NASA Astronauts May Eat Own Poop In The Future

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA — When NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson returned to Earth last fall after her record-setting 665 cumulative days in space, she was thrilled to return to a world that included flushable toilets and something beyond the same old freeze-dried meals. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have come up with a potential solution to both dilemmas. We know you may be eating, so we’ll try to keep this as scientific as possible, but it basically involves — brace yourself — converting astronauts’ poop into something they can eat.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. The research team is experimenting with a technique that rapidly breaks down solid and liquid waste to grow food with a series of microbial reactors that minimize pathogen growth.

"We envisioned and tested the concept of simultaneously treating astronauts' waste with microbes while producing a biomass that is edible either directly or indirectly depending on safety concerns," said Christopher House, a professor of geosciences at Penn State, said in a statement. "It's a little strange, but the concept would be a little bit like Marmite or Vegemite where you're eating a smear of 'microbial goo.' ”

Astronauts already recycle their own urine — something that prompted Whitson to say in a recent interview with Patch that “you don’t want to know” what it’s like to live for months without flushable toilets. But managing solid waste — which is currently ejected into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it burns up — is more problematic.

It may take months to years to address safety concerns about pathogens and turn waste into something edible, but early results are promising, House and his team said.

The study addresses the multiple challenges of sending astronauts into deep-space missions to Mars and beyond with enough food from Earth. Whitson is celebrated for adding pizzazz to astronauts’ standard freeze-dried meals by adding sauces, but meals are often mundane for astronauts.

Plus, it’s super-expensive and otherwise problematic to send food into space with the astronauts. It increases fuel costs and takes up precious cargo space, as does the apparatus to hydroponically grow food — an energy- and water-intensive process.

The researchers used artificial solid and liquid waste commonly used in waste management tests and created an enclosed, cylindrical system — think of a 4-foot-long mailing tube about 4 inches in diameter — that allowed select microbes to come in contact with the waste. The microbes broke down waste using anaerobic digestion, a process similar to the way humans digest food.

"Anaerobic digestion is something we use frequently on Earth for treating waste," House said in the statement. "It's an efficient way of getting mass treated and recycled. What was novel about our work was taking the nutrients out of that stream and intentionally putting them into a microbial reactor to grow food."

The methane produced during the anaerobic digestion of human waste could be used to grow a different microbe, Methylococcus capsulatus, which is used as animal feed today. The team concluded that such microbial growth could be used to produce a nutritious food for deep space flight.

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Image: In this 2015 photo, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly gives a thumbs up on the quality of his snack while taking a break from his work schedule aboard the International Space Station. He and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are eating specially prepared space food. (Photo by NASA via Getty Images)