Cultured meat for long-term space missions

To provide astronauts with nutritious food for long-term space missions it will become more and more important to be able to culture food in space. For protein sources, such as meat, cellular agriculture may provide the solution to producing food in situ without the need of animals. Muscle stem cells are painlessly extracted from an animal, then inserted into a bioreactor that provides the required biochemical and mechanical stimuli for the cells to proliferate. The cells then differentiate to form small muscle fibres, which are then ‘assembled’ to form, for example, a meat burger. Technologies developed for space applications in turn can then be used on Earth to help reduce the impact on our planet.

ESA is seeking proposals to investigate the application of cellular agriculture as a novel technique to produce food, in particular cultured meat, during future long-term space missions.