Description: This project focuses on microbial biomanufacturing in space and contains two related research and development goals. The first is the development of a platform technology named BioNutrients that uses food microorganisms to produce nutrients during long-duration space missions. This technology is designed to enable on-demand production of nutrients that have been shown to degrade in pre-packaged food and vitamin supplements during long-duration missions. The work principally involves engineering food-safe microorganisms and production packs, and comparing storage performance and nutrient production in space (ISS) vs. ground tests, over a five-year duration. The work also addresses the development and testing of food safety and monitoring procedures and system readiness for use by crewmembers. The second development goal is to increase the types and amounts of on-demand products without increasing the need for launching additional growth media. The overall effort, termed CO2-Based Manufacturing, involves building on the advances of the BioNutrients effort to construct and test a prototype system that includes: a physicochemical reactor that makes the organic media needed for microbial biomanufacturing from CO2, hydrogen and wastes (potentialin situ resources), a custom-built, space-relevant bioreactor, and the engineered organisms. The current focus is on producing a specialized enzyme that facilitates the capture of CO2 from spacecraft environments. In addition to making small quantities of nutrients and other high-value products, this approach could allow the synthesis of large amounts of products by using plentiful in situ resources. Potential products include nearly all materials that can be made microbially, including chemicals, food components, medicine, polymers, adhesives, and similar products.

Benefits: The ability to make high-value, complex biological products on-demand can serve to mitigate certain shelf-life issues with current pre-packaged foods and vitamin supplements. In addition, further development of this technology could increase the variety of on-demand products, by bringing an array of engineered microbes (as low mass/volume dried pellets) and associated media. For example, this system could potentially enable the on-demand production of medicines such as protein therapeutics, thereby overcoming shelf-life issues and reducing the needed inventory of launched medicine stocks. To promote sustainable biomanufacturing in space, it will be required to use local resources such as CO2, water, nitrogen, and certain elements from lunar/Mars regolith. Being able to make substantial quantities of microbial media from these components will allow the manufacture of products in larger volume. While photosynthesis is a well-studied method for converting CO2 to organic products, this research is investigating novel abiotic techniques to convert CO2 to organic substrates to more rapidly, efficiently, and selectively make products. This approach can also be used on Earth using renewable energy to essentially make products primarily from the components in our atmosphere. This can help reduce CO2 emissions, and promote biomanufacturing operations nearly anywhere on the planet, not only where biomass or fossil fuel feedstocks are readily available.