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Microbial food safety in space production systems

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Microbial food safety in space production systems

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While traveling to deep space is difficult for many reasons, food is a crucial one. Round-trip Mars mission scenarios last 3 years, demanding food with a shelf-life of 5 years [1]. This means that feeding human crew sustainably for long-duration missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) will ultimately lead to a paradigm shift away from the current Earth-based food production system, which depends upon storing and transporting prepackaged foods, and toward bio-regenerative production of food in space [1,2]. Pharmaceuticals and nutritional supplements face similar shelf-life challenges [2,3]. Moreover, the methods we currently use to detect dangerous microbes in food require sample return to Earth, a situation not viable for deep-space missions.

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