ESA is also working to develop technologies that will improve bioprocesses and metabolic resource use onboard the spacecraft. "ESA is investing significant efforts in researching advanced life support systems," explains Christel Paille, ESA life support engineer and part of the cultivated meat activities. "We are creating ground prototypes to investigate, for instance, closed-loop systems that recover nutrients and recycle metabolic wastes. This could also be applied to cultivated meat production to recover the nutrient medium that we give to the cells.

There's still a lot of work to be done before we can start feeding astronauts this way. Paolo adds: "It's something that is still in its infancy, so we proposed a roadmap that outlines the steps required to progress the necessary technologies and fill current knowledge gaps."

"This includes understanding how cells adapt to altered gravity and radiation," continues João Garcia, ESA researcher in cultivated meat for space applications. "By using facilities available at ESA, we will soon start experiments to understand these effects."

Whilst we consider cultivated meat for feeding astronauts in space, it is also becoming a promising solution for feeding a growing population on Earth. Though further developments and attitude shifts would be required before it becomes widespread, significant milestones have been achieved recently. Some examples are the positive assessment on cultivated meat presented in the United Nations FAO and WHO report, and the full regulatory approval for two companies to sell cultivated chicken products in the United States.

"Hopefully, we will see soon the European Food Safety Authority granting similar approvals and the research rapidly progressing," continues Paolo "The feeling is that we are at the beginning of a process that could transform the industry, making the conventional meat production model obsolete. Developed countries have the historical opportunity to move away from farming and killing animals, being a very inefficient process to produce food, unