Friday, January 21, 2022

Attention Chefs, Cooks, and Chemists: "NASA Offering $1 Million Prize for Better Space Food"

From ExtremeTech, January 21:

Human space exploration has been limited to low-Earth orbit for decades, but that period of stagnation is coming to an end. NASA aims to return humans to the moon in the coming decade, and the goal is to set up a long-term presence there to help with future missions to Mars. There are rockets, space stations, and other equipment in development, but the food menu is still sparse. To remedy this NASA has announced a new round of the Deep Space Food Challenge, and this round of the competition comes with $1 million in prizes for teams that can come up with innovative foods that can be prepared in space. 

To address this, NASA partnered with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to launch the Deep Space Food Challenge in 2021. The agency awarded $450,000 total to teams based on concepts for stable, nutritious space foods. Now, NASA is inviting teams from the first round as well as newcomers to participate in phase 2. Teams that participated in phase 1 are automatically invited to phase 2, but everyone else needs to apply before the end of February. In addition, the cash prizes are only available to US-based teams (although anyone can participate). The CSA is running a parallel process with its own judges and prizes for Canadian teams....

....MUCH MORE