Space Travel and Synthetic Biology

of allergies. Actually, that's not a bad idea. I was just going to kid about that, but that's actually a pretty interesting topic. We'll put it on the list. Yeah, and we'll make sure that she's, you know, got plenty of any histamines in her system before we record that one, but not so many that she's asleep, because there's no point really. But today we wanted to talk about something that is a pretty cool topic, the idea of one

of the big challenges in space travel. You knew it was going to come to space travel because here and Forward Thinking, space travel is one of those things we're absolutely obsessed with, you know, so, But Joe, why don't you pay me a picture with your words and tell me what you think of as some of the biggest challenges in space travel. Well, let's see. First of all, i'd have to say space pirates. That's a big one, geck. And I'd have to say the fact that space smells

really bad. In space, no one can smell you. Third, though, I'd say there are tremendous costs to getting the stuff we need in space up there. Yeah, you might be wondering, like, um, why don't we have all of those Star Trek space stations going all around the Earth and colonies on the Moon and Mars. And there are several explanations, but one of the most basic is just it's really expensive. Yeah, it costs huge amounts of money to have a space launch.

And uh, you know we've talked about in the past before. We've given kind of the round number, the one that everybody quotes, which is ten dollars per pound. Right now, it's more expensive than that really good cut of meat that you can find at your grosser's. Um. Yeah, ten thousand dollars a pound is a huge amount of money. But the unicorn meat, I don't know, say, think geeks sells unicorn meat for much less than that, but uh, it comes in a can like spam, but ten thousand

dollars per pound. So we we thought for a moment, we thought, well, why we should look into this, because we have quoted this figure many many times ourselves. Right, well, it's not necessarily wrong, but it's not a specific number either. It's sort of a rough historical estimate, right, and and beyond that, it's it's very vague because this is ten thousand dollars to get stuff into space. But we're into space, right,

that's a good question. So basically, if you look back in the history of us taking stuff from the surface of the Earth up to orbit or beyond it, it's been about ten tho dollars per pound on average, if you if you average together the stuff that costs more and the stuff that costs less. Well, what influences those. One of those is the kind of rocket we use, and we can talk about that in a second. But of course another one is simply where you're taking this stuff.

So going to a low Earth orbit destination like the International Space Station is going to be cheaper than say, taking a satellite way out to geo stationary orbit where it stays at the same line of longitude and revolves

around the Earth in synchronization. Right. And also it would matter about whether or not the spacecraft you're sending up is expected to come back, because then you know you need to believe it has crew that's gonna be yeah, because yeah, you want them eventually to come back, and so you need to factor in the amount of field that's going to be necessary to make the return trip.

And that's just talking about orbit. Of course. Now once you're talking about going to another planet or to a moon, then you add in a whole other lay of complexity because then you're talking about landing vehicles and hopefully if it's a crude mission you're talking about relaunching off of this, I mean adding more and more layers of complexity and more and more support requirements. Right. We can talk about the support mass that's required on these missions in a bit,

But the other thing is what rocket you're using. So on on the low end, so far, we have something like SpaceX's Falcon nine, right, And I should add that the figures I've seen, we're actually priced per kilogram, so per unit of mass as opposed to per unit of weight, and then I did the conversion to UH cost per pound that way, Well, what is it, Jonathan, give us

the numbers. So for the Falcon nine the cost per pound and and it was about a thousand, eight hundred sixty seven dollars and seventy three cents, so significantly less than ten thousand dollars per pound, but still well above uh, you know what most of us be able to pay to send a pound of stuff up into space. And there's also the Atlas five, which would be closer to the higher end. That's closer to about six thousand dollars

per pound. But all of this is rough estimation, and it's mostly estimated based on the cost of a launch compared to the cargo capacity of you know whatever device, like how much mask can a rocket propel up into orbit? So it's it's taking all that into consideration. It's almost like looking at the pound for pound best fighter. You know, you have to take all this stuff, and there are a lot of factors that may not be entering into

this really rough estimation that could wildly change that amount, right. Well, one of the things that could wildly change it, of course, is creating much cheaper, newer versions in the future, which people like Elon Musk have been predicting is going to happen for a while now. The he said, you know, Musk says, the private spaceflight industry is going to be able to get prices much cheaper. The first major milestone is going to be a launch cost of a thousand

dollars per pound. And Musk predicted in an interview with NPR in two thousand eleven that the Falcon Heavy, which is the booster rocket that's the successor to the Falcon nine. They're working on it now. The Falcon Heavy is like the Falcon nine, Like I think it's something like three Falcon nine's grouped together. It's it's ridiculous. Yeah, it's it's enormous. I know, it's big. I mean, we'll see if that achieves a thousand dollars per pound. He predicted that a

