In 2021, Nasa launched a Deep Space Food Challenge to discover new ways to create food in space with limited resources producing minimal waste, while also providing safe, nutritious and tasty food that can perform on a long-term deep space mission.

Solar Foods, based in Helsinki, is one of the eight companies that has reached the challenge’s final phase. Their remarkable concept: using space waste to create protein.

“We make food out of thin air, quite literally,” says Artuu Luukanen, Solar Foods’ senior vice president in Space and Defence. His company discovered an edible microbe in the Finnish countryside that grows by feeding on a mixture of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen. The result is a source of protein from bacteria. The protein can be blended with a range of flavours or textures to create various kinds of nutritious food, such as pasta, protein bars, alternative meats and even an egg replacement

“We started thinking about space food because in any space habitat, you have two key waste gases available: hydrogen and carbon dioxide,” Luukanen said. “So what we are talking about here is really not just a food manufacturing technology for space, but something that will be an integral part of the environmental control and life support system.”

Solar Foods’ protein can be turned into a paste or powder and blended with flour and more typical food ingredients to create protein enriched foods such as pasta, protein bars and even chocolate. Experiments are continuing to discover whether it can be mixed with oils and turned into something with a texture of a steak, using a 3D printer.

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One thing that seems likely is that the future of space food will include fungi. Three of the six finalists in the Nasa Deep Space Food Challenge are working on ideas around fungi, including Mycorena of Gothenburg, Sweden, which has developed a system that uses a combination of microalgae and fungi to produce a mycoprotein (a type of protein that comes from a fungus, often used in alternative meat products).