If you like food and dream of contributing to the projects of NASA, your time has come. THE space agency of the United States, in partnership with its Canadian counterpart, launched a new edition of the competition Deep Space Food Challenge. The competition aims to improve the food of astronauts, expanding the menu of space missions. THE NASA has a total prize pool of 1 million dollars for participating teams from the United States, competitors from other countries have gained recognition.
Eating, eating is the best way to populate space
With plans to return and colonize the Moon, in addition to several other space missions, the NASA and the CSA (Canadian Space Agency, not the Alagoas team) launched the contest to develop technologies for space food. THE Deep Space Food Challenge it’s not just about creating a nutritious recipe for astronauts: the hole is way down in the ambitious plans.
Storing freeze-dried food (a process in which food is dehydrated to increase its conservation) is “easy”. The business complicates when there is no more space to store and no way to send more food in a simple way. How to send a team and their food to a base on the Moon? Remember: you have the one-way trip, the three years that NASA wants to keep the mission and the return trip. The cost of sending a ship with food regularly isn’t cheap (but the NASA make these trips.
At the Deep Space Food Challenge, submitted projects will need to develop food production technologies to sustain a crew of four for three years. In the projects, the teams will have to consider all the processes of the production chain: storage, preparation, delivery to the crew and of course, ways to produce food in the long and distant missions. Among the winning projects in the first stage, some propose the cultivation of plants and laboratory meat.
Prize money will only be given to participating teams from the United States and Canada. Teams from other countries can participate, but with no cash prize to fund the project. The award in these cases will serve as a portfolio, use in Lattes and to put on LinkedIn… Which let’s be honest, it’s already a good move. In the first award, a partner foundation of NASA funded two international projects that were among the winners.
Interested? Join your team and sign up (and remember you saw it here). Registration runs until February 28.
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Source: NASA