couple of years ago, but we don't know yet. It's scheduled for launch in so I guess we'll find out. And of course, in the same NPR interview, must acknowledge that even a thousand dollars per pound is still too expensive. I mean, that's so expensive. What we really need to do is get things under a hundred dollars per pound. Yeah, and even then we still have some limitations to take into right, because no matter how cheap you get it in terms of the dollar or as you spend right,

you still have physical limitations. Exactly, you have a physical limitation of how much cargo of particular rocket can boost into orbit. And depending upon what your mission is, you may not be able to physically take with you using a single rocket at any rate the materials you need

to carry out your mission. Let's say that your mission is to go to Mars and spend some time there and come back now, because the way the Martian orbit and the Earth orbit are, there's really a very limited window of when you want to launch to Mars in order to spend the least amount of fuel to get there. And then once you're at Mars, you have to wait for a long time for that situation to come back round for you to be able to get back to

Earth under the same conditions. Otherwise you have to have even more fuel because the distance between Earth and Mars will be greater, right, because they don't orbit the son at the same rate. Yeah, I mean, there's no point at in launching at a time when you're not going to be able to make the shortest route to Earth, right, Yeah, you wouldn't want to launch off of ours and say, well,

here's the problem. By the time we get to Earth, we it will effectively be on the other side of the Sun from where we are now, So we're going to need five times the amount of fuel we would need or more. Really, I was just throwing five times in there out of random, right. So they are basically mass constraints on top of the dollar constraints. And one of those is that in the paper we're going to talk about in this episode points this out, so you'll

hear about that in a second. But they say for every unit mass of payload launched into space, the mission as a whole requires nine nine units of support. So for every pound of payload the stuff you're taking, we require nine pounds of food, water, oxygen, fuel. Yeah, and it gets even more complicated, right because when you're talking about fuel, like, you can't just add fuel into the mixture and say, oh, now, adding fuel increases your weight,

so you need to add more fuel. You have to find the right balance point where the fuel you have is going to be sufficient to get that weight out into space. It's kind of like, why doesn't my car have a gallon gas tank? Yeah? Yeah, because by that time that your car would be so heavy as to not be able to move. Um, I mean yeah, you never need to refill it because it would never consume enough fuel. You never get anywhere your battery would diverse.

But then we look at things like permanent colonies, which have their own issues. Right, even if you if you figured out the amounts you need to get people to where they're going. Let's say you know you're going to establish a Martian colony. Obviously you can't expect to have everything you ever will ever need on board that same rocket. It's just not you know that spacecraft is not going to have the cargo capacity necessary to carry a lifetime

supply of everything. Unless you're big cargo requirements are effectively infinity. Then you can't do that, right if you if you're going to be a cynical, cold hearted person and say, well, technically there is lifetime supply on there, because after the supply runs out, so well, the lifetime that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about being able to

perpetuate a colony. Be able to keep it going. So clearly you can't just expect to be able to carry everything with you, nor in the case of something like Mars, can you expect to get regular resupplies from Earth. Because it takes months for a ship to get from Earth to Mars, and that's under ideal conditions. That's when we're talking about Earth and Mars being lined up so that you are spending the least amount of effort to get

out there. Then even then you're you're talking about uh, like an eight month trip and then more than a year before it comes round again. So that's not really a viable option either to say like, oh, we'll just send uh supplies from Earth to Mars indefinitely in order to keep them going. So that's one of the reasons why we talked about the big challenges that the Mars one Colony faces if they want to really be successful. So here's where we get to the point of the episode.

What if we could create a way where a low mass initial investment in a space mission's cargo could create a self replenishing system for the things we need in order to colonize other planets or survive in a long space journey, right, So, in other words, what if we could bring something with us that could continue to manufacture the basic things we're going to need, either on the journey there or if it's a uh, if it's a mission like the one we mentioned about Mars, where you

land on the planet, you are actually able to make the stuff that you need in order for that mission to be a success and for everyone to survive and to get back to Earth safely. Yeah, and this is where synthetic biology comes in. Yeah, this is really an interesting idea. Synthetic biology is defined as the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the redesign of existing natural biological systems for useful purposes. So

it's sort of like engineering with life. Yeah, it's saying, look at these various organisms, usually micro organisms in the case of synthetic biology. Look at these micro organisms that have remarkable capabilities and qualities and can survive in various environments and produce things that, with a little tinkering can

come become useful stuff for us. What if part of our payload in that initial launch happens to be some of these micro organisms that we put to use, especially once we get to a place like Mars and can we realistically create you know, the basic things we're gonna need using those microorganisms converting the stuff that's already there. Yeah, the idea here is going to space and taking along

a factory that fits in a Petrie dish. Yeah. But space, of course, we should say at the outset is not the only place that synthetic biology is going to be a No, there's actually an m i T Synthetic Biology working group. Have you actually looked at this website the websites, it's it's kind of cute. It's a website that includes

areas of interest for the field. So the at m I T. You have a working group that meets in brainstorms about potential uses for synthetic biology and they dream big and my favorite like they have areas like yeah we expect well yeah, I mean you know why dreams small, aim for the stars. If you don't make it, you're still going to come up with something amazing with your bacteria. Yeah, So that they're applications include things like fabrication, computation and

signal processing, materials processing, energy management, mechanics, and replication. But it also creates creates some interesting more science fiction e like applications that would have fit in with our our x men uh episodes in a way, like the idea of creating humans that can photos synthesize, so that humans would be able to get some energy through a photosynthetic chemical process similar to what you find in plants. Uh.

