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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

space food

Podcast: How Will We Feed Astronauts in Deep Space?

Up until now, every morsel of food an astronaut eats in space was created and packaged here on earth. However, as we embark on a new era of long-term space flight, NASA and other space agencies realize that will need to change. 

As the Senior Project Manager for Space Crop Production and Exploration Food Systems for NASA, Ralph Fritsche has been thinking about this problem for the past decade. Ralph and his team work every to try and figure out how exactly they can provide sustenance to space travelers for multi-year space missions that are out of reach of re-supply from the space shuttles they rely on today.

In other words, they are trying to figure out how to feed humans on a mission to Mars.

In this podcast, we talk about the evolution of the NASA space food program, how they are discovering new ideas for possibly feeding space travelers, and the timeline for sending systems up in space to feed astronauts as they embark on multiyear missions to the far reaches of the galaxy.

If you’re a space nerd like me, then this is the podcast for you. Just click below or find this and other Spoon podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Make Alcohol From an Astronaut’s Breath? Yep. Here Are the Finalists For Phase 2 of the Deep Space Food Challenge

This week, NASA’s ability to keep astronauts fat and happy on a mission to Mars took another giant leap forward for mankind.

That’s because the U.S. space agency, in partnership with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), announced the 11 finalists for Phase 2 of the Deep Space Food Challenge, a competition designed to help explore and better understand how these agencies can feed humans in space.

The second phase of the competition kicked off in January 2022, and both new teams and previous Phase 1 winners were challenged to build small-scale prototypes of their ideas. Dozens of teams developed prototypes to use minimal resources, creating little waste, and producing safe, healthy, and tasty foods for astronauts.

The judging panel, which featured experts from academia, industry, and government, evaluated submissions on various criteria such as design innovation, scientific and technical approach, and the feasibility of their design.

The following U.S. companies were selected as finalists:

  • InFynity (Chicago, Illinois) is utilizing fungi protein to prepare nutritious and delicious foods.
  • Nolux (Riverside, California) is producing plant- and fungal-based food using artificial photosynthesis.
  • Mu Mycology (Hillboro, Oregon) uses a closed-loop mushroom cultivation system allowing for scalable growth of various edible mushrooms.
  • Kernel Deltech USA (Cape Canaveral, Florida) produces inactivated fungal biomass using a continuous cultivation technique.
  • Interstellar Lab (Merritt Island, Florida) produces fresh microgreens, vegetables, mushrooms, and insects to provide micronutrients for long-term space missions.
  • Far Out Foods (St. Paul, Minnesota) developed a nearly closed-loop food production system called the Exo-Garden that is capable of producing a variety of mushrooms and hydroponic vegetables.
  • SATED (Boulder, Colorado), or Safe Appliance, Tidy, Efficient, & Delicious, cooks a variety of well-known foods from long-shelf-life ingredients.
  • Air Company (Brooklyn, New York) developed a system that captures carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts, combined with hydrogen made with water electrolysis, to produce alcohol that is then fed to an edible yeast to make proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

In addition to these U.S. companies, the NASA and the CSA recognized three international finalist teams from outside the U.S. and Canada:

  • Enigma of the Cosmos (Melbourne, Australia) created a food production system with an adaptive growing platform that could increase efficiency by at least 40%.
  • Solar Foods (Lappeenranta, Finland) uses gas fermentation to produce single-cell proteins.
  • Mycorena (Gothenburg, Sweden) developed a circular production system utilizing a mix of microalgae and fungi, resulting in a microprotein using minimal resources while generating minimal waste.

The top 5 U.S. companies will be recognized as Phase 2 challenge winners, each awarded $150,000. In addition, up to three top-scoring international teams will be recognized as Phase 2 challenge winners. The winners of Phase 2 are scheduled to be announced in April 2023.

Looking at the finalists, it’s clear the big winner was…fungi. Six of the final eight finalists have built systems that create fungi in some form or another. But maybe the most intriguing system chosen by NASA is from Brooklyn’s Air Company, which has technology that can convert an astronaut’s breath into alcohol, which is then used as feed media for an edible yeast that produces proteins, fats, and carbs. As it turns out, the company’s technology can also produce vodka, which I’m thinking might just come in handy during a long-term space flight.

