Categories: News

Farming startups are betting on a new market: Mars.

NASA is working hard to bolster its culinary reputation beyond Tang pouches and desiccated ice cream, Modern Farmer reports. Hatch green chiles have already made their way to space. Now, NASA’s recently launched Deep Space Food Challenge is boasting a million-dollar prize for the team that can develop the most viable food technology to help fill meal gaps during three- to four-year space missions. (Any resulting technologies could also improve food access on Earth, the contest website assures us.) Winning designs from the contest’s first phase include a fancy technology similar to 3-D printing and a production system that can grow algae, fungi, and plants. Elsewhere, startups are betting on extraterrestrial frontiers, too: Israel-based Aleph Farms is looking at the impact of zero-gravity environments on cell-cultured meat, and Orbital Farms is developing closed-loop farming systems that can work anywhere. Orbital founder Scot Bryson told the magazine he expects there’ll be a market for the product “fifteen, twenty years from now, when we have large numbers of people living … on Mars.” —H. Claire Brown

Related Post
The Counter
Share
Published by
The Counter

Recent Posts

Grist acquires The Counter and launches food and agriculture vertical

Grist, an award-winning, nonprofit media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices,…

6 months ago

Is California giving its methane digesters too much credit?

Every year, California dairy farms emit hundreds of thousands of tons of the potent greenhouse…

2 years ago

Your car is killing coho salmon

Highway 7 runs north-south through western Washington, carving its way through a landscape sparsely dotted…

2 years ago

The pandemic has transformed America’s dining landscape into an oligopoly dominated by chains 

One of the greatest pleasures I had as a child growing up in the Chicago…

2 years ago

California is moving toward food assistance for all populations—including undocumented immigrants

Undocumented immigrants experience food insecurity at much higher rates than other populations, yet they are…

2 years ago

Babka, borscht … and pumpkin spice? Two writers talk about Jewish identity through contemporary cookbooks.

Writer Charlotte Druckman and editor Rebecca Flint Marx are both Jewish journalists living in New…

3 years ago