This was not It wasn't gone into detail. It was like literally it was listed on the website, and I thought, I want to read that paper to see if you're actually paying attention. Maybe that could very well be the

point of it. But the idea is that this biology would allow us to harness these processes that organisms carry out, or we could change the organisms to do something that we specifically need them to do, either genetically or through selective breeding or whatever, um, and then use those to

our advantage. So really simple example that I was thinking of is a genetic alteration to a silkworm so that the silk produced is stronger and more resilient, so that you could use that silk to then make other stuff that would be useful for you. That's just a like

an example polled elephant air. Yeah, I feel like you've talked about some other examples of this kind of thing on the show before, like when we talked about microbial computing and about creating microbial machines that would move tiny components in machines that like you can get microbes to spin a tiny gear. Uh. And if you would be changing the nature of these microbial life forms in order to do useful work for you, that seems like that

would fit under synthetic biology, right. Yeah, in this case, the work we're mostly talking about tends to be chemical in nature as opposed to mechanical. Well, obviously that that's probably easier to do, I guess, I imagine. So I mean just getting those microorganisms to be consistent with hitting those punch cards in and out whenever they're checking in for the beginning of the day and they're checking out at the end of the day, that alone is a nightmare.

They're also always just walking in front of the robot. They get beaten down every time. Yeah. So let's talk about this paper you found that really became the the lynch pen for all of the research that we've done for this topic. It's actually an incredible paper and it's and it's completely available to read. You can read the

full text for free. So so it was just last week, I think it was in It was a group of authors associated with UC Berkeley and with NASA two and to each and they published a paper called Towards Synthetic Biological Approaches to Resource Utilization on Space Missions, and this was in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, and of course interface here sort of refers to the interface

between different natural and applied sciences. And so the authors, which were Menezi's cumbers, Hogan and Arkin, claimed that if you're going to explore or colonize the Moon or Mars, it makes good sense to develop systems of biological production to use live organisms to transform things like available volatiles and waste products into usable resources to keep the crew members alive and able to do their work on the

mission right. And ideally you would want to have organisms that could harness whatever resources are going to be available on the site you're going to Mars, for example, which would include things like carbon dioxide and nitrogen which are found on Mars. Also, ideally the outputs of those organisms will fall into a useful category of material or as an intermediate feedstock that some other microorganism will consume to

produce the useful material. In other words, they actually talk about, you know, you could create a system where you have these microorganisms that take some sort of raw material that are that that you find on Mars, they convert it into a different type of material. You have a second group of microorganisms that consume that new material, they produce a third type of material, and so on and so forth until you finally get to where you want to be.

Now they stress that, of course, you want to have as few intermediates in that relationship as possible because you want it to be more simple. The added complexity just means you have added payload because you have to bring more stuff with you in order to process the different materials. Oh yeah, it makes sense. You want to streamline your chemical assembly line, right, and you want to try and

make it effective across multiple outputs. And we'll talk about the outputs in a little bit, because there are they identified four big ones and and you want those processes to apply to as many of those as possible. So that way, again, you are simplifying your your efforts as much as you can. Yeah. So, in the simplest possible terms, you're looking for a way to create a collection of organisms that sort of eat Martian soil and poop things

that are really useful. That's pretty much it. Yeah, yeah, the most useful poop in the universe. Well, at least for as far as we're concerned, And we haven't run into like, what's the what's the little nibbler on Futurama that that poops dark matter that US spaceships. We haven't run into that yet. So barring running into Nibbler, then yes, so far this is the most useful stuff. Okay, And so probably we should be fair and say, maybe not pooping in the way you and I imagine, but at

least creating a byproduct. Please don't imagine the pooping now, you can't help. But what are what are the pooping, non pooping byproducts that these powerful little machines could create. Well, one of the first ones we should mention are drugs in medicine. Yeah, yeah, there are. In fact, there are a lot of drugs that we synthesize through uh, using different types of micro organisms, bacteria, fungi, all sorts of stuff that we depend upon from the natural world in

order to produce drugs. Uh. You know, even if we're talking about starting off with something and then creating a purely synthetic version. We often look at nature as the first source. So you know, you hear about like um, natural cures and folk wisdom. A lot of the drugs we use really are the refined, scientifically arrived at versions of stuff that has been used in folk cures for

quite sometimes. Oh sure, like we have, you know, chemically isolated the active ingredient in some piece of tree bark that acted as a pain reliever. And now you've got just just that main chemical that was actually doing the work concentrated in pill form, right in a very predictable and measurable way. Right. But now that I bring up the pill form, I do kind of wonder. We'll wait a second, why would you need to synthesize medicine in space?

