image: Dr Rodrigo Ledesma Amaro and Dr Aqeel Shamsul
Credit: Imperial College London / Bezos Centre
Imperial scientists are looking ahead to when human space missions will take us to other planets in or beyond the Solar System.
Weighty supplies like food, water, and fuel add to the cost and scale of the flight, and feeding each astronaut is estimated to cost around £20,000 per day. One potential solution is to take microbes called yeasts onboard, which can be engineered to produce such supplies through precision fermentation.
Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro from Imperial's Department of Bioengineering and his collaborators at Cranfield University and companies Frontier Space and ATMOS Space Cargo have now launched a miniature laboratory into Earth orbit to find out whether such yeasts can produce food, pharmaceuticals, fuel and bioplastics in the microgravity of space.
This partnership successfully launched a fully automated miniature microbe laboratory aboard Europe's first commercial returnable spacecraft, Phoenix, via SpaceX on Monday 21 April at 20:48 ET (Tuesday 22 April at 01.48 BST).
Watch the launch (opens external site in a new window)
Dr Ledesma-Amaro brings the world-leading scientific and engineering expertise from Imperial to this industry partnership, building on his research at the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein and Microbial Food Hub at Imperial College London. He and colleagues aim to create environmentally friendly, nutritious and affordable non-animal foods on Earth.
He says: “We dream about a future where humanity heads off into the dark expanses of space. But carrying enough to feed ourselves on the journey and at our destination would be unimaginable in cost and weight. We’re excited that this project makes use of academic and industry expertise in physics, engineering, biotech and space science – converging on this challenge. If just a handful of cultivated cells could provide all our food, pharmaceuticals, fuels and bioplastics using freely available resources, that would bring the future closer.”
Miniature lab-in-a-box
The miniature lab developed in partnership with Imperial transported microbe specimens to space and will return them to Earth for comprehensive analysis, providing crucial data about microgravity, long-term storage and the effects of space transportation.
"This mission represents a major milestone in democratizing access to space research," said Aqeel Shamsul, CEO of Frontier Space. "Our SpaceLab Mark 1, 'lab-in-a-box' technology enables researchers to conduct sophisticated experiments in microgravity without the traditional barriers to space-based research. This project represents a significant opportunity to mature Frontier’s technology, providing bio-experimentation solutions for space environments with the future space infrastructure post International Space Station"
The lessons learned from this experiment will accelerate developments in space-based manufacturing, pharmaceutical research and sustainable food production for long-duration space missions.