Fungi Protein Heading to Space Station Aboard SpaceX to Test Viability as Astronaut Food

Back in 2012, researchers exploring the thermal springs of Yellowstone National Park happened upon a hearty new microbe called Fusarium strain flavolapis. Having survived the acidic volcano springs of Yellowstone meant the microbe, a fungus, might just survive in a challenging environment like outer space.

That was the theory, but researchers will soon know how Fusarium flavolapis performs 254 miles above earth as the fungi heads to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s 25th cargo mission for NASA on Friday, June 10th. The fungi will go to space as part of NASA’s EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research), under a project where Montana State University, BioServe Space Technologies, and a startup called Nature’s Fynd will test how it performs and see if it could be used as a source of food for astronauts. 

The fungi, now better known by its commercial name of Fy, was initially isolated by Dr. Mark Kozubal under a research program funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation. Kozubal would go on to found Nature’s Fynd as part of an effort to commercialize Fy as a complete protein that could be used in plant-based meat and dairy substitutes. Earlier this year, Fy made its way to market as part of a series of consumer products that includes meatless breakfast sausage and dairy-free cream cheese

As Nature’s Fynd worked to develop Fy into new consumer-facing products, the company continued to work with NASA under their Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, which had opened a call for microbial biomanufacturing technologies in space. Nature’s Fynd worked with researchers from Montana State University to build a bioreactor prototype that could grow FY in microgravity environments like the International Space Station (ISS). And earlier this year, Nature’s Fynd, MSU, and Bioserve Space Technology, a Center within the University of Colorado Bouldertechnologies, received a grant under NASA’s EPSCoR to test the bioreactor in space.

One of the reasons Fy is so attractive as a potential food source for astronauts is it’s a source of complete protein, meaning it has all nine of the necessary amino acids humans need as part of their diet. It’s also a source of net new protein, meaning – unlike pea or animal protein – it isn’t simply a protein that’s been converted from one source to another. In space, efficiency is the name of the game, and Fy’s ability to create protein without an intermediary makes it a promising new candidate to feed long-term space travelers. Starting this Friday, researchers will soon know whether Fy will live up to that promise.

This project is one of many being funded by NASA as part of its effort to develop sources of food for long-term space travel. Earlier this year, the space agency announced $1 million in prize money for Phase 2 of its Deep Space Food Challenge, a NASA Centennial challenge that aims to foster innovation around sustainable food production technologies or systems that require minimal resources and produce minimal waste. The space agency has also experimented with baking cookies and printing pizzas in microgravity environments.

Aleph Farms is About to Send Cow Cells to Space. Here’s What They’re Looking to Learn

In five days, Aleph Farms will watch as cow cells from its research labs are handed to Eytan Stibbe, the second Israeli to travel to space and the first ever to head to the International Space Station (ISS). Stibbe will be traveling with a SpaceX crew on the Axiom-1 mission, taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a Falcon 9 rocket on April 6th. Stibbe and the rest of the crew will spend eight days aboard the ISS, orbiting an average altitude of 227 miles above Earth. 

Why is an astronaut taking cell cultures from Aleph into outer space? As described by a post published this week on Aleph’s website, the company hopes to understand better the effects of microgravity on two basic processes responsible for muscle tissue formation, which will help them better understand how cow cells can be transformed into the building blocks of steak.

From the post:

Understanding processes in such an extreme environment, like space, will allow us to eventually develop an automated, closed-loop system that can produce steaks during long-term space missions. Similar to car manufacturers and Formula One, in space, we are developing the most efficient processes under the toughest environments. The processes we are validating in space can then be transferred to our mainstream production on Earth to help us increase efficiencies, and reduce our environmental footprint. Our space program will ultimately help us develop more sustainable and resilient food systems anywhere.

The company is working with SpacePharma, an organization specializing in developing drugs in microgravity environments. SpacePharma has developed a microfluidic device called a Lab-on-a-Chip that feeds the cells and allows them to grow in transport. Once on the ISS, Astronaut Stibbe will transfer the Lab-on-a-Chip into the ICE Cubes platform, which allows scientists on Earth to do research in real-time as images and data are sent from the Lab-on-a-Chip.

