Astronauts Want Cake

So I was thinking, how do we make the astronaut’s birthday cake?

Humans need protein, oils and carbs but nobody is bio fabricating carbs.

Hundreds of companies are working on making biofab protein, because protein production is expensive and raising animals destroys the environment.  So people are making expensive proteins, Insulin for example is a fancy protein that’s been made for many years in GMO microbes.

Air Butter

And companies are making CO2, water and electricity into oils, such as savor.it, a company partially funded by Bill Gates. And a real effort is being made to convert straw, corn cobs and sawdust into sugar using microbes. And sugar made in algae. 

Easter Egg Hunt

Down the Internet rabbit hole I went studying sugar. And I quickly discovered the incredible chemistry website, with gorgeous computer graphics and myriad options: PubChem https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Sorbose_-L

Search Result: Sad Astronaut

No company is currently selling sugar from air/abiotically (without life ) or with even microbes.

Our Heroes

As with many other great technological innovations, NASA leaps to the rescue with a crowd sourced program to jumpstart CO2 to sugar  abiotic  technologies. Three teams demonstrated prototypes that will work in space and split the prize money.

Read: NASA Space Sugar Awards

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/nasa-awards-750000-in-competition-to-convert-carbon-dioxide-into-sugar/

More

Progress in Abiotic Sugar BioFab

• Here’s a great overview, Highly technical paper on making bio fab sugar https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00408-1#fig1
• Microbe facilitated BioFab Sugar https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960852422011361
• Solar-driven sugar production directly from CO2   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46954-w