So far, food for astronauts hasn’t exactly been haute cuisine. Freeze-dried cereal cubes, squeezable tubes filled with what amounts to baby food, and meals reconstituted with water from a fuel cell don’t seem like meals to write home about. And from the sound of research into turning asteroids into astronaut food, things aren’t going to get better with space food anytime soon. The work comes from Western University in Canada and proposes that carbonaceous asteroids like the recently explored Bennu be converted into edible biomass by bacteria. The exact bugs go unmentioned, but when fed simulated asteroid bits are said to produce a material similar in texture and appearance to a “caramel milkshake.” Having grown hundreds of liters of bacterial cultures in the lab, we agree that liquid cultures spun down in a centrifuge look tasty, but if the smell is any indication, the taste probably won’t live up to expectations. Still, when a 500-meter-wide chunk of asteroid can produce enough nutritionally complete food to sustain between 600 and 17,000 astronauts for a year without having to ship it up the gravity well, concessions will likely be made. We expect that this won’t apply to the nascent space tourism industry, which for the foreseeable future will probably build its customer base on deep-pocketed thrill-seekers, a group that’s not known for its ability to compromise on creature comforts.
