NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge adds flavour to space menus
Recycling carbondioxide for protein shakes, and mimicking photosynthesis to create mushrooms, are just two of the many ways to create food for astronauts on long space missions
A Reuters story published yesterday reported a Brooklyn-based company, named Air Company, “has pioneered a way of recycling carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts in flight to grow yeast-based nutrients for protein shakes designed to nourish crews on long-duration deep-space missions.”
The protein shake, according to a company spokesperson, has the texture of a whey drink. Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Stafford Sheehan compared its taste to that of the tofu-like seitan. The process to make this shake can also be used to create carbohydrate-based substitutes for breads, tortillas and pastas.
Their patented Airmade technology was one of eight winners announced by NASA this month in the second phase of its food competition, Deep Space Food Challenge. It’s a two-year-old competition introduced by NASA and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to improve the menu for astronauts at space stations as well as on long voyages in a sustainable manner. The idea is to reinvent food systems so that they are sustainable as well as tasty for astronauts who spend months in space. In a statement on the website, NASA.gov, the space organisation said, “As NASA prepares to send astronauts farther into the solar system than ever before, the agency needs food systems that can fortify future crews in deep space for years at a time. The Deep Space Food Challenge calls on solvers from around the world to create technologies to help feed astronauts on future long-term space missions.” Denise Morris, program manager of NASA Centennial Challenges at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama was quoted as saying, "The possibilities presented in this challenge could help sustain our explorers on future missions, and even have the potential to help out right here on Earth in areas where food is scarce or hard to produce."
The reward is money and the eight winning teams received $750,000 (₹61,962,373 approx) in prize money this year. Apart from Air Company, here’s a list released by NASA about the other winners: Florida’s Interstellar Lab for a modular bioregenerative system that produces fresh microgreens, vegetables, mushrooms, and insects; Florida’s Kernel Deltech USA for developing mushroom-based ingredients; California’s Nolux for a process that mimics the photosynthesis for creating plant- and mushroom-based ingredients; Colorado’s SATED (Safe Appliance, Tidy, Efficient, and Delicious) for a cooking appliance; Australia’s Enigma of the Cosmos developed for an adaptive growing system to boost the efficiency of plants' natural growth cycles; Sweden’s Mycorena for a process to create microprotein; and Finland’s Solar Foods for devising a system that uses gas fermentation to create single-cell proteins.
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First Published:30 May 2023, 09:00 AM IST
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