AstroBite

About the team

We are a team of food scientists and engineers with a passion for developing innovative food products. At the core of our mission is the belief that everyone deserves access to safe and nutritious food. This principle extends to astronauts, who face extraordinary conditions in an isolated environment. We are committed to ensure astronauts experience the joy of culinary diversity in nutritious food, akin to life on Earth.

Our vision

Astronauts face significant challenges with meal palatability due to limited menu variety. Space food must meet stringent nutritional requirements to maintain health in outer space while also having an extended shelf life to support long missions, as resupplying can take up to a year. To address these challenges, we aim to revolutionize space nutrition by introducing powdered ingredients as the base for 3D-printed meals. This technology allows astronauts to "print" fresh, customized meals on-demand, offering an interactive and engaging dining experience. Coupled with precision radiation technology, it ensures the meals are safe, nutrient-dense, and diverse, replicating the comfort of home-cooked dishes. Our vision is to enhance both the physical health and emotional well-being of astronauts, leveraging advanced 3D food printing with precision radiation technology to create a wide variety of culinary dishes in space. We hope we can make long-duration space missions more sustainable and enjoyable through innovative culinary solutions.

Our solution

We propose a single cohesive food production system that combines advanced 3D printing technology with precision irradiation. Our approach is using a combination of radiation capture and energy conversion technologies to power our 3D printing machine. For our 3D printing, we use materials of steel, which creates high pressure that pushes materials so it can tackle the challenge of microgravity. For radiation capture, we plan to use thermoelectric or photovoltaic-like materials that can directly convert high-energy radiation into electrical energy, and connect to our 3D printing. 3D printing is easy to fine-tune; other than that, it is an opportunity to benefit what space already provides, such as radiation. Our suggestions of combining 3D printing and irradiation shed light on our problem since space has cosmic radiation and high energy radiation. Using space radiation to directly power adaptive 3D printing will help in post-processing to make the food more palatable and safe. This system overall can customize nutritional profiles, adapt to individual astronaut needs, ensure food safety through controlled irradiation, generate varied, appealing food textures and forms compared to rehydrated food, and minimize waste and storage requirements.