This week, NASA announced $1 million in total prize money for innovations as part of Phase 2 of its Deep Space Food Challenge. The contest, which announced Phase 1 winners last October, is a NASA Centennial challenge that aims to foster innovation around sustainable food production technologies or systems that require minimal resources and produce minimal waste.
The goal, according to NASA, is to develop food systems that can feed a team of four astronauts on a long-haul space mission of up to three years. They also make it clear they hope this challenge will result in food innovation that can help feed more people on earth.
“Feeding astronauts over long periods within the constraints of space travel will require innovative solutions,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “Pushing the boundaries of food technology will keep future explorers healthy and could even help feed people here at home.”
While judges in Phase 1 focused on how innovative the proposed systems were, contestants didn’t actually have to build anything. That all changes in Phase 2. According to the announcement, Phase 2 entrants are expected to take their ideas to the next step and build working prototypes. From the announcement: “…the competition calls on teams to design, build, and demonstrate prototypes of food production technologies that provide tangible nutritional products – or food.”
For Phase 1, NASA announced 28 winners who had developed ideas for making food using technologies ranging from 3D printing and cell-cultured meat production to vertical farming. One of the winners – Space Cow – even developed a system concept that converts CO2 and waste streams straight into food, with the help of food-grade micro-organisms and 3D printing.
All of the winners from Phase 1 automatically meet the submission requirements for Phase 2 and have been invited to participate. In addition, the challenge is also opening the door to new entrants for Phase 2, for which NASA is taking registrations for entrance until February 28th. The Canadian Space Agency is running a parallel contest as part of the Deep Space Food Challenge (each space agency is running a separate contest with separate prize pools).
NASA’s Phase 2 prize purse is divided in the following ways: $20k each will be awarded to the 10 top scoring teams, and $150 thousand will be awarded to the top 5 scoring teams, each of whom will be invited to compete in Phase 3.
While NASA hasn’t detailed what Phase 3 will entail, the Canadian Space Agency has described their Phase 3 as “Full System Demonstration” where finalists “will grow and scale up their solutions in Canada over a 12 to 18-month period starting in Fall 2022.” I assume – if and when NASA launches Phase 3 – their final leg will focus on a similar system scale up as its primary criteria.