Because medicine doesn't really take up that much room or mass. It's not a significant amount of your payload. And it turns out there is a good reason you need to synthesize medicine and space. Yeah, and this was interesting. I did not know this until we looked at this paper that medications. You know, there are expiration dates for medications that tell you when the active ingredient is no longer going to be as efficacious as it should be. I always just assume that's a lie, But maybe that's not

at all. Apparently it is not a lie. And apparently not only is it not a lie, it happens faster in space, So drugs go go bad. They they lose their efficacy, they become less effective over time and space it happens faster. It's the old radiation, isn't it. You know, I think it's really the microgravity. They just start partying and then they're tired. Oh no, I'm thinking of the astronauts. Uh,

you know, it's interesting. I think it's it's a cool idea to bring along micro organism so that you can continue to create drugs instead of having to rely upon whatever stores you brought with you. Right, So, once you get to Mars, apparently it is not all that difficult to create a system where you could have microbes manufacturing, for example, a seat amnifin, which is the you know, a pain killer, right. And there are other drugs that they might be able to make too, like antibiotics, which

obviously that'd be really useful in small amounts. I mean, if you want to if you don't run into the Mars flu every five seconds would be good too. Well, I mean, I guess we would hope that whatever cold you catch on Mars is something we brought with us. And the Martian supervirus, I'd be pretty pretty sure that it would be something we brought with us. We haven't detected anything on Mars that would lead us to believe

there are pathogens already there. But yes, you know you would want to be able to make this kind of stuff, especially if you know again the the useful uh lifespan of it would be effective or really drastically shortened by space travel. Okay, well, let's go from a tiny part of the payload to the big cahuna. Fuel. Yeah, this is the big one, right. So, according to that Royal Society paper, about two thirds the entire mass of a rocket bound for Mars and destined to return to Earth

would be fuel. So the more stuff you want to bring with you, the more fuel you need. And again, like we said, it's not that simple ratio. The more fuel you need, the more fuel you're gonna need to move that fuel, and you have to find just the right balance there. Uh. Now, the paper says that if we could make fuel on Mars. We could cut that down, cut down on the amount we need by a factor

of two to three, which is significant. And Uh. Further, the paper goes on to say, Okay, look, there are lots of different types of rocket fuel out there, and a lot of them are really chemically quite complex, and to make them requires a long production uh process that you cannot realistically find a way of of matching using the synthetic biology. It's just not in the cards. However, there is one type of fuel that you could create that we could do it right now with synthetic biology,

which would be a methane oxygen fuel. So liquid methane is something that we could produce um using micro organisms and the base I stuff that you would find on Mars, maybe bringing some stuff along with us in order to do it, because yeah, you can use hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make methane oxygen fuel. Uh. And it relies on stuff like acetogens, which are microorganisms that create acetate as a product of respiration and other microorganisms can convert

the acetate into nitrogen compounds. Oh. By the way, Uh, we have acetogen's really close by us. Did you see that? They They include some of the microflora found in human feces. That's pleasant. Uh. Then you also have methanogens which can convert hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane boom. So that yeah, exactly, You're gonna be careful with that stuff, right. Um, So

there's also you. It was interesting you had this note here about nitrous oxide and hydrocarbons, which is currently preferred for safety and efficacy, but we're not sure how to produce it biologically. That that's a problem. So it may be stuck with the liquid methane thane fuel. But here's the really really oh right, this is you, isn't it. No,

it is me. Here's the really super cool part. So the Royal Society team Ransom numbers to see how much mass we'd have to bring to Mars if we want to create a methane oxygen propellant while we're at Mars. So you'd have to take some fuel with you to launch from Earth. Yeah, we couldn't just automatically get there with you know, fuel free, right. But the the idea is either in transit or once you land on Mars, you set up a fuel production factory that consists of

these microorganisms. Right. The idea being what's the bare minimum amount of fuel that we could put on a launch vehicle, um, you know, just just as a way of getting two Mars. And so they came up with a couple of different methods. One was, if we just produce oxygen on Mars, so we bring everything else we need to create methane oxygen fuel with us, but we leave the oxygen production for

the when we're actually on the planet. We would need to ship seven thousand, five D twelve kilograms and methane to Mars in order to have enough to lift off again. Now, if we produce both oxygen and methane our Mars, we would need to ship just three thousand, two hundred fifty one ms of hydrogen there to fuel the production of the methane oxygen fuel while we're on the planet, which is less than half the mass of what we would