Aleph isn’t the only food company looking towards space. Last year NASA announced 28 winners of the first phase of its Deep Space Food Challenge (including one called Space Cow) and announced in January a $1 million prize purse for phase 2. A consortium called Space Foodsphere in Japan is comprised of dozens of Japanese companies as well as JAXA, and last year the group was selected to help develop food systems for long-term stay on the Moon. The European Space Agency put out a call for proposals last year to expand its research around cultured meat in space.

Space Hummus? Israel, NASA & Strauss Team Up to Grow Chickpeas in Space

Astronauts have attempted to grow lots of different kinds of food in space over the past few years, but one type of produce that’s never grown above the ozone layer is chickpeas.

But that’s about to change because on February 19th NASA is teaming up with SpaceIL, a non-profit trying to land an Israel space ship on the moon, Stanford University, and Israel food conglomerate Strauss to send a specially designed miniature greenhouse that contains 28 chickpea seeds to grow in space.

From the Times of Israel:

Inside the white metal box will be 28 chickpea seeds from Israel that Winetraub and his team will attempt to germinate and grow — remotely, using special software — in an environment free of gravity and natural light. The plants in the greenhouse will be grown for one month and then will be refrigerated until they are brought down to Earth in June.

The specially designed greenhouse, which is the size of a shoebox, was designed by SpaceIL and a group of scientists from Stanford University. Strauss, the company behind the well-known hummus brand Sabra, not only helped develop the mini greenhouse but also chose the chickpea seed. The seed, called the ‘Zehavit,’ is used to make the Israel-based version of Strauss’s hummus (sold under the Achla brand).

The creation of such a small closed-loop greenhouse is a scientific feat made possible by recent advancements in synthetic biology. Scientists have discovered they could use light to control signaling pathways of a plant in small systems like this, including growth, flowering, and photosynthesis rates.

For Strauss, the partnership not only marks the kind of high-visibility brand engagement that most food companies would pay significant money to participate in but also could be a sign of things to come as space travel continues to heat up. We’ve already seen many food companies participating in the Deep Space Food Challenge use their participation as a brand builder, and some future food companies like Aleph Farms make space food a significant part of their company identity.

If you’d like to watch the new chickpea-growing greenhouse launch into space, you can watch a livestream on February 19th at 12:39 Easter here.

NASA Offers $1 Million to Innovators to Create Food Systems For Deep Space

This week, NASA announced $1 million in total prize money for innovations as part of Phase 2 of its Deep Space Food Challenge. The contest, which announced Phase 1 winners last October, is a NASA Centennial challenge that aims to foster innovation around sustainable food production technologies or systems that require minimal resources and produce minimal waste.

The goal, according to NASA, is to develop food systems that can feed a team of four astronauts on a long-haul space mission of up to three years. They also make it clear they hope this challenge will result in food innovation that can help feed more people on earth.

“Feeding astronauts over long periods within the constraints of space travel will require innovative solutions,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “Pushing the boundaries of food technology will keep future explorers healthy and could even help feed people here at home.”

While judges in Phase 1 focused on how innovative the proposed systems were, contestants didn’t actually have to build anything. That all changes in Phase 2. According to the announcement, Phase 2 entrants are expected to take their ideas to the next step and build working prototypes. From the announcement: “…the competition calls on teams to design, build, and demonstrate prototypes of food production technologies that provide tangible nutritional products – or food.”

For Phase 1, NASA announced 28 winners who had developed ideas for making food using technologies ranging from 3D printing and cell-cultured meat production to vertical farming. One of the winners – Space Cow – even developed a system concept that converts CO2 and waste streams straight into food, with the help of food-grade micro-organisms and 3D printing.

All of the winners from Phase 1 automatically meet the submission requirements for Phase 2 and have been invited to participate. In addition, the challenge is also opening the door to new entrants for Phase 2, for which NASA is taking registrations for entrance until February 28th. The Canadian Space Agency is running a parallel contest as part of the Deep Space Food Challenge (each space agency is running a separate contest with separate prize pools).

NASA’s Phase 2 prize purse is divided in the following ways: $20k each will be awarded to the 10 top scoring teams, and $150 thousand will be awarded to the top 5 scoring teams, each of whom will be invited to compete in Phase 3.

While NASA hasn’t detailed what Phase 3 will entail, the Canadian Space Agency has described their Phase 3 as “Full System Demonstration” where finalists “will grow and scale up their solutions in Canada over a 12 to 18-month period starting in Fall 2022.” I assume – if and when NASA launches Phase 3 – their final leg will focus on a similar system scale up as its primary criteria.

