Technologies

How to Feed Astronauts Bound for Mars? Try Protein Made Out of Thin Air

It’s a long trip to the red planet and space is tight, but eating well could require just a few simple ingredients.

There are no grocery stores on Mars, and resupply from Earth is many months away. As much food as future astronauts to the red planet may pack for the trip, inevitably, they’ll have to create some food of their own in an inhospitable environment. Whether they go the fanciful farm-to-table route with locally sourced potatoes, like Matt Damon’s character did in the 2015 film The Martian, remains to be seen. But they may have an even more science-forward option.

Creating protein out of thin air.

That’s the goal of a partnership between the European Space Agency and a company called Solar Foods, formed out of a scientific research program less than a decade ago, which opened its first large-scale production facility in 2024.

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The project, dubbed HOBI-WAN (for “hydrogen oxidizing bacteria in weightlessness as a source of nutrition”) in a nod to the Star Wars movies, is an outer space version of a process that Solar Foods has been working on already here on Earth. That effort involves growing bacteria in a vat with water, air and nutrients, and then drying out the bacteria, turning them into a protein powder called Solein for human consumption.

A key next step will be to test Solein production on the International Space Station.

“Providing a sustainable and nutritious food supply which meets the energy requirements of the crew is one of the biggest challenges in human spaceflight exploration beyond low Earth orbit,” ESA said in a blog post. “In cases where pre-deployed food depots or continuous resupply missions from Earth are impractical, resource-heavy, or technically unfeasible, cost-effective alternatives are required.”

Making protein powder from air

The central goal of the HOBI-WAN project is to determine whether production of the protein-rich powder can take place in microgravity conditions.

The process is complex, but essentially it’ll be letting nature take its course.

“Solar Foods produces Solein by a process called gas fermentation,” Arttu Luukanen, the company’s senior vice president of space and defense, tells me. The gas fermentation process, he says, creates single-celled organisms that feed on hydrogen gas and use it to “sequester” carbon. From there, the bacteria are fed “minerals of life” such as ammonia as a nitrogen and hydrogen source.

All the ingredients go into a bioreactor along with water and gases that are pumped in “a bit like a big SodaStream,” Luukanen says. This provides the bacteria with the proper environment to reproduce, which they do very quickly. Once the bacteria have reproduced to a sufficient quantity, they’re harvested. Some of it is set aside to seed the next round in the bioreactor, while the rest is thoroughly dried and pasteurized.

These dried and pasteurized bacteria form the Solein product, which is composed of 78% protein, 6% fat (primarily unsaturated), 10% dietary fiber, 2% carbohydrates and 4% mineral nutrients. Luukanen says the powder can be flavored in any number of ways and on its own imparts “a very mild flavor of umami.”

But can it work in space?

Solein production will be harder to do in space. The weightless environment, plus the limited cargo capacity and reduced space for the bioreactor, add challenges that ESA and Solar Foods believe they can solve.

“[The] main difference for the experiment onboard the ISS is the lack of gravity, which means there is no buoyancy, which alters greatly how liquids and gases behave,” Luukanen says. The other challenge is limited physical space. Solar Foods uses bioreactors that can hold 20,000 liters or more, while the bioreactor heading to the ISS will be significantly smaller — a “few tens of liters.”

Extra steps will be required for gas safety, process monitoring, quality assurance and maintainability, as there won’t be bioprocess engineers on board to babysit the process. The product made in space also won’t be dried into a powder, at least not at the ISS. In the event of a leak, having a cloud of powder floating around in a zero-gravity environment wouldn’t be ideal.

So in space, Solein will likely be served up as a paste.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

The last big factor is the ingredients. They’ll have to be altered to account for the lack of resources available in a long-term space flight. Recycling has long been a key component of living in space, and that’ll be true for Solein production.

That means using CO2 from crew respiration and recycling the hydrogen gas made when the ISS uses electrolysis to turn water into oxygen for the crew. On Earth, making Solein requires a lot of water.

There will also be substitutions, such as using urea instead of ammonia, since ammonia would be dangerous if there were an accident. But that doesn’t mean that astronauts will be using urine like they do for “recycled coffee.”