need if we were only concentrate on oxygen. Now, if we want to step further and said, how about we tried to produce the hydrogen on Mars as well. And the way we would do that is we would collect water from the soil of Mars. We would evaporate the water out of the soil we would then use electrolysis to break the molecular bonds so that you get hydrogen

gas and oxygen gas um. And if if we use that methodology, then we could cut it down to between two thousand, twenty one and two thousand, six hundred fifty eight kilograms. Now, remember we started with seven thousand, five hundred and twelve and that was already assuming we were going to produce socks gen on Mars. That's not even like if we were talking about just pure fuel to get there and get back without ever making fuel on Mars, you start getting into huge, huge numbers, and it it

quickly becomes problematic. Yeah, so this is a really interesting idea. Uh, the you know, I don't fully understand the processes, the actual like lab process. That means you're not a rocket scientists, nor am I some sort of micro organisms fuel scientists. It's not a microbiologist either. So so both of those are true, and so I think we can take them at their word for now, and so we hear response

by other people in the community. So let's go to another big thing that's part of our trip and making sure that we survive, not just to get there and get back but to survive the entire way, and that's a that's some tasty yum yums, well maybe somewhat tasty. I don't know if they qualify as yum yums. Maybe maybe almost numb numbs. You know. We need some sort of sustenance, however, some some barely edible, somewhat nutritious food

that people can keep down while they're up there. So one of the paper talks about a resupply mission to the International Space Station. Yeah, they So they say that typically more than half of a resupply mission the cargo is food, and they specified there was one recent mission they looked at which was fifty nine percent food by weight. And that space food we're talking about, that's presumably mostly or totally dehydrated food. Yeah, you would add water once

there and prepared to to eat your shrump cocktail. Mush. We had a nice long discussion about shump cocktail. But we're going to talk about space food in a minute, Okay, fair, I won't, I won't. I won't spoil it then, uh, And this is not really practical for people who are headed to Mars, where you can't get that resupply mission regularly.

Like I was saying before you need to have, uh, you know, some way of producing food, because you're probably not gonna be able to carry all the food you're gonna need for that incredibly long mission, you know, the eight month or so flight out to Mars, the year or more that you're going to be spending on Mars before you can take another eight month flight back. That's a long time, you know. I have a question actually,

which is how much food does an astronaut need? Oh? Well, and I wonder how that compares to what you need on Earth because an astronaut, you know, they have to exercise constantly in order to prevent too much decay of the bones and muscles. Uh And and how does that factor into how many calories they need? Well, I can tell you that they eat about one point eight three kilograms of food per day each person. Does I don't know the caloric value of that one point eight three

ms um, I don't know. Like it's just straight up pork dripping, ye, it's yeah, it's it's just pork rinds, Just bags and bags of wark grinds up on the is s s. No, like we were saying, I think most of that is going to be dehydrated packaged food that's shipped up it. You know, it's been designed by

the chefs at NASA. Now I didn't. I don't know for a fact if the one point eight three kilograms of food per person per day is based on the dehydrated amount or the quote unquote wet food, because they do talk about there's a difference between dehydrated and wet in the paper, because you know, you can ship stuff up dry, add water to it to make the wet food, or you could have it all be wet food to begin with, which adds mass obviously because you've got water there.

You know, the term wet food makes me think of the canned dog dog cat. So if we wanted to go to Mars, so this, this is how much we would need to take with us for an entire trip, which includes flying out there, staying on the plant, and then coming back, we need to ship ten thousand, five the eight kilograms of food to last the whole trip. That's based on six astronauts um. And that's the conservative estimate. So according to the paper Snacks No no midnight snacking.

Going to the paper, about five thousands of quote vegetarian wet food end quote could come from local crops. So I imagined this would be similar to the approach that the Mars One Colony proposes, which is they want to use hydroponic farming techniques to grow food crops on the surface of Mars. Really, it's probably under the surface of Mars because it's probably an underground greenhouses because there are

radiation issues if you are on the surface. UM. So, according to the paper, yeah, we would still have to bring more than four thousand kilograms with us in order to UH to have the entire trip accounted for, because you know, you need to have enough food to get there. Once you're there, you can start growing food and use that to supplement it. So they said that this could also come from a different source, not just local crops.