To Feed Astronauts Safely in Space, NASA is Learning To Monitor The Spaceship’s Microbiome

To support astronauts on longer-duration missions farther away from Earth, NASA needs to figure out how to provide them with a continuous supply of nutritious food. The freeze-dried foods astronauts currently eat won’t cut it, as key nutrients in these meals gradually break down.

The Vegetable Production System, or Veggie, is one potential solution to that problem. Veggie is a suitcase-sized system used to grow plants onboard the International Space Station. It has produced three types of lettuce so far, and NASA researchers determined that one variety (red romaine) was as nutritious as its Earth-grown equivalent. A challenge for the Agency as it moves forward with the system will be to control onboard microbial contamination.

Image: Fungi gathered from Veggie system aboard Space Station, incubated to promote growth. Source: NASA

The International Space Station and other space vessels are sensitive environments. Bacteria and fungi that get carried onboard by incoming astronauts are generally non-threatening, but the wrong strain or a burst of growth could endanger the crew’s health or compromise critical equipment. NASA keeps a constant eye on microbial conditions in the space station — and in particular, the Agency is closely monitoring patterns of microbial growth on the Veggie system.

“If the crew consumes food contaminated with pathogenic organisms, they could become ill,” NASA Senior Scientist Dr. Cherie Oubre said in an Agency press release. “Or, if plant growth systems become contaminated with plant pathogens, the crops could be compromised or fail. To prepare, we must assess Veggie’s vulnerabilities and carefully monitor it.”

Astronauts on board the space station contribute to the Veggie monitoring project by swabbing different components of the system, incubating any microbes they’ve picked up on growth media slides, and then analyzing and making a record of the organisms that have colonized the slides.

Sampling began in 2019 and is ongoing. By creating a record of microbial activity through time, NASA researchers will be able to analyze growth patterns, and respond to potential problems in future plant production system designs.

Technologies developed by NASA have found applications in industries on Earth in the past. Design adaptations that the Agency develops to ward off contamination in the Veggie system could eventually prove useful in emerging food tech spaces like indoor farming and cultivated meat production.

Fruit Cells, Space Bread, and Cultured Meat Cartridges: Deep Space Food Challenge Announces Phase 1 Winners

On planet Earth, we face the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population that is set to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050. In space, we face the challenge of feeding astronauts traveling through the galaxy for an extended period of time. Novel and innovative food technology could offer viable solutions in both realms.

For the first time ever, NASA and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) have come together this year to host the Deep Space Food Challenge. Companies competing in the challenge must be able to offer a solution to feeding at least four astronauts on a three-year space mission. The solutions should be able to achieve the greatest amount of food output (that is palatable and nutritious) with minimal input and waste. In addition to being used in space, the solution must also improve food accessibility on Earth.

This week, the winners of Phase 1 were announced:

MANUFACTURED FOODS

  • Astra Gastronomy
  • Beehex
  • BigRedBites
  • Bistromathic
  • Cosmic Eats
  • SIRONA NOMs
  • Space Bread
  • µBites
  • ALSEC Alimentos Secos SAS
  • Electric Cow
  • Solar Foods

BIO CULTURE FOODS

  • Deep Space Entomoculture
  • Hefvin
  • Mission: Space Food
  • KEETA
  • Natufia x Edama

PLANT GROWTH

  • Far Out Foods
  • Interstellar Lab
  • Kernel Deltech
  • Nolux
  • Project MIDGE
  • RADICLE-X
  • Space Lab Cafe
  • AMBAR
  • Enigma of the Cosmos
  • JPWORKS SRL
  • LTCOP
  • Team π

Many companies that were selected as Phase 1 winners use technologies that have steadily gained popularity in the food tech space, like 3D printing, using bioreactors for cultured protein, and vertical farming. In-demand “future food” ingredients like fungi, microbes, cultured cells/meat, and insects were also popular amongst competitors.

Out of the 28 winners, here are some of our favorites:

Beehex (Columbus, Ohio) – Some of you may remember Beehex for their work on a 3D pizza printer for NASA. For this competition, Beehex is proposing a UFF (Universal Food Fabricator) which can dehydrate plants and cultured meats into powder form foods, store them into hermetically sealed cartridges for 5+ years, and 3D print with the stored food in cartridges when needed.