“On Earth, we use ammonia, but for the ESA project, we’ve decided to use synthetic urea instead, mainly because it is not potentially hazardous like ammonia is if there is a spill,” Luukanen says. “Recovering the urea from urine is in principle possible, but given the small portion of urea needed, it may not make sense, especially if the urea extraction from urine involves complex and heavy equipment.”

How long could this process feed astronauts?

A trip to Mars is a much bigger time commitment than an excursion to the moon. NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission will see astronauts circle the moon for the first time in nearly half a century, but the trip will last only 10 days. In terms of food, it’s not that big of a deal. For missions like Escapade, where two satellites will travel to Mars, the trip will take two years. Heading to the red planet, astronauts will need to pack more than a picnic.

Should the Solein project prove successful, the amount of food it generates could theoretically feed a team of astronauts for hundreds of days while using much less cargo space than today’s space meals. Luukanen says that, as the project is being designed, the only thing astronauts would need to carry would be mineral salts, and they wouldn’t need that much.

“Even for a five-[person] crew, 900-day mission to Mars, we are talking of [less than]100 kilograms of mineral salts,” he says.

Other technologies may also help recycle nitrogen and minerals, which would allow astronauts to reuse those materials onsite, further extending food supply.

Using the protein powder, astronauts could make all sorts of food with the right additional ingredients. Luukanen says Solar Foods has developed recipes ranging from ice cream to cream cheese ravioli. Some of them were showcased during NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge, which highlighted methods for long-term food solutions, including a no-light food-growing method called Nolux and a closed ecosystem that can autonomously grow food and maintain insects for use in an astronaut’s diet.

It might not be what you’d expect from a Michelin-starred restaurant or even your neighborhood deli, but it’ll likely be better than a steady diet of Mars-grown baked potatoes.

Technologies

Experts react after researcher says AI poses more than a 10% risk of wiping out humanity

AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic while warning that the company and OpenAI are advancing powerful systems too quickly. His concerns were echoed by Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger, who estimated a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

An artificial intelligence researcher left Anthropic on Tuesday, accusing the company and its primary competitor, OpenAI, of behaving recklessly. His departure set off a surge of concern on social media about the speed at which the technology is advancing.

Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both organizations, said in a post on X that he resigned because Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said the people developing AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

Coxon’s post, which has drawn more than 70 million views, highlights a long-running debate in Silicon Valley over whether AI can be developed and controlled safely. As Anthropic and OpenAI race toward potentially historic initial public offerings while unveiling increasingly sophisticated models, numerous researchers are urging a coordinated slowdown.

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a blog post Sunday that no AI company has “solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” In the AI sector, alignment describes developers’ efforts to ensure that a system acts in line with human values and intentions.

“I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established,” Pachocki wrote. “And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.”

Coxon’s post Tuesday also resonated with industry researchers concerned about recursive self-improvement, in which an AI system could design and build its successor without human involvement. Although recursive self-improvement is not currently possible, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies have warned that it could make it easier for people to lose control of such systems.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence.”

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, supported Coxon’s remarks in a post on X late Tuesday.

“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Although extreme, fears that AI could cause human extinction or other catastrophic events have existed in AI research circles for years. In 2023, prominent researchers and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Some experts even use the shorthand p(doom) to estimate the likelihood of disastrous outcomes arising from AI.

Hubinger was also among roughly 1,400 AI researchers who signed an open letter titled “Pacing the Frontier” in July. The letter called on the U.S. government to create the tools needed to support an effort to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

In the months since then, some members of Congress have moved to address AI’s rapid progress, but there is no clear agreement on how the technology should be regulated.

In July, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., introduced the FRONTIER Act, legislation designed to create a framework for overseeing the deployment of advanced AI models. Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would temporarily halt advanced AI development until the federal government puts safety rules in place. Both proposals have received mixed reactions.