If you didn't want to go the hydro product crop route, you could grow arthur Spira plat tensis and arthur Spira maxima, which together formed voltron No, actually they become spiro Leina. Have you ever heard of spirolina? And not before today? So spiro Lena. Actually had had heard of this, but I didn't know much about it. Um. It's often sold as a food supplement. It's specifically sold to vegetarians as a food supplement because it is it's got a lot

of proteins in it. In fact, it has like all the major amino acids are involved in a uh in in this so you you wouldn't miss out on any So vegetarians often take this as a supplement so in case they're not getting enough protein through their other parts of their diet. Um. And it's stuff that the Aztecs used to eat. It's technically a cyanobacteria that lives in tropical lakes that have happened to have a high pH level,

so they need that environment really to survive. Uh. And it's sold as a food supplement everywhere also as a whole food. I mean, there are people who make cakes out of this stuff. That's what the Aztecs used to do. And uh. The only thing that really I know about that is something to take as a precautionary warning, is that it doesn't necessarily serve as a good source for vitamin B twelve, So you could suffer a vitamin B twelve shortage if you didn't have some other means of

supplementing this food. Presumably they would plan ahead and either have that in other food stores or have a supplement. Yeah, because the supplement that's often packaged with this stuff in uh, you know, often it will say it's it's fortified with it or whatever. A lot of that doesn't end up being biologically active when you take these things. So it's actually a real problem. You need to have a good

source of B twelve. But using this approach, the spirolina approach, the shipping mass for food would be cut down to two thousand three two ms uh and the mission would include bioreactors in which space travelers could cultivate the spiralina. So you'd be cultivating the scum you need for dinner. Yes, I mean we're talking about cyano bacteria right here. So this is a k A blue green algae scum in the ocean that is responsible for all the lakes. But yes,

well sure, yeah, there's cyanobacteria specific stuff is from lakes freshwater. Correct, you are so it would it would not be salty cyano bacteria scum. Yeah. There's no discussion about how they would augment the texture or taste of this stuff. This is purely a could we do could we achieve the

goal of producing food using a synthetic biology. It's not so much a do we want to do this because you right, well, now I can see that the main advantage of this would be on a very extended journey, right, a long trip to Mars or to an asteroid or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, in fact, not so much for the Moon or something close, because those bioreactors have masks, they take up space on your ship, they have mass. You have to spend fuel to launch them out there.

And if your trip is going to be a relatively short one, as it would be for a lunar mission, then uh, you know you you're not going to be producing enough food to justify it would actually be cheaper to put all the food you're going to need on that launch vehicle rather than to bring the bioreactors along if it's going to be a short trip. It's only when it's a long trip that starts to pay off. And uh, but I've had in the paper they mentioned that you could still use this on a lunar mission,

specifically to test it as a proof of concept. Right, Well, I think it would be very important to test something like this ahead of time because, as we know from reading about the experiences of people on the I S. S. Food tastes different in space. Yeah, I mean the astronauts report this that you might you might taste a meal on Earth to try to figure out, Okay, what do what menu items do I want to have available to me when I go up on the I S. S. And you decide you like this, that and the other.

You know, it's very steak, is amazing, exactly, I want I want fifty cartons very steak uboard the I S. S. And then it turns out you get up there and something's happen to your body when you're in a microgravity environment. Suddenly all these fluids that were originally in your legs and your feet and stuff flow up into your head.

You get sinus congestion. It's like having a really bad cold for a while, and and even after that, supposedly that subsides somewhat after a number of weeks, but even then, they're just problems with tasting in space. It's different than it is on Earth. It's the different experience. You're in an environment that's saturated with recirculating strange smells and can't

necessarily smell the food that you're trying to eat. Yeah, it's just all out of whack, basically, And and so it's strange that if you've never heard this before, be prepared for a surprise. What do you think the most popular rehydrated meal on the I S S Is? We already mentioned it earlier in the episode. It is, in fact shrimp cocktail that is so disgusting. I don't know what they're talking. I don't know what you're gay. Where your problem is with this idea of it being disgusting?

How is this more disgusting than any other kind of dehydrated food because it's shrimp. I don't know. I don't get it, though, dude, I mean, like, like like sea monkeys are dehydrated shrimp. Well, I think I think people generally acknowledge, like you know, shrimp cocktail just doesn't sound like the best thing to dehydrate and rehydrate in space. But they love it. Astronauts can't get enough of it.

And I've heard I've heard it speculated that the reason they love it so much is that the cocktail sauce has a horseradish kick in it, and the spiciness of it sort of brings back the magic to your mouth. And know didn't you say there was an astronaut who asked that all of his meals be that. Oh yeah, Now I can't remember what the person's name was, but there was somebody who ate shrimp cocktail. Just continuous morning, noon,

and night. It's shrimp cocktail all the time. Um. But now, I I had said, and this was before we went into the studio, I had said that I have imagined that he landed and never wanted shrimp cocktail ever again. Yeah, so we'll see. But anyway, all of this is in service of the point that you definitely need to plan ahead for what things are going to taste like in space.