Deep Space Entomoculture (Somerville, Massachusetts) – In this company’s proposed food system, dry-preserved insect cells will be brought up into space. Using a suspension bioreactor, the insect cells, along with other ingredients, will be reactivated and used to create traditional meat-like analogs.

Space Bread (Hawthorne, Florida) – As the name aptly suggests, this company’s tech allows for crew members to create bread in space. This food system includes a multifuntional plastic bag that is used to store and combine ingredients, and then bake a roll.

Mission Space Food: This company is making a system that will cultivate meat in space using pluripotent stem cells using cell cryopreservation and bioreactor. The creators say the system can can grow beef as well as be adapted to grow other meats such as pork or lamb.

AMBAR – (Bucaramanga, Colombia) – Operating as a small-scale ecosystem, AMBAR’s growing cabinet contains different compartments for various plants. Within this system, both terrestrial and aquatic are able to be grown for food.

Hefvin (Bethesda, Maryland) – This company produces berries by growing fruit cells in a nutrient rich media. Spherification (the culinary process used to shape liquid into squishy spheres) is used to encase different cells to create a full berry, complete with skin and pulp.

Space Cow: (Germany) – this company makes a system converts CO2 and waste streams straight into food, with the help of a food grade micro-organisms and 3D printing.

Each U.S. winner of Phase 1 has been awarded $25,000 to continue working on their solution and is invited to continue on to the Phase 2 competition.

NASA Is Growing Chile Peppers In Space

Astronauts onboard the International Space Station are aiming to grow the first-ever peppers in space via the Plant Habitat-04 (PH-04) experiment. PH-04 will grow “Espanola Improved” New Mexico Hatch Green Chiles. These are a medium-heat chile peppers NASA says have been suitable for use in controlled growing environments.

The pepper seeds were planted in April of this year and sent to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s 22nd Commercial Refueling Services (CRS-22) mission. Astronauts will grow the plants for four months in the Space Station’s “advanced plant habitat” (APH), which contains more than 180 sensors and can regulate temperature, moisture levels, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. NASA says the growth habitat is “mostly autonomous” and that it sends data from the sensors to scientists on the ground at Kennedy Space Center.

The PH-04 experiment is meant to help NASA in enabling long-duration deep-space exploration, for which adequate food supply is needed. Peppers are a good source of nutrients and could be used supplement astronauts’ packaged food, according to NASA. PH-04 will also monitor whether elements like texture and flavor change when the peppers are grown in space. NASA notes that the whole experiment may also be able to inform the processes for growing peppers via traditional outdoor agriculture as well as through indoor farming.

Another goal of the project is to create an indoor grow system that needs little input from the astronauts themselves, since they would not have the time to devote to growing plants that those of us on Earth would.

There’s a growing interest from multiple different countries to develop new novel concepts for feeding people in space. The PH-04 joins a growing list initiatives, including 3D-printed pizzas, tomatoes, and cell-based steaks, that have been researched or tested. 

Food Tech Show Live: Beyond Launches 3.0

It’s another weekly news round up with the Spoon team and this week’s special guest, Ron Shigeta.

The stories/topics we discuss this week include:

As always, you can find to the Food Tech Show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also just click play below or download the episode direct to your device.

The Food Tech Show: The Future of Space Food

Feeding humans hurtling through space isn’t easy.

While today’s astronauts get to eat high quality cuisine made on earth by some of the world’s best cooks, space travel in the future will require entirely new approaches that can grow enough food in space to produce sufficient calories and nutrients for astronaut crews on multiyear interplanetary missions.

Which is why there’s growing interest from the space agencies from the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries to find new and novel food system concepts that can keep astronauts and eventually even permanent space inhabitants fed.

To discuss the current and future state of space food, I recently got together with Anjan Contractor, the CEO of BeeHex, a company who created a 3D pizza printer for NASA. Also joining us was Dane Gobel, the operations administrator for the Deep Space Food Challenge, a new initiative by NASA and the Canadian space agency to spur innovation in developing new food systems for long-term space travel.

Some of the things we discuss on the podcast:

  • The challenges of creating food systems for space
  • How astronauts need a variety of food types and nutrients (including fresh food) to maintain long term physiological and psychological health
  • How new technologies like cultivated meat and proteins will play a pivotal role in space food in the future
  • The requirements and goals of the Deep Space Food Challenge

And much more!

