How we can mine asteroids for space food
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To deeply explore the solar system, it will be necessary to become less reliant on the resupply tether to Earth. An approach explored in this study is to convert hydrocarbons in asteroids to human edible food. After comparing the experimental pyrolysis breakdown products, which were able to be converted to biomass using a consortia, it was hypothesized that equivalent chemicals found on asteroids could also be converted to biomass with the same nutritional content as the pyrolyzed products. This study is a mathematical exercise that explores the potential food yield that could be produced from these methodologies. This study uses the abundance of aliphatic hydrocarbons in the Murchison meteorite (>35 ppm) as a baseline for the calculations, representing the minimum amount of organic matter that could theoretically be attributed to biomass production. Calculations for the total carbon in solvent-insoluble organic matter (IOM) represent the maximum amount of organic matter that could theoretically be attributed to food production. These two values will provide a range of realistic yields to determine how much food could theoretically be extractable from an asteroid. The results of this study found that if only the aliphatic hydrocarbons can be converted into biomass (minimum scenario) the resulting mass of edible biomass extractable from asteroid Bennu ranges from 5.070 × 107 g to 2.390 × 108 g. If the biomass extraction process, however, is more efficient, and all IOM is converted into edible biomass (maximum scenario), then the mass of edible biomass extractable from asteroid Bennu ranges from 1.391 × 109 g to 6.556 × 109 g. This would provide between 5.762 × 108 and 1.581 × 1010 calories that is enough to support between 600 and 17 000 astronaut life years. The asteroid mass needed to support one astronaut for one year is between 160 000 metric tons and 5000 metric tons. Based on these results, this approach of using carbon in asteroids to provide a distributed food source for humans appears promising, but there are substantial areas of future work.
Space food is an area of intense research effort (Weiss, Reference Weiss 1972; Mizuno and Weiss, Reference Mizuno, Weiss and Horton 1974; Calvin and Gazenko, Reference Calvin and Gazenko 1975; Grover et al., Reference Grover, Bhasin, Dhingra, Nandi, Hansda, Sharma, Paul, Idrishi, Tripathi and Agarwal 2022; Pandith et al., Reference Pandith, Neekhra, Ahmad and Sheikh 2022). The ability to create human-edible food in space is a key achievement that can foster economic exploitation of the asteroid belt (Gertsch, Reference Gertsch, McKay, McKay and Duke 1992; Sommariva, Reference Sommariva 2015; Ehresmann and Herdrich, Reference Ehresmann and Herdrich 2017; Calla et al., Reference Calla, Fries and Welch 2018) as well as being a requirement for long-term human space exploration (Fritsche et al., Reference Fritsche, Romeyn and Massa 2018; James, Reference James 2018). Current technologies that can supply food to space travellers are dependent on consumables from resupply missions from Earth (e.g., dried (Venir et al., Reference Venir, Del Torre, Stecchini, Maltini and Di Nardo 2007; Park et al., Reference Park, Song, Han, Kim, Yoon, Choi, Byun, Sohn and Lee 2009), freeze dried (Obrist et al., Reference Obrist, Tu, Yao and Velasco 2019), irradiated food (Pometto and Bourland, Reference Pometto and Bourland 2003) or frozen food (Geiges, Reference Geiges 1996)). These systems are completely dependent on Earth resupply and thus far from optimized for energy or economics. For example, food demands for a Mars mission for six astronauts will weigh around 12 tons without packaging (Park et al., Reference Park, Song, Kim, Choi, Sung, Han and Lee 2012). To explore further than Mars would entail massive quantities and masses of food. Even with SpaceX's relatively low cost of $2720 per kilogram to lift into space (Cobb, Reference Cobb 2019), a less costly and more sustainable method is preferred. Recycling of air, water and waste will likely also be essential, but such systems are used in the context where waste mitigation includes the jettison or storage of these products, which ultimately leads to the need for resupply missions (Boscheri et al., Reference Boscheri, Saverino and Lobascio 2021). To deeply explore the solar system, it will be necessary to become less reliant on the resupply tether to Earth (Sercel et al., Reference Sercel, Peterson, Britt, Dreyer, Jedicke, Love, Walton and Abreu 2018).