And on top of that, this isn't trivial. Taste matters in space because morale matters in space, and if your astronauts are not getting nutritious food that's at least somewhat palatable, it can be a big problem for the mission. Yeah, especially when that's going to take more than a year

to complete. I mean, you know, if you're if you're three months in and you're already feeling really depressed because you know the food is unpalatable to you, then you know, and you know that you've got more than a year of that food to look forward to. That's an issue, but no one thing we should point out though, is that the issues that people run into in space may not in fact be the same as those that they encounter once they're on the surface of the planet. That

that's a good point. I was actually wondering about exactly that fact. So obviously, if you're traveling to Mars, a lot of this is going to be like being on the I. S. S. You know, you'll have this fluid redistribution, and so probably it will affect the way things taste. I wonder if things, if you're on the surface of Mars in a sort of buried habitat there, does your sense of taste and smell return to more like what it would have been on Earth? Or is it more

like what it is in space? Well, I mean you still have is it something completely different? Would probably be different. I mean I would imagine to be kind of similar to what you encounter. And like any place where you get a lot of recirculated air, so imagine an airplane where you get a lot of recirculated air. It's the same sort of thing, because you know you're not getting any fresh air because you can't know on Mars. However, Mars does have gravity. It's it's much greater than micro gravity.

You have maybe what about third the the strength of Earth's gravity. Uh, So you know, your fluid distribution would be more akin to what it is on Earth. So you wouldn't have necessarily the same sort of scinus issues that you would have in in microgravity. Uh. And you would not have to worry as much about opening up a food item and not being able to, you know, really smell it, because you know on a space in a space environment, you have to make sure you're not

emitting anything that's gonna get into important equipment. Right. You can't. You can't just squirt the shrimp cocktail all over the place. You know, you're you're just rough housing over aboard the I S S. You can't do that. But on Mars it sounds big of an issue, So things like the smell of food could become more of an important factor. Of course, if you're thinking, do I want to smell

cyano bacteria grouped into cakes, that's a different question. I would smell like I don't know either, I've never had it. Well anyway, the whole point is, yes, you need to test this in space first and and tested on the Moon. I think that's crucial because you can't settle these people with disgusting grubbins for three years or what two and a half two and a half, so yeah, something I think.

I think it's not quite two and a half. Like I remember the paper talked about being nine something days, so a two and a half to three years somewhere in between there. Yeah. So we've talked about medicine, we've talked about fuel, we've talked about food. There's one more big one that I think is very important. Now here's

a good question. Let's say you're going to space, and you know there's this whole range of tools and building materials you might need, but you don't know exactly how many of them you're going to need for sure, or or maybe you just notice that some of these tools, while they would be very useful when once we get to Mars, are kind of unwieldy in shape and would be difficult to store on the way they're there, you know, volumetrically inconvenient. Why don't you just print them in space?

This is an idea that's been explored and we've talked about it. On the show before three D printing for space exploration. So instead of taking up all these tools and building materials, you instead take a lump sum of printing material and then you can print the items you need once you're there. I think that makes good sense, But you can do one step even better. Don't even take the bulk materials to begin with. Take some microorganisms that can convert whatever stuff happens to be on the

planet you're visiting. That will then convert that into the bio polymers that you need to print stuff. Brilliant. Yeah. Now, now this again could really cut down on the amount of launch mass you need for your mission. That would require the team to print out stuff that they need, and that could include things like habitats, It could include

like it, it could include big stuff. And really, again, the team that was writing this paper was just looking into the feasibility, like is it possible to have a microorganism create the stuff that could potentially go into a device like a three D printer, And they found that yes, that is feasible. It doesn't mean that we can do it right now, It just means that there's no reason we couldn't pursue that as an option. Oh, bioplastics are

a huge thing. Yeah. Sure, it seems totally feasible to me that you can have a microbial factory for producing the plastics you need to make a you know, slat that goes on the side of a habitat. Yeah. So again, this could really cut down not just on the bulk material. I mean again, it just it creates more room for other stuff. It means that you also have a more self sustaining mission that is capable of handling things when the unexpected occurs, like when something you had not accounted for,

like a tool breaks. Then with this system you would get more of whatever raw material with the microorganisms needed to convert into biopolymer, then put that into the three D printer and print yourself a new tool whenever the old one has worn out or broken, and you don't have to worry about that kind of situation completely throwing the mission into jeopardy. I think that's an excellent idea. And I also want to do a little aside that

you might find amusing. Okay, it's a note about academic language usage in the way people write papers, right, I don't want to denigrate their research. These guys are brilliant. But I kept seeing a certain phrase in this paper and I was like, what the heck is three dimensional printing? So so we have completely gone beyond using the actual words three dimensional to the point where I didn't recognize what that was. It didn't register as three D printing team, Right,

that's pretty funny. Yeah, we're we've gotten to the point where three D itself means something and three dimensional doesn't necessarily evoke that. That is amusing. We also wanted to briefly talk about another thing that we would obviously need

on any space exploration mission, which is oxygen. Now, the the various the paper doesn't address oxygen, right, and I think that makes sense because it's less of a synthetic biology concern and just the fact that you might have plants or algae or you know, things that exist already to produce breathable oxygen and habitat Mars one specifically was looking into creating oxygen through electrolysis, again, taking the water from the Martian soil and using electrical current to separate

