Grow your own food... in space!

The Manila Times

Grow your own food... in space!  How do you feed the crew on the long journey to Mars and back when every kilogram counts and trips can take years? The answer could be to grow your own food, fuel and even pharmaceuticals enroute, starting with just a handful of cultivated cells and a bioreactor, according to researchers in the UK.  With funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, Imperial is investigating how to create the food that astronauts, and people back on Earth, can produce sustainably using biofoundries - where cells are turned into mini-factories producing useful products.  Their thesis has now been tested in space when Europe's first commercial returnable spacecraft, called Phoenix 1, carried their cells into space in a miniaturized automated laboratory called SpaceLab, launched on board a Space X Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday, April 22.  SpaceLab is a 'lab-in-a-box' technology providing bio-experimentation in microgravity without the traditional barriers to space-based research.  REUTERS / FRONTIER SPACE TECHNOLOGIES / ATMOS SPACE CARGO / NASA / NASA/JPL / SPACEX  Subscribe to The Manila Times Channel - https://tmt.ph/YTSubscribe    Visit our website at https://www.manilatimes.net    Follow us:  Facebook - https://tmt.ph/facebook  Instagram - https://tmt.ph/instagram  Twitter - https://tmt.ph/twitter  DailyMotion - https://tmt.ph/dailymotion    Subscribe to our Digital Edition - https://tmt.ph/digital    Check out our Podcasts:  Spotify - https://tmt.ph/spotify  Apple Podcasts - https://tmt.ph/applepodcasts  Amazon Music - https://tmt.ph/amazonmusic  Deezer: https://tmt.ph/deezer  Tune In: https://tmt.ph/tunein   #TheManilaTimes #tmtnews #spacex #spacemission #spacelab

Transcript

00:00five four three two one ignition engines full power and lift off go falcon go bandwagon three

00:12stage one propulsion is nominal vehicles pitching downrange

00:30uh so this project is about how we can produce the food we need if we want to travel in space

00:56if we want to colonize all the planets uh it's really difficult to to bring everything we need

01:03from earth just think that an astronaut consumes between half a kilo and 1.5 kilograms of food per

01:10day and every kilogram we ship to space can be 20 000 uh use dollars so imagine every meal can be

01:17something like 10 000 dollars so what what if we just make the food we need in space

01:24and instead of bringing it from earth

01:39so the solution is using microbes so microorganisms such as bacteria or yeast that we are currently

01:44using on on earth to make some of these products already so we can do microbial foods we can produce

01:50ingredients like vitamins that are required for human health we can make bioplastic we can make

01:56pharmaceuticals so if we bring a tiny little cell out in space that cells can then grow and produce

02:05everything we need

02:19two or three copy numbers because we have one you can see a different color so this is more red

02:25yeah you can see it's pretty stable the problem we had before was the stability so some of the colonies

02:29were white i see yeah and now all of them look pretty good because i was just going to ask like is that

02:47a reliable way basically of it

02:50multiple copies even if they lose one

02:53they still use the stability but i think it's so interesting that we are now starting a pc project

02:57producing only in this collaboration we want to to explore a space bioreactor so these are bioreactors

03:07that work in space so a bioreactor is just a vessel a fermenter where cells grow is the same when we brew

03:14beer or wine we have a vessel and that's where the organism can breathe and grow so they look like

03:21the one i have behind me so this is a bioreactor they're actually growing cells of yeast that are

03:26producing a particular vitamin precursor and they can be collected extracted and consumed so for space

03:34this is this is very difficult to bring so we need to rethink how this bioreactor may look like

03:47so this is where the great collaboration with

03:56so this is where the great collaboration with

04:00uh frontiers space is coming along and they are developing devices that will work in space as our

04:23bioreactors work in our planet and they look like something like that that's smaller more modest but

04:30this will allow us to generate a lot of information on how these cells behave in space conditions

04:45it's not the actual bioreactor but these are the prototypes uh and this one i would refer to more

04:50as a storage device as a storage device actually

04:56we'll do one two weeks ago and then so with these big pilots we can see the chromatograms

05:04the lab in the box fundamentally it's is a bio and wet chemistry lab like what you see here essentially

05:25it has fluid control thermal control the pressure is controlled the atmosphere is controlled and what

05:31we're trying to do is really bring it back down and miniaturize them and make them automated for the

05:36fundamental reason is that mass per kilogram is the unit economics of space the heavier is the more

05:42expensive it will be and what we're trying to do is reduce the cost and make it more accessible

05:46sometimes at the beginning you have to hold it yeah like this

06:08yeah so our entire lab actually just about this tall by 10 by 10

06:13it weighs just under one kilogram it has about three experiments on board so we have optical capability

06:21we have a experiment that we have with imperial and we also have our own microfluidic device experiment

06:27but what we're seeing now is that the whole space infrastructure is is getting built so we're going

06:43to have commercial space station we have much more regular uplift and down lift capability that enables us

06:49to really build and permanently station our bioreactors that ways we you know we can we can manufacture let's

06:55say cancer drugs in space and bring it back down for research or therapeutics but down the line when

07:01we have the moon base we need this kind of bioreactors to be able to really sustain permanent settlement of

07:07human civilization in this environment

07:19now

07:23so

07:27so

07:35things

07:35they're Carlos

07:35so

07:36you

07:36Beep

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