NASA Wants To Turn Human Waste Into Food
NASA Is Funding A Project That Would Let You Eat Your Own Poop
A lot of us are too young to remember the Space craze of the 1960s, when NASA successfully marketed all kinds of good parts of astronaut life in order to make the space race appeal to the masses. There was Tang, which early astronauts drank while up in the big yonder. There was that weird astronaut ice cream too, the freeze-dried stuff that was crumbly and didn't go in the fridge. We were all about space-age food, and wanted to eat just like astronauts.
Now? Well, NASA is funding a project that is literally supposed to convert your own poop into food — at which point the "astronaut diet" stops being so appealing.
The space agency just announced the next crap — sorry, crop — of projects they're funding, and among the eight is this novel idea. Mark Blenner of Clemson University received funding for his project entitled "Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials: Closing the Loop for Long-Term Space Travel." As the name suggests, it aims to solve the problem of food supplies running out on long-term space expeditions by essentially recycling your poop and feeding it back to you, albeit in a much . Blenner, whose specialty is protein engineering and synthetic biology, will get up to $200,000 for up to three years on the project.
Poop = Food. That's nasty, but all in the name of Science!... http://t.co/CzHmjWtEPV— UWyo Phys/Astro (@UWyoPA) August 20, 2015
So as not to sound like we're sh*tting all over the idea (har har), it sounds like some incredible technology that could have applications beyond simple space exploration. But that doesn't mean we want to eat it quite yet.