Regenerative Foods Without Crops: The Case for Chemical and Microbial Synthesis of Food Ingredients for Long-Term Space Missions

Food is the most costly expendable resource for long space missions. Prepackaged food is massive and has limited shelf life. Bio-regenerative food production by higher plants entails large investments of energy, equipment and labor per unit of food energy produced, and has a lengthy recovery time in the case of crop failure. Direct chemical and hybrid chemical/microbial synthesis of food ingredients could furnish food ingredients such as glycerol, fats, functional proteins and even sugars from waste materials including CO₂. Before such foods can meet NASA's objective of providing a safe, nutritious, balanced and palatable diet for space crews, two levels of development work are required: first, chemical and engineering research to address the issues of byproduct toxicity and purification, and second, food product research to develop a range of acceptable foods from microbial biomass fractions and/or glycerol.

This review explores the prospects for production of several different synthetic and microbial food products for long-duration crewed missions, focusing on the technological aspects of food product synthesis rather than the product development aspects.