Europe's scientists launch mission to grow food in space

A European Space Agency project is assessing the viability of creating lab-grown food in space. They’re doing it using genetically engineered microbes in bioreactors to produce food from its first principles The project is a collaboration between Bedford-based Frontier Space, Imperial College London and Cranfield University. Frontier Space’s CEO is Aqeel Shamsul…

Aqeel - The daily diet of the astronaut is not as appetising as calling a takeout for your Chinese or your Indian, unfortunately. Because of the constraints that's involved, what we do is we launch the fresh supply of food into the space station, but most of these supplies are often canned food or dehydrated food. You just prolong the shelf life, make it easier to transport, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is twofold. So obviously when you're trying to do this launching, it costs a lot of money and energy to go up there. And the second problem is that because you're eating canned food every day, it's not good for morale and astronauts losing weight, they don't have the appetite to eat. So if you start thinking about how do we support future human exploration, food is a primary and quite critical component.

Chris - One space technologist/food scientist I spoke to also said to me, one other further unappetising element is that you're rehydrating the food with recycled water. And we all know what that means in space. It's basically urine, isn't it?

Aqeel - Yeah, I think you can leave that up to your imagination.

Chris - So how are you trying to solve this then? I mean, there must be sort of short term and long term goals here. The long term is that we won't necessarily have an Indian takeaway on the moon, but we would have more appetising, nicer looking food that's also nutritious. But in the short term, there must be some steps towards getting there that you're trying to realise.

Aqeel - So one of the things that we're working on is the concept called precision fermentation. We use our bioreactor. And what we do is we put the microbes, bacteria and yeast into this bioreactor and grow them up. From the microbes, we can get proteins, carbohydrates, oil and fat. And that is basically the elements to be able to produce the food that you want.

Chris - So the chefs in this case are microorganisms. Will you genetically modify the microorganisms to endow them with the sorts of chemistries that making more nutritious, but also tastier foods in microgravity is going to require? Because they're not going to natively be able to do what you want them to do.

Aqeel - That's exactly right. We genetically modified or engineered the biology to, let's say, produce specific proteins, then get the microbes and then we cultivate them, culture them that we can then use as a feedstock for a 3D bioprinting to print a steak, for example.

Chris - Brilliant. So there'd be a sequence of small bioreactors then that would all produce individual micronutrients or groups of micronutrients or food groups, and they would then feed in almost like the filaments on a 3D printer of different coloured plastics. You would have different nutritional elements that you would print into a foodstuff.

Aqeel - Yes, exactly that. It doesn't even have to be just food, so we can actually engineer them to produce biofuel, biomaterial, so you can actually produce bioplastics. So the opportunity is quite vast.

Chris - This really does sound like rocket science though, and there is a pun intended, but how far along the path are you towards realising this?

Aqeel - Yeah, so I mean, this is kind of an early stage. The ideal precision fermentation has been picked up on Earth drastically for quite a few number of years now, but we're now trying to put that into the space context. As a company, we're raising private capital, obviously, to be able to do this and start building a larger scale system. Providing everything goes well, we can have a system up there and running in the next three to five years.

Chris - That's very near term. What about testing it though? Have you got any ambitions or plans in place to actually do some testing, so you can see if this really will deliver in space?

Aqeel - Yeah, so we actually launched our first mission on Monday. That was on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket inside a commercial space capsule. We're planning to do more and more of these tests. For example, we are planning to have another launch by the end of this year. We're planning to have up to three launches next year.

Chris - Have you got some recipes yet? Because it's one thing to be able to genetically engineer organisms to produce what you want. It's a bit like going to that compost heap in Derbyshire, where someone got the fungus that makes marmite.You're kind of at that stage where you can get the microbes, but do you know yet what you're going to cook up with them?

Aqeel - The amazing thing about using microbes is that you can actually get the foundational element or chemistry for any type of food or cuisine. Technically, you can actually produce, let's say, I don't know, Indian takeout, because you can actually get microbes to produce all this different chemistry. So the challenge is, for the time being, obviously start building the reactor and start growing the microbes. But there's maybe one or two steps after that. How do we extract the proteins? How do we then use the proteins to produce the element that we need for the food ingredient?

Chris - And do we know if the microbes are happy in space? Will they behave the way we think they will? And do they actually produce what we think? Or do they change their behaviour? Because some organisms, when you put them in different environments, they completely change what they do. I mean, I'm referring to the fact we spoke to Maggie Koblitz recently, who made miso in space, and she said, her taster team said it tasted totally different.

Aqeel - This is still uncharted territory, right? I think we do need to do a lot of testing to understand the parameters. What we've been working on is really building off 25 years of research in the space station, and using the knowledge that we found from that to kind of predict where we're going. So I mean, in most cases, you're right, there will be some adaptation to the microbes that actually make them resilient. There are also studies showing that you can actually increase the production yield. But this is all kind of hypothesis that we're testing along the way.

Chris - Now, Douglas Adams wrote about the restaurant at the end of the Universe. You're not going quite that far yet, but you're saying restaurant on the moon, possibly in three to five years.

Aqeel - I wouldn't go as far-fetched as a restaurant. But yeah, I think we can definitely produce a certain type of food in three to five years.