If nothing else, it’s progress towards a permanent manned presence in space. Some people are going to eat it all the time, which will give us training information about what is really necessary to survive. It simplifies the grow-food-in-space problem down to generate-these-chemicals-in-space, which is a much easier problem.
If nothing else, it’s progress towards a permanent manned presence in space.
How so? Space food is >52 years old, and we even have subjects who have spent at least as long as 2.2 years subsisting on it (the current record holder for time in space, Sergei Krikalev). What does Soylent add?
Err, I may not have been explicit enough about independence from Earth’s food supply. Soylent is more of a marketing thing than a space food thing, but the approach (don’t make food, make chemicals) seems at first glance to be a more promising route.
If nothing else, it’s progress towards a permanent manned presence in space. Some people are going to eat it all the time, which will give us training information about what is really necessary to survive. It simplifies the grow-food-in-space problem down to generate-these-chemicals-in-space, which is a much easier problem.
How so? Space food is >52 years old, and we even have subjects who have spent at least as long as 2.2 years subsisting on it (the current record holder for time in space, Sergei Krikalev). What does Soylent add?
Err, I may not have been explicit enough about independence from Earth’s food supply. Soylent is more of a marketing thing than a space food thing, but the approach (don’t make food, make chemicals) seems at first glance to be a more promising route.