You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen by clicking the player below.

The Mars Farm: a Not-Too-Distant Reality?

The following is a guest post written by Jonathan Hua of Scrum Ventures.

The disruptive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world’s agricultural systems have been broad and varied. And they follow several years of challenging production and market conditions such as disruptive weather events and poor planting conditions. Although the pandemic exposed weaknesses in current food production processes, the food industry had a banner year in 2020. 

In the first few weeks of 2021, we’ve also seen several major VCs, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and even major corporations take an interest in new ways to produce food. They’ve been launching climate and sustainability funds focused on areas such as regenerative agriculture, sustainable food, renewable energy, healthcare and innovations in new materials, infrastructure, and water. At the same time, the past few years have brought significant progress in space travel, space tourism and exploration missions to the moon and Mars. 

These advancements and focus areas have many putting two and two together and asking: is it possible to produce food in space? If, as expected, one day humanity exhausts its natural resources on Earth and has to consider surviving elsewhere, we’ll have to answer many questions including how to grow food on space stations, in spaceships, and even on a completely different planet. 

Six-figure salads?

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine space as the final farming frontier. There’s already a space garden, the Vegetable Production System, Veggie, on the International Space Station (ISS). Although Veggie is only about the size of a carry-on bag, it helps NASA study plant growth in microgravity and provides astronauts with nutrients. The problem? At roughly 16 pounds, Business Insider estimates Veggie costs $145,600 to $690,900 to transport onto the ISS—that’s an expensive salad. 

Veggie is just one example. The price of eating in space is prohibitively costly. This Columbia Tribune article estimates that it could cost as much as $18,000 just to send one 16-oz bottle of water weighing about one pound into space. Assuming some economies of scale and the unit economics of sending many months’ worth of food in a single trip, it’s probably safe to assume that it would cost anywhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per astronaut per meal.

Costs aren’t the only issue. There are also space-related constraints such as microgravity and lack of refrigeration and water. Food choices are limited as well. Most items have to be calorie-dense and have extraordinary shelf lives. 

The potential of vertical farming

Despite the challenges, finding a more sustainable food production system locally in space would be an endeavor with both immediate and long-term benefits. Vertical farming offers a viable solution to this food production problem. Controlled-environment agriculture promotes growth of veggies, herbs, and some fruits in limited spaces. In addition, vertical farms are optimized for year-round production and are less susceptible to extreme environmental conditions. 

Next, because vertical farms are closed systems, water supplies can be filtered and recycled to maximize efficiency. Sensors and software within the vertical farms can also regulate water usage. And, AI can optimize water usage to prevent over or underwatering. Finally, because vertical farms are highly automated, there is the potential for high productivity. 

This all sounds too good to be true, so what’s the catch? As with many things space-related, vertical farms are cost-intensive and limited in scope. Unless progress is made on both fronts, it will be challenging to even start to consider building them at any kind of scale in space. The long-term decline in cost of technology, as well as improved yields, will drive the success of a vertical farming operation in any location. If we can successfully pull this off, vertical farms will provide additional benefits that are unrelated to food consumption. For instance, plants produce oxygen that we will need to breathe in extraterrestrial climates. 

Drilling down: vertical farming by the numbers

If we’re going to start farming in space, we’ll need to understand the numbers in depth. Here’s what we’re seeing from some of our latest research. 

  • Facility costs: Building a vertical farm could cost upwards of $40M for each facility. According to this AgFunder article, AeroFarms’ facilities cover 70,000 square feet of space and will be able to grow 2 million pounds of greens annually. Vertical farms built in shipping containers cost quite a bit less. Usually, containers cost somewhere in the ballpark of $75,000 to $100,000, but are much smaller and will produce less food, so multiple containers would be required to scale up this kind of vertical farming system that could quickly increase costs. Location of real estate will also affect these costs.
  • Labor costs: Larger-scale vertical farms employ anywhere between 25-50 employees for each facility. Assuming most of these employees are being paid somewhere between $40,000 to $50,000 per year, that’s $1M to $1.25M in additional costs for labor to maintain these farms. The number of employees would need to be scaled down quite a bit in space, but the salaries would probably be higher as well.
  • Resource costs: The cost of water can be justified by recycling the water that isn’t used for the crops or lost via evaporation, but energy costs are currently one of the highest expenditures for vertical farms. Lots of LED lights are required to grow food in a vertical farm. Some estimates put it at around 3,500 kWh of energy a year to produce just 1 square meter of lettuce. 
  • Last-mile costs: Depending on size of loads, locations, and other factors, transportation and delivery costs can be quite significant. In space, vehicles would be in limited supply, and would need to be modified to handle different gravity effects and refrigeration, not to mention likely very high electricity or fuel costs to run. This cost could be quite difficult to justify.
  • Limited variety: Vertical farms are optimized for growing microgreens, herbs and a few types of fruits.

