The future potential of the food and manufacturing industries may be found in the eyes of entrepreneurs and companies literally looking to the stars.
That was the take-home point from several speeches made at Maker Faire in Rome, which WIRED.co.uk is attending. More specifically, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are already looking to be able to manufacture new components for their missions while in orbit around Earth -- and that includes the components for food.
Anjan Contractor is a mechanical engineer who earlier this year showed off a prototype of a 3D printer that didn't produce hardware for astronauts -- it printed full-on pizzas. "Nasa wanted something that had longer shelf life, that offered personalised nutrition, [and] was suitable for [astronauts] who might have different physiological needs," explained Contractor on stage, who detailed how his modified British-designed RepRap 3D printer prototype functioned.
He explained that on Earth edible ingredients would first be processed to remove moisture, before being freeze dried. Once suitable ingredients and nutrients are ready they are individually stored in capsules for use within the printer. "Our objective is to store ingredients for a very long time," said Contractor.
"When astronauts press a button a little powder goes to a mixing chamber, water gets added, then it's pushed to the print heads," he explained, adding that "it takes seven minutes to print a pizza".
To prove this, he played a video of the printer producing a small, square pizza base from the ingredients needed to create dough. "As it's printing pizza it's also cooking, because the bed
[onto which the dough is being layered] is hot." It then prints the second stage: the crust. "And when it's finished the crust it starts on the tomato [sauce], and then after that it's the cheese.
This is a complete process and after it finishes printing it can be eaten."
Samantha Cristoforetti, who began proceedings at Maker Faire with a talk that young women in particular would have found inspiring, is likely to become familiar with the problem of "tasteless" space food. But the 37-year-old Italian astronaut seemed more motivated by what 3D printers could do for her work rather than her stomach. "I have spent dozens of hours in a simulator learning to pilot the Soyuz [spacecraft] and hundreds of hours with my crew learning to deal with any emergency," she said. "I have spent over 100 hours training underwater at Nasa in the replica ISS to learn how to fix
[the real one]."
So, she continued, "this will be groundbreaking," speaking of bringing 3D printers aboard the ISS. "Next year there will be a research programme to validate additive manufacturing in space. It means that in future exploration we'll be able to manufacture spare parts [in orbit]."
That'll come in handy if they undercook their 3D-printed pizzas: "The worst emergency of all is when the space toilet breaks," she said, probably not entirely without a modicum of truth. "We learn how to fix that."
Before all this becomes a mainstay of trans-planetary life in the nether regions of the cosmos, 3D-printed food is being explored on Earth. Lynett Kucsma co-founded Natural Machines, a company that is working on producing a rather elegant-looking 3D food printer called Foodini that functions anecdotally in a similar way to Contractor's ISS-bound model. But it has an added benefit: it's designed to be a stand-alone kitchen appliance. It can download recipes from the web; it has five empty food capsules that can be filled with whatever ingredients are required, then blend them during the printing process. The result? A raw consumable, which Foodini will cook within the same space the raw product was produced.
But unlike Contractor's astronaut-focussed model, Foodini isn't intended to be a space-age solution for zero-g nourishment -- it's a key part of the solution to the growing Earthly problem of unhealthy diets and food wastage. "In the future you'll see 3D printers as kitchen appliances," Kucsma said on stage at Maker Faire, highlighting that future domestic chefs will be able to "print what you want to eat" and won't be forced "to buy a product that has five servings when you only need four".
The current model doesn't cook the food yet, but can print "a spinach quiche in the shape of dinosaur" in under two minutes, which can then be popped in the oven. Someone should tell Bernard Matthews and Pizza Hut: when the ISS crew returns from a lengthy spacewalk replacing components with 3D-printed upgrades, nothing says "welcome back" like a turkey dinosaur served on the side of a six-inch cheese and tomato.
WIRED.co.uk will look forward to seeing that on the BBC's future series: The Great Inter-Planetary Bake Off.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
