Sustainable Food Production To Enable Long Term Human Space Exploration

In situ food production capability is a key achievement required to enable long term human space exploration. Making food production sustainable in space is not only a matter of increasing crop yields while reducing necessary consumables, power consumption and buffers, coping with the microgravity or planetary space environment. Safety, reliability, repeatability, maintainability, logistics, failures management, biocontamination control are the key enabling aspects for sustainable food production technologies. Starting from the experience gained in Thales Alenia Space Italia from multiple studies in the ASI, ESA and EC framework, as well as from internal research activities, the lessons learnt concerning these key enabling aspects were analyzed. A path toward sustainable food production in space emerged from this analysis, impacting the currently ongoing ESA PFPU projects. This path runs along with analog applications for a sustainable future on Earth.