How to Make Vertical Farming More Feasible and Cost-Effective

Here are some of the strategies we need to consider to make vertical farming in space feasible.

  • Make real estate space available: We’ll need to make real estate space more readily available or subsidize prices for larger-scale vertical farm development.
  • Develop more tax incentives for vertical farming companies: Tax incentives will encourage companies to build, and decrease risks for investors who want to support the space. Right now, it’s primarily huge funds like SoftBank’s Vision Fund that have the capital and risk appetite to support the vertical farming space. Much more investment is required to bring vertical farming to a more commercial scale and to encourage other entrepreneurs to develop the complementary technologies needed to make it more cost-effective long-term.
  • Innovate LED technologies: Lighting accounts for the most significant energy use in a vertical farming system. It also has significant impacts on crop yield and time to maturity. Like the computer chip industry, innovations in LED technology will need to focus on stronger outputs in smaller and more energy-efficient form factors. Lights that can customize intensity for each plant and improvements in energy efficiency will be necessary.
  • Adopt renewable energy sources: Vertical farms should use more renewable energy sources like wind to help decrease energy unit cost, if the option is available on another planet. If there’s a way to harvest the sun’s energy more effectively on Mars, that would help as well. If sun exposure is weak on Mars, figuring out how to concentrate the sun’s rays and transmit them to use as energy on a vertical farm could be a worthy undertaking. 
  • Decrease the cost of hydroponics or aeroponics: There is no soil on the moon or on Mars, meaning that vertical farms in space will require the use of hydroponics or aeroponics, both of which can grow crops without soil by substituting soil with a mineral nutrient solution. Decreasing the cost of this growth medium, enhancing it to optimize yields and nutrition, or otherwise making it easier to produce at scale will help make vertical farming more feasible. Relying more on an aeroponic strategy that focuses on using nutrient-saturated water and mists rather than a more concentrated solution is likely the best strategy. 
  • Improve AI/IoT for greenhouses and vertical farms: Continuous monitoring and control of both environmental variables and crop growth are essential to the success of vertical farms. There are already many technologies for this, but more data and better algorithms will lead to better sensors and devices and more efficiencies that can cut down costs. Improvements in automation due to better AI/IoT can also decrease labor costs.
  • Choose crops wisely to begin with: At least initially, we’ll need to focus on crops with shorter production cycles and higher yields to cut down on resource requirements and use. Crops with year-round consumer demand should also be prioritized over more seasonal items to improve cost efficiencies.
  • Locate smartly: Make sure the vertical farms in space are built as close as possible to the densest population colonies to minimize transportation and logistics costs.
  • Build to withstand harsh environments: In space, there are other considerations that could make or break any attempts to implement vertical farms. For one, the facilities have to be able to withstand the harsh environmental conditions of the local terrain and climate. Next, it is unclear how differences in gravity, adverse environment and radiation exposure will affect crop yields, nutrition or even taste. Also, there’s the issue of food safety. New environments bring new microbes, bacteria and other organisms that could make food unsafe or toxic for human consumption. These are just a few of the many additional variables that will need to be considered. 

As we move toward developing vertical farms in space, the opportunities for budding founders and entrepreneurs to build successful space-focused food businesses are galactic. My hope is that we proceed with care and make sure our presence there does not defile the most pristine areas of the universe. We’ve already polluted it with space debris that we need to clean up. When it comes to space farming, humanity will need to work together to protect the environment that we will likely one day travel to and inhabit.

About Jonathan Hua

Jonathan is an investor with Scrum Ventures where he also helps run Scrum’s Food Tech Studio – Bites! a global program for startups of all stages who share a common vision of solving key challenges plaguing our food supply chain today, such as safety, waste reduction, and health.