A team of six graduate students in food science, mechanical engineering and biological engineering is among the winners of Phase 1 of the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge, an international competition that seeks novel food technologies to provide safe, nutritious foods for long-duration space missions to the moon, the International Space Station and eventually to Mars.
The student team, named BigRedBites in a nod to Cornell and Mars, developed a compact symbiotic food system concept that produces mushrooms, fresh vegetables and plant-based meat alternatives in various sizes and textures, such as patties, meatballs and chips, and provides approximately 15% of an astronaut’s daily calorie requirements.
The system minimizes the amount of soil, water and nutrients needed, and maximizes diverse food production by creating interconnected subsystems that benefit from one another. Individual subsystems produce cyanobacteria and yeast, plants and mushrooms. Waste products from each system, such as carbon dioxide, oxygen and water, are then recycled into other subsystems, where they can be used to grow additional food. Innovations like 3D-printed artificial soil further reduce the amount of materials astronauts would have to carry into space.
“Our team was very nutrition-driven,” said Viviana Rivera Flores, a doctoral student in the field of food science. “One of the first things we did was work to understand the nutrient requirements of astronauts in space based on what activities they’re doing and how they’re performing those activities. That kind of set the stage for what we were going to create.”
