According to current job offers, the European Space Agency (ESA) is increasing their activities in the CellAg Space domain.
Based on the description, there is a focus on “human exploration missions beyond Low-Earth Orbit which results in unprecedented constraints on the supply and re-supply of food to meet the energy requirements of the crew. For very long missions (with no opportunity to pre-deploy food depots or re-supply from Earth), it may be impractical or even impossible to launch and store all the food required with the crew, alternative approaches will be required.”
Furthermore, it is stated that “as missions get longer, there may be a “trade-off” point at which it may be optimal (from a mass/volume/resource perspective) to switch from launching food to a combination of launching food and in-flight production.”
Of particular interest are in-flight bioreactor and solutions for 3D bioprinting of meat in microgravity.
Very interesting is that the research also includes “multi-use opportunities for bioreactors“, in order to grow human cells, which may lead to a fusion of nutrition and medical purposes of CellAg for space applications.
