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Home » Diets that Work » CU-Boulder team to work on space-food project

Space food is poised to evolve from dehydrated fruits and vegetables strapped to serving trays with Velcro to fresh produce -- including strawberries, bell peppers and lettuce -- grown in an on-board garden partly tended by robots who can take commands from Earth.

And a team of University of Colorado students, with the help of faculty experts, has been selected by NASA to help develop the technology behind the next generation of cosmic cuisine for astronauts on long-term missions, such as the 80-million-mile trek to Mars.

"I'm hoping that space food in the future looks a lot more like Earth food," said Heather Hava, an aerospace engineering doctoral student working on the project. "It's like the local food movement -- but for space."

Part of the CU team's work will be to determine how the tasks should be divvied up between the robots and the on-board astronauts. Hava said, for example, that perhaps the robotics are tasked with daily watering, while the flight crews might enjoy picking their food.

Now, food that astronauts eat is similar to MREs -- Meals, Ready to Eat -- that people would take camping.

"It's OK for short periods of time," Hava said. "But for missions longer in duration, it's better for their well-being, psychological and physiological, to have fresh food and flexibility in their diets."

She said the team's work also has gardening applications for people who have limited mobility, including those who have physical disabilities or the elderly in nursing homes.

The CU project is among five university proposals picked to participate in the 2013 Exploration Habitat Academic Innovation Challenge, allowing students to get hands-on experience designing futuristic space systems that can be used in deep space exploration. "X-Hab" is led by NASA and the National Space Grant Foundation.

With the $40,000 grant, the CU team will spend the next year creating a "bioregenerative" food system that can grow, harvest and compost plants. Such a system is capable of purifying water and producing food for consumption.

Already, NASA has identified 10 pick-and-eat crops that could be grown on long-term space missions: lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, green onions, radishes, bell peppers, strawberries, herbs and cabbages. NASA has plans for hydroponic growth labs, a way to grow plants using mineral nutrient solutions in water and without soil.

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CU-Boulder team to work on space-food project

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Home » Diets that Work » CU-Boulder team to work on space-food project