There are no grocery stores on Mars, and resupply from Earth is many months away. As much food as future astronauts to the red planet may pack for the trip, inevitably, they'll have to create some food of their own in an inhospitable environment. Whether they go the fanciful farm-to-table route with locally sourced potatoes, like Matt Damon's character did in the 2015 film The Martian, remains to be seen. But they may have an even more science-forward option.
Creating protein out of thin air.
That's the goal of a partnership between the European Space Agency and a company called Solar Foods, formed out of a scientific research program less than a decade ago, which opened its first large-scale production facility in 2024.
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The project, dubbed HOBI-WAN (for "hydrogen oxidizing bacteria in weightlessness as a source of nutrition") in a nod to the Star Wars movies, is an outer space version of a process that Solar Foods has been working on already here on Earth. That effort involves growing bacteria in a vat with water, air and nutrients, and then drying out the bacteria, turning them into a protein powder called Solein for human consumption.
A key next step will be to test Solein production on the International Space Station.
"Providing a sustainable and nutritious food supply which meets the energy requirements of the crew is one of the biggest challenges in human spaceflight exploration beyond low Earth orbit," ESA said in a blog post. "In cases where pre-deployed food depots or continuous resupply missions from Earth are impractical, resource-heavy, or technically unfeasible, cost-effective alternatives are required."
Solein starts wet and is dried through a process that includes centrifugal force and spray drying. Solar Foods
Making protein powder from air
The central goal of the HOBI-WAN project is to determine whether production of the protein-rich powder can take place in microgravity conditions.
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