NASA serves $750,000 to Deep Space Food Challenge winners in kitchen for astronaut meals
BROOKLYN, NY — What will the space food of the future look like? These scientists have the answers.
On Friday (May 19), NASA announced the winners of phase two of the Deep space food challenge, an initiative to design new food production technologies that could be used by astronauts on long journeys. The methods could also help address food insecurity on Earth.
NASA announced 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 collaborating on the challenge. In April, the CSA also announced the four winning teams of phase two the Canadian challenge, which takes place simultaneously with the NASA initiative. The five winning teams in the United States each received prize money of $150,000.
Of the eight winning teams announced on Friday, three were food production methods, while two were grow-grown systems and three were combined or bioculture systems. The diversity of approaches was also surprising for the organizers of the event. “I think what struck me the most was just the variety of solutions that presented themselves,” Angela Herblet, program manager for the challenge, told Space.com.
Related: Food in space: what do astronauts eat?
The winning farming systems used different techniques to conserve resources and minimize waste. Interstellar Lab, a winning team from Merritt Island, Florida, has created the Nucleus of Nutritional Closed-Loop Ecological Unit System, or NUCLEUS, a system of interconnected mini-habitats they call “quarks.”
The top six quarks grow plants, while the bottom three are used to grow mushrooms or raise insects. A black soldier fly habitat, for example, not only produces calcium-rich, edible fly larvae, but also carbon dioxide that the plant boxes can use.
Intestellar Lab plant scientist Maarten Smits holds a black soldier fly larva from one of the “quarks” within the Nucleus of the company’s nutritional closed-loop ecological unit system, or NUCLEO.
(Image credit: Rebecca Sohn)“You have waste and you turn it into something useful,” Maarten Smits, a plant scientist at the Interstellar Lab, told Space.com. “When you go to space, that’s very important.” They added that in addition to being functional, the NUCLEUS beautifully displays its crops, potentially serving as a reminder of the Earth and as a morale booster.
Air Company, a winning food products team from Brooklyn, also used the waste to create their entryway. Their product uses carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts combined with hydrogen gas, which is also produced as a waste product in life support systems. They can then use these spirits, which they feed on yeast, also grown with minimal resources in the space.
“The yeast ate it and made more yeast grow,” Air Company CEO Stafford Sheehan told Space.com. “And so we created this type of nutritional yeast that can essentially be made from astronauts’ breath, which is completely circular.”
Several winning teams have used mushroom and mushroom types in their entries, which grow quickly and efficiently with little resources. Kernel Deltech, a team out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, has developed a self-contained appliance that produces a fungal base that grows well in low gravity and can be used to prepare many different types of foods.
“Only few other organisms are as efficient,” Eternal CEO Miguel Neumann told Space.com. Eternal is a company that is part of Kernel Deltech, together with the space engineering company De Leon Technologies. Neumann said insects, for example, also have this high efficiency, but not everyone might want to eat insects.
The five US teams will advance to phase three of the competition, where they will have the chance to win up to $1.5 million in prizes from NASA. The 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 and the second looked at whether teams could actually produce food, Herblet said that in phase three, teams will have to demonstrate that their technologies can repeatedly and reliably produce that food.
The five stage two winning teams from the United States are:
- Airline of Brooklyn, New York
- Interstellar Laboratory of Merritt Island, Florida
- Kernel Deltech USA of Cape Canaveral, Florida
- Nolux of Riverside, California
- SATED (Safe, Neat, Efficient and Delicious Appliance) of Boulder, Colorado
The three international winning teams are:
- Melbourne Cosmos Enigma, Australia
- Mycorena in Gothenburg, Sweden
- Solar Foods of Lappeenranta, Finland
While the challenge centers on producing food for astronauts, Herblet stressed that the technologies should also have applications on Earth, such as in disaster relief. Globally, according to the United Nations World Food Programme, as many as 828 million people are unsure where their next meal will come from.
“We want to look into the future, what the future food system will look like,” Herblet said. “But we also want to make sure that we are taking care of our planet and that there are applications for the Earth.”
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