A team member from Interstellar Lab of Merritt Island, Florida, prepares Daikon Radish sprouts during NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge Phase 2 prize announcement on May 19, 2023. Teams from all over the world showcased some of their food production technologies at the event held in Brooklyn, New...May 29 - In the 2015 sci-fi film "The Martian," Matt Damon stars as an astronaut who survives on a diet of potatoes cultivated in human feces while marooned on the Red Planet.
"It's definitely more nutritious than Tang," said company co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Stafford Sheehan, referring to the powdered beverage popularized in 1962 by John Glenn when he became the first American to orbit Earth. The company's patented AIRMADE technology was one of eight winners announced by NASA this month in the second phase of its food competition, along with $750,000 in prize money. A final round of the competition is coming up.
While few if any are likely to earn a place in the Michelin Guide for fine dining, they represent a big leap forward from Tang and the freeze-dried snacks consumed by astronauts in the earliest days of space travel. Keeping astronauts well nourished for extended periods within the limited, zero-gravity confines of space vehicles in low-Earth orbit long has posed a challenge for NASA. For the past two decades, crews aboard the International Space Station have lived on a diet mostly of packaged meals with some fresh produce delivered on regular re-supply missions.
Advances in space-based food production also have direct applications for feeding Earth's ever-growing population in an era when climate change is making food more scarce and harder to produce, Fritsche said.