Grow your own food... in space!

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

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