BROOKLYN, NY — What will the future of space food look like? These scientists have the answer.
On Friday (May 19), NASA announced the winners of Phase 2. Deep Space Food Challenge, an effort to design new food production technologies that can be used by astronauts on long voyages. The method could also help address food insecurity on the planet.
NASA announced the eight winning teams at Friday’s event, including five from the United States and three international teams, selected by both NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), who are cooperating in the challenge. bottom. In April, the CSA also announced: 4 winning teams The Phase 2 Canadian Challenge is running concurrently with the NASA effort. Each of the five U.S. champions received $150,000 in cash prizes.
Of the eight winning teams announced Friday, three were food manufacturing methods, two were growing systems, and three were combinatorial or biological culture systems. The diversity of approaches surprised even the event organizers. “I think what impressed me the most was the variety of solutions that were proposed,” Angela Herblett, program manager for the challenge, told Space.com.
Related: Food in Space: What Do Astronauts Eat?
The winning cultivation system used a variety of techniques to conserve resources and minimize waste. Interstellar Labs, a winning team from Merritt Island, Florida, created the Nutrient Closed-Loop Ecounit System Nucleus (NUCLEUS), a system of interconnected mini-habitats they call “quarks.”
The top six quarks grow plants, while the bottom three are for growing mushrooms and insects. For example, the black soldier fly habitat not only produces edible, calcium-rich fly larvae, but also carbon dioxide that can be utilized by the plant box.
Intestellar Lab plant scientist Maarten Smits holds a black soldier fly larva harvested from one of the “quarks” within the company’s nutrient closed-loop eco-unit system, NUCLEUS.
(Image credit: Rebecca Thorne)“We have waste, but we turn it into something useful,” Interstellar Labs plant scientist Marten Smits told Space.com. “That’s very important when you’re going to space.” I added that there is.
Air Company, the winning Brooklyn manufactured food team, also leveraged waste to create an entry. The company’s products use a combination of carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts and hydrogen gas, which is also produced as a waste product of life support systems. These are then used to make alcohol, which is fed to the yeast. Yeast is grown in space with minimal resources.
“The yeast ate it and made more yeast grow,” Air Company CEO Stafford Sheehan told Space.com. “So we created this kind of nutritional yeast that is perfectly circular and can be made from astronaut breath.”
Several winning teams utilized fungi and mushroom species in their entries that grow quickly and efficiently with few resources. A team from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Kernel Deltec, has developed an autonomous machine that grows well in low gravity and produces a fungal base that can be used to make many different types of food.
“There are very few other organisms that are as efficient as this,” Eternal CEO Miguel Neumann told Space.com. Eternal is part of Kernel Deltech, along with space engineering company De Leon Technologies. Insects, for example, have similarly high efficiency, but not everyone might want to eat them, Neumann said.
Five US teams will advance to Phase 3 of the competition for a chance to win prizes of up to $1.5 million from NASA. Three international teams are also invited to advance to the next stage of the competition. While the first phase of the competition focused on design, the second phase examined whether the team could actually produce the food, the third phase required the team to ensure that their technology could produce that food over and over again. We need to prove we can produce it, said Herblett.
Here are the five teams that won Phase 2 of the US:
- Brooklyn, New York airlines
- Interstellar Labs, Merritt Island, Florida
- Kernel Deltec USA in Cape Canaveral, Florida
- Nolux in Riverside, California
- SATED in Boulder, Colorado (Safe Appliances, Tidy, Efficient, and Tasty)
The three teams that have won internationally are:
- Mysteries of the Universe in Melbourne, Australia
- Mykolena in Gothenburg, Sweden
- Solar Foods in Lappeenranta, Finland
While the challenge focuses on producing food for astronauts, Herblett stressed that the technology could also have applications on Earth, such as in disaster relief. According to the United Nations World Food Program, 828 million people around the world are wondering where to eat their next meal.
“We want to look to the future to see what the future food system will look like,” said Herblett. “But we also want to make sure that we care about the planet and that it applies to the planet as well.”