out the hydrogen and oxygen, and then to mix in some nitrogen from the Martian atmosphere. Because you don't want to breathe pure oxygen. No, so yeah, exactly, you want to be able to to supply your mission with oxygen. You know, we need it to breathe. But we can't

carry all that with us either. But usually these systems involved things like electrolysis or like you said, photosynthesis, some sort of um other method to generate the oxygen we need, as opposed to just uh, you know, create a microorganism that poops air. That one's not listed in the paper, So if you want to be more elegant, you could say it exhales air. Yeah, I could say that. Yeah, it's something that that respirates and it breathes out oxygen

and maybe breathes in carbon dioxy. I guess the term is excretes it. It puts it out there. So we have a lot of different challenges here. One of those is just being able to make use of whatever the

resources are at the destinations we're going to. And because I mean this comes up in the paper, going to the Moon and going to Mars are different in terms of the chemical elements available in say the soil exactly, yeah, Martian soil and lunar regules, which is what we call the the soil on the Moon have very very us some oxides and other elements in them that you can

find in one but not the other. So you may be able to come up with a micro organism that could work really well in one environment but not so well on the other. Which is that's problematic because normally we would say, how about we use the Moon as kind of a testing grounds for a lot of this technology to make sure it works before we commit to a Martian expedition where people are going to be much further away for much longer, and uh thus their lives

will literally depend upon this technology working. But if we can't really test it effectively on the Moon, at least not without you know, some caveats, then that's a little that's challenging. Right The Moon is at least where we should test the algae cakes. Yes, yeah, which again they point out that in the case of going to the Moon would actually be less efficient than just packing all the fooji exactly. But this is not a matter of efficiency, it's a matter of testing the technology. Uh So it

is really interesting. And again, the the paper itself looks at four main components as the inputs. You know, we talked about the four outputs, which are four main chemicals that you would feed these microbes right right, Because the four outputs we've already talked about drugs, biopolymers, food, and fuel. Well, the inputs would be carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen.

So it is really interesting that they're looking at these four basics and they said, all right, well, how can we take these four basic things that we can get either we can ship to the place we're going to, or we can harvest it from that environment, and how can we get these four outputs we want? And in some cases, like I said, it's going to require intermediaries, some some intermediate steps between the beginning and the end.

But how can they cut that down to the bare minimum to be as quote quote greedy end quote as possible? That's the that's the phrase they used to say, like, how can we maximize these inputs to try and get as much of these outputs as we possibly can. It's fascinating to me to think that the the they're they're treating these microbes like common office workers. I was gonna say that to me, it's remarkable that the success of our long term space exploration initiatives could come down to

dependence on these micro organisms like that. Really, the the future of long term space missions could be in these little you know, the different types of bacteria and algae and things like that. UM really interesting. It makes me less likely to sign up for a trip over to Mars because I don't know that I want to eat algae cakes for two three years. Somehow I feel like I'd rather have algae cakes than than shrimp cocktail in space. But maybe I'd changed my tune once I got my

fluids redistributed. Bonkers, man, I don't know what it is about the dehydrated trimp cocktail that gy. What need to do is we need to get some. We need to get a pack of dehydrated shrimp cocktail as used in space missions and do a taste test. NASA kitchen, if you're listening here, we are. I send the house stuff works. Yeah. Yeah, that that's me. I'm the bald guy. Yeah, absolutely, I would.

I would try it in a heartbeat. I would. I'll try it with you, Okay, alright, So that you got at least two of the three hosts, we might be able to get Lauren in on this. I don't know, Lauren, Lauren uh there's certain foods that don't agree with Lauren, so I don't I don't want to speak for her, but we will at least offer her a spoonful of dehydrated, reconstituted shrimp cocktail that we have probably rehydrated in some way. I'll try it. I've I've eaten worse stuff. I believe

you can it with the bravado. I'll take you at your words, all right, Well, at any rate, I think this wraps up our discussion about synthetic biology and ace travel and how it could be a really integral part of how we get around and how we survive on these missions. Yeah. I thought this paper was fascinating, And if you're interested in reading all of the technical details and in full, the text is available online just to

look it up. Yeah it uh. It took me three or four reading sessions to get all the way through it, because there's a lot that synthesize, you know, it's just a lot of information and a lot of a lot of of chemistry that um, you know, I frankly had to take time to really understand because it was well beyond my my poor recollection of chemistry from my school days, but very fascinating stuff and guys, if you have any

suggestions for future episodes of Forward Thinking. Maybe you've got a topic that's been um, you know, just eating at you and you want us to cover it. Let us know. Send us an email our addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Google Plus, Twitter or Facebook. At Google Plus and Twitter, we are f W Thinking and just search for FW

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