth?"
Buzz Aldrin by the leg of the Lunar Module, Apollo II mission, July 1969. /Heritage Space/Heritage Images via Getty Images
With funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, Imperial is investigating how to create the food that astronauts, and people back on Earth, can produce sustainably using biofoundries - where cells are turned into mini-factories producing useful products.
Their thesis has now been tested in space when Europe's first commercial returnable spacecraft, called Phoenix 1, carried their cells into space in a miniaturised automated laboratory called SpaceLab, launched on board a Space X Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on April 22.
"Our entire lab... weighs just under one kilogram. It has about three experiments on board," Aqeel Shamsul, CEO and co-founder of SpaceLab's developer, Frontier Space, explained.
International Space Station astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough, Akihiko Hoshide and Megan McArthur, pose with chilli peppers grown in space for the first time aboard the orbiting laboratory platform for the Plant Habitat-04 investigation. /NASA/Handout
SpaceLab is a 'lab-in-a-box' technology providing bio-experimentation in microgravity without the traditional barriers to space-based research.
"This is a bioreactor that is actually growing cells of yeast that are producing a particular vitamin precursor, and they can be collected, extracted and consumed. So for space, this is very difficult to bring. So we need to rethink how this bioreactor may look like," Ledesma-Amaro said.
The data gathered on this mission will help finalize the design of the radical inflatable atmospheric decelerator, which will act as both its re-entry heat shield and a high velocity parachute to slow down enough for a traditional splash down.
ATMOS Space Cargo, maker of the Phoenix, hopes the technology will open access to microgravity and in-space manufacturing for a wide range of industries and applications, including in-space manufacturing and defense on missions lasting from several hours to several months.
"We'll have much more regular uplift in downlift capability that enables us to really build and permanently station our bioreactors," predicts Shamsul.
"Down the line, when we have the moon base, we need these kind of bioreactors to be able to really sustain permanent settlement of human civilization in this environment," he said.
Ledesma-Amaro and his team hope even a short time in microgravity will reveal if their cells can produce the variety of different products they hope to be able to grow, from bio-diesel to dairy products and vitamins to vanilla ice cream.
In 2021, NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station grew chilli peppers in space. Their second harvest of 26 peppers grown broke the record for feeding the most astronauts from a crop grown in space.