“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” Trahan wrote in a post on X Wednesday. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”

Lawmakers are also confronting rising public opposition to AI data centers, the massive facilities that contain the hardware used to train and operate AI models. The backlash has intensified to the point that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, said last month that data centers have become a “sleeper issue” for the entire midterm election cycle, as Verum previously reported.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that AI companies have done a “horrendous job of explaining themselves to the American people.”

“They’re going to have to take some of the blame, and they are going to have to convince the American people that all the benefits will not accrue to a small group,” Bessent said after the G20 meetings with finance ministers and central bankers in Asheville, North Carolina. “That’s what they hear from me.”

Technologies

Hit TV show ‘South Park’ becomes ‘South America’ in apparent reference to Trump’s geographic name changes

Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said in a statement that they were “inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google.”

Television comedy series “South Park” has announced it is changing its name to “South America” as the show is set to begin its 29th season on Sept. 16.

The show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said, “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”

Parker and Stone’s statement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America amid a trade spat with Canada. Canadian officials said they will not recognize the new name.

Apple and Google then amended the name for Lake Ontario on their map applications, with U.S. users seeing “Lake America,” while Canadian users saw “Lake Ontario.”

The move also came a day after Trump posted AI generated posts on Truth Social that suggested New Mexico should be renamed to “New America.”

Last year, the president used an executive order to change the name for the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, drawing international opposition.

“South Park” won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program for the “Sermon on the Mount” episode which premiered last year and parodies Trump’s presidency.

The “Skydance Capitulation” line comes after the $8 billion merger between parent company Paramount and Skydance, which was approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year after Paramount settled a lawsuit brought by Trump for $16 million.

Trump had alleged an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2024 with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, was deceptively edited.

Paramount subsidiary CBS News in July 2025 said it was canceling comedian Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” citing financial reasons, just days after Colbert accused Paramount of paying Trump a “big fat bribe.” The final episode of the show aired in May.

Paramount and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Technologies

Trump says he has no regrets about starting the Iran war as U.S. dials up economic pressure

Speaking to Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham, Trump said that he would have attacked Iran despite the impact on the midterm elections.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he has no regrets about starting the Iran war and added that “If I had it to do again, I would do exactly what I did.”

Speaking to Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham on Thursday stateside, Trump said that he would have attacked Iran despite the impact on the midterm elections.

“If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now,” Ingraham told Trump, to which Trump replied “supposing we were cruising, and all of a sudden Iran has a nuclear weapon. They would use it.”

He added that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, the Islamic Republic would “wipe out” Israel and the Middle East, and start hitting U.S. cities.

His comments come as markets brace for a longer Iran war, after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that top White House advisors had discussed with Trump the possibility that the Iran war could drag on beyond his current term.

Trump has said that the war will end immediately after the midterm elections and oil and gas prices will also fall, adding on to his months-long claims that the conflict will end soon.

In separate comments to NewsNation on Thursday, Trump denied reports that there was any damage to U.S. assets, after Iran claimed it had hit multiple U.S. fighter aircraft at a base in Jordan.

“No damage. No nothing,” Trump said, when asked if there was any truth to the reports.

Economic pressure

Washington is continuing efforts to isolate Iran from its economic network, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flagging sanctions against “a large bank” next week.

“We’re going to do it on Monday because we want to honor the memory of our fallen citizens on 9/11. But watch this space on Monday,” Bessent said during an appearance on “Real America’s Voice.”

Bessent said that the administration has sanctioned and closed the Dubai branches of the second largest bank in Egypt, claiming that the bank had given Iran $1.8 billion dollars. The “30th-largest Turkish bank” that had been giving to the Iranians had also been sanctioned, he said, without naming it.

The U.S. had sanctioned Turkey-based Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi Anonim Sirketi (Golden Global Bank) and its subsidiaries last week.

Trump, in the NewsNation interview, was also asked how Iran could continue holding out under the current economic pressure.

“I don’t know that they’re gonna be able to hold out,” Trump said. “But it’ll get settled after the elections. Or maybe sooner. But it’ll get settled right after the election.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Bessent said the 30th largest Turkish bank had been sanctioned. An earlier version misstated the bank’s ranking.