Astronauts could eat asteroids for food? Scientists propose radical space meal

Researchers have presented a bizarre idea – asteroids as a food source for future missions.

Of course, space travelers wouldn’t be eating the space rocks directly. Rather a chemical and physical process would extract edible material from them.

Currently, the International Space Station astronauts rely on resupply missions from Earth. However, this would not be feasible for long-duration flights to deeper solar system locations.

Researchers from Western University’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration have proposed using organic matter from asteroids to produce food for astronauts on long-duration space missions.

By breaking down organic compounds found in asteroids, astronauts might be able to create edible biomass using microbes

“To deeply explore the solar system, it will be necessary to become less reliant on the resupply tether to Earth. An approach explored in this study is to convert hydrocarbons in asteroids to human edible food,” the study paper stated.

The process of making asteroid food

Asteroids are valuable celestial bodies, rich in diverse elements that make them attractive targets for space exploration and scientific research.

The researchers suggest breaking down organic compounds in asteroids using a high-heat process called pyrolysis.

This reaction will lead to the production of hydrocarbons. Subsequently, the hydrocarbons could serve as a nutrient source for microbial organisms, which would then generate biomass possessing nutritional value for human consumption.

The study focused on carbonaceous chondrite asteroids like Bennu, which contain significant amounts of organic matter as well as 10.5% water. Bennu is a time capsule, which could provide insight into the formative years of the solar system. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned precious samples from the asteroid Bennu to Earth on September 24, 2023.

In this theoretical study, the Murchison meteorite was used as a reference point to establish a lower limit for the amount of organic matter that could potentially be converted into food from asteroids. This helps provide a realistic range of potential yields.

Calculations show that asteroids like Bennu could potentially produce between 50 and 6,550 metric tons of edible biomass. Surprisingly, this could provide enough food to sustain one astronaut for around 600 years.

Moreover, an estimated 5,500 to 175,000 tons of asteroid material would be needed to provide one astronaut with food for a year.

“The mass of edible biomass extractable from asteroid Bennu ranges from 1.391 × 109 g to 6.556 × 109 g. This would provide between 5.762 × 108 and 1.581 × 1010 calories that is enough to support between 600 and 17 000 astronaut life years,” the researchers wrote in the study paper.

The sci-fi-like idea needs lot of research

Future astronauts won’t be able to rely solely on freeze-dried food or onboard gardens for their nutritional needs during long-duration space missions.

For this reason, mining asteroids could potentially transform long-duration space travel by enabling astronauts to produce their own food instead of relying on supplies from Earth.

While the results are promising, further research is needed to determine the feasibility and efficiency of this approach.

“Based on these results, this approach of using carbon in asteroids to provide a distributed food source for humans appears promising, but there are substantial areas of future work,” the study paper noted.

The findings were published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.