Study Suggests Asteroids Could Provide Food for Space Travelers

In a recent study, planetary scientists and engineers from Western University’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration in Canada have introduced a novel concept of producing food for space travelers using asteroids.

No, they are not suggesting that astronauts eat rocks. Instead, they propose feeding bacteria with asteroid material to create edible biomass, which could serve as a food source for space missions.

This idea, detailed in the paper “International Journal of Astrobiology,” explores how much asteroid material would be needed to generate edible biomass. The goal is to provide a reliable source of food for astronauts on long-duration space journeys.

The study suggests that asteroids could potentially meet the nutritional needs of astronauts. The process would involve breaking down the carbon content found in space rocks and converting it into edible substances. This is particularly important because astronauts have a limited supply of dried food, and space farming is not yet a viable solution.

In an interview with The New York Times, Joshua Pearce, an engineering professor at Western University in Ontario, compared asteroids to plastic in their potential use. The idea builds on a previous project by Michigan Technological University, initially supported by the U.S. Department of Defense, which aimed to produce edible food from plastic waste.

The process used in this project is known as pyrolysis, where plastic is broken down into oil, solids, and gas. The oil is then fed to bacteria in a bioreactor, which results in the production of nutrient-rich biomass.

Further research by Annemiek Waajen of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam confirmed that microbes can indeed consume asteroid material. In her experiments, microbes were fed fragments of meteorites that had fallen to Earth, and they successfully grew by consuming the rock.

After reviewing this data, Dr. Pearce and his team focused on the asteroid Bennu. They calculated that the carbon in Bennu, once processed by microbes, could potentially support a single astronaut for up to 600 years.

However, Dr. Waajen, who was not involved in the study, noted that while the concept is promising, it remains far from practical implementation. Before this method can be used, scientists will need to conduct extensive toxicity tests to ensure that the biomass is safe for astronauts to consume.