NASA Will Pay You $500K If You Can Figure Out How To Supply Fresh Food To Astronauts In Space
NASA wants to provide fresh food for Astronauts in Space. They’ve always had to rely on freeze-dried foods while in space and can you imagine how boring that gets?
The thing is, they need some brilliant minds to come up with some ideas to make this happen. NASA is hosting a challenge called “The Deep Space Food Challenge”.
As NASA develops concepts for longer crewed missions to Mars and beyond, the agency will need innovative and sustainable food systems that check all the boxes.
NASA
The goal of the challenge is to provide “future space explorers and people on Earth nutritious foods they will enjoy”. As you can imagine, delivery service is out.
They are looking for ways to actually grow and harvest fresh fruit and vegetables on board while traveling through space! Somewhere out there is a brilliant mind that can solve the problem.
The Deep Space Food Challenge, a NASA Centennial Challenge, seeks ideas for novel food production technologies or systems that require minimal resources and produce minimal waste, while providing safe, nutritious, and tasty food for long-duration human exploration missions.
NASA
Some humans are able to look at problems and find solutions that others can not. When it comes to growing and producing food in space, things are extremely different.
Solutions from this challenge could enable new avenues for food production around the world, especially in extreme environments, resource-scarce regions, and in new places like urban areas and in locations where disasters disrupt critical infrastructure.
NASA
You have to think about the restrictions caused by the different environments as well as space and time. Solutions to this problem could also help people here on Earth.
The Competition
If you think you have a great idea, then you need to register by May 28th, 2021 for phase 1. Ideas for phase 1 need to be submitted to NASA by July 30th, 2021.
NASA will then pick up to 20 best ideas and give them $25,000! Phase 1 winners will then move on to phase 2 of the competition.
You can find out all of the information about the competition here. This is pretty exciting and I can not wait to see what people come up with!
