Who hands over the secondary product…
Scientists have created a bioreactor for the production of food from the waste of astronauts
Biologists and engineers from Pennsylvania has created the first "space" bioreactor that converts waste from astronauts and astronauts into a nutritious mixture of proteins and fats, according to an article published in the journal Life Sciences in Space Research (Steinberg et al., Coupling of anaerobic waste treatment to produce protein- and lipid-rich bacterial biomass).
"We have developed and implemented a concept for simultaneous utilization of astronauts' biowaste and their transformation into edible biomass. Although such an idea looks strange to the layman, in essence it does not differ from eating spreads and pastes made from yeast extract or beer wort," says Christopher House from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA).
The problem of providing food for future astronauts and travelers to deep space, as NASA believes today, is the second most important problem after the high level of radiation in space, which humanity needs to solve in order to go to Mars and other distant worlds.
Scientists are trying to solve it in two ways – by creating new types of high-calorie and compact "space" food that can be stored for as long as possible and at the same time replace the entire astronaut's diet, and by developing systems that would allow the crews of such ships to produce food independently. For example, similar experiments on board the ISS are constantly carried out by NASA astronauts at the Veggie installation and their Russian colleagues at the Lada complex.
House and his colleagues went further and tried to combine two processes related to human activity, and thereby realize the dream of many science fiction writers who described half a century ago how people would conquer the depths of space.
Today, as scientists note, the nutrients and nutrients contained in the waste of the ISS crew's vital activity are, in fact, not used in any way – the station's sanitary systems simply extract water from them and freeze them. Scientists from Pennsylvania offers to eliminate this disadvantage and recycle these biowaste with the help of microbes.
According to House, this idea was not popular with his colleagues for two simple reasons – waste recycling usually involves bacteria that produce methane that can cause an explosion or fire on board a ship or the ISS, as well as the fact that this process is extremely slow.
Biologists and engineers eliminated both of these shortcomings by speeding up waste recycling with the help of special filtration membranes, which are used today for water purification in aquariums and fish farms, and adding Methylococcus (Methylococcus capsulatus) to the bioreactor – a bacterium capable of "eating" methane and quickly converting it into biomass. It, as the researchers note, consists almost entirely of proteins and fats and it can be eaten in a "raw" form without health consequences.
Under optimal conditions, this installation, according to House, can process more than half of the biowaste of a crew of five or six astronauts in about a day. With further optimization, according to the scientist, he will be able to extract about 85% of nitrogen and carbon from them, which will almost completely solve the problem of providing future marsonauts with food, without requiring a lot of space and energy, like greenhouses and greenhouses.
"Each component of our bioreactor is stable by nature and rapidly decomposes biowaste. This, we believe, gives him quite serious chances to go into space. In fact, this way we can get food faster than growing tomatoes or potatoes in greenhouses," the scientist concludes.
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