“What’s for dinner?” is a common refrain in any household. Out in the vastness of space, it takes on a new potency.
Once humans leave Earth, finding food gets tricky. Without oxygen or gravity, storage becomes difficult. Without soil or sunlight, farming is off the cards.
Yet there are ways of adapting. Using living microbes and bioreactors, industry is already biomanufacturing proteins-to-order with just a fraction of the resources we need for livestock.
These low-input, often circular systems are sustainable ways to make food here on earth.
One day, they could help us settle in the furthest reaches of the solar system.
This is the new field of space biomanufacturing.
Gastronomy for astronomy
Last week, NASA’s Artemis II mission saw humans travel further into space than they ever have. Reaching 252,756 miles from Earth, the flight tested the limits of manned space travel.
On short-haul space flights like this, crew don’t have the luxury of re-supply. Nor do they have onboard equipment for producing their own food. Instead, Artemis members ate pre-planned rations designed to last the flight.
Ready-to-eat, rehydratable meals are standard fare for astronauts. But crafts have little storage capacity. So what would humans eat if they ever travelled further into the unknown? Or settled more permanently in space?
Companies and governments are investing in extra-terrestrial food production as space colonisation ambitions grow.
Growing food without the soil, gravity, or oxygen means going back to basics: Protein, fats, and carbs – the foundations of everything animals eat – can all be grown in test tubes and vats.
A plethora of startups already offer foodtech that can make these nutritional elements without the acreage and energy costs of conventional farming.
EU trials space pee protein
Next year, the European Space Agency and its private sector partners are set to trial food manufacturing tech on the International Space Station, a base situated on an -orbiting satellite.
The ISS is an ideal testing ground for space foodtech. It is the largest human spacecraft ever made. Manned by a continual crew from 15 nations, any defect in onboard food-tech systems should become obvious very quickly.
One partner in the EU project is Finnish startup Solar Foods, which is developing a special protein powder that can be manufactured onboard spacecraft. The powder, known as Solein, is made from an unusual feedstock: astronaut pee.
Urine powder may not be to everyone’s taste. But in space, where resources are limited, self-sufficiency depends on material efficiency. The ability to turn waste into resources can become a key survival tool.
In November 2025, the ESA launched the first study phase of HOBI-WAN, a pilot project to validate Solein production in space. In the second phase of the HOBI-Wan project, the team will manufacture, test, and launch the actual flight equipment.
The questions behind the project are whether Solar Food’s pee powder production system works under low gravity conditions and whether it can operate reliably in space.
The premise of Solar Food’s space food system is simple enough. In a bioreactor, a nutrient solution containing live bacteria is fed with gaseous hydrogen, oxygen, and CO₂.
Urea is added to the mix, serving as the nitrogen source that allows the bacteria to synthesise protein. The entire set-up has to be compact enough to fit on a mid-deck locker on a spacecraft.
Vitamins in microgravity
Frontier Space, a UK spinoff of Cranfield University, is another company involved in the EU space food testing project.
Frontier Space is at the leading edge of space biomanufacturing research that is working closely with researchers at Imperial College London, home to the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Proteins, along with researchers at Cranfield University.
Frontier uses yeast as tiny food producers, single-celled organisms that gobble basic raw materials and churn out almost any component of food – from proteins, fats, and carbs, to vitamins and antioxidants.
Whether yeast produces tofu, chicken nuggets, or vitamin C depends entirely on their genes, which producers can alter to adjust end products. Imperial researchers have focused on encouraging extra vitamin production, inserting a gene that instructs the yeast to do this.
This process of using bacteria to turn basic ingredients into specific substances is called precision fermentation – something that resembles beer brewing or cheese-making in its use of hungry microbes.
Yeast lift off
In April 2025, Frontier supplied a fully-automated miniature precision fermentation bioreactor for an explosive initial test run.
The kit, launched via a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Florida, orbited Earth for three hours before falling back to Earth.
The purpose of this mini-launch was to test whether a small, simplified version of Frontier’s tech worked out in space.
Although the kit has been proven here on , higher radiation and low gravity might interfere with the biological processes involved.
In June 2025, Frontier Space tech got launched into space again – this time on an orbital mission on the returnable spacecraft Phoenix-1.
On this second trial, all eyes will be on how the yeast themselves cope in space. Once the craft returns, microorganism samples on board will be analysed to see whether they could survive on a longer trip away from .
Farming food in space
The immediate goal of the European space food project is the relatively mundane problem of cost: the price of re-supplying orbiting astronauts with food currently stands at £20,000 per astronaut, per day.
Nonetheless, the ultimate goal behind the ESA’s project is to develop systems that could support longer missions: a permanent lunar presence, a trip to Mars, or even explorations further out.
Space agencies are actively working towards the prospect of setting up more permanent bases on the moon, perhaps resembling the international research bases now on the Antarctic. Space tech that provides humans with a renewable supply of fats, proteins, carbs, and nutrients anywhere they go is critical to achieving this goal.
The ESA’s space trials have broader implications beyond space food production alone. The data they are collecting today will reveal how biological experimental work more generally can be conducted on spacecraft.
The data on how biological systems behave off-planet will be valuable for setting up non-food production systems in space – bio-factories for pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and materials.
Self-sufficiency with rocks, plastic, and poo
Most of the food systems that have been tested in space are not entirely self-sufficient. They would still need occasional re-supply to replenish feedstocks. Needless to say, shuttling raw materials back and forth from the planets would be astronomically expensive.
Washington University researchers Hakyung Lee and colleagues are trying to develop bio-factories that could enable humans to explore deeper in space without relying on costly cargo from earth.
Their research is developing ways of biomanufacturing food using just the materials found on other planets. The team published a Nature article in 2025 reporting on three new feedstocks for space food production: martian and lunar rocks, post-consumer polyethylene terephthalate, and – surprisingly – fecal matter.
Their experiment deployed Rhodococcus jostii, a bacteria capable of breaking down PET plastics. The results were promising: with the help of human waste to boost cell growth, the bacteria was able to turn rock particles into lycopene – an antioxidant found in tomatoes. The bacteria worked even under microgravity conditions.
The experiment shows how microbes could help humans explore even the most barren solar worlds, eking valuable resources from landscapes that on first sight look inhospitable to human life.
Governments bet on space biomanufacturing
Governments around the world are eagerly investing in space food biomanufacturing. In fact, this support from public space agencies may eventually help the industry scale sustainable food production for the mass market.
In March 2026, the UK Space agency launched a coordinated funding and regulatory package for the emerging industry. The goal is to commercialise fully functioning factories in space, providing humans with a ready stream of essential chemicals and materials without regular re-supply.
The package is mainly targeted at pharma and med production – another area where resource constraints make human survival difficult in deep space.
But the project has implications for space food too. Some of the tech it is supporting is designed to make proteins for biomedicine, something likely to bolster our understanding of how to manufacture food proteins.
The British project has an important regulatory focus. Industry will be co-developing the rules that may one day govern the sector – a crucial endeavour that would give prospective startups more certainty around how to design their products.
In China, research in space life science has been a theme for several decades. However, this interest in developing space life-support systems accelerated in 2022 when the China Space Station was finally completed. Microorganisms have been launched into space under the ongoing China Manned Space project to study their behaviour under low-gravity conditions.
The foodtech being trialled for space has an important mission back home, too. With biomanufactured foods now getting more attention as a space technology, the industry as a whole may get the regulatory and investment boost it needs to scale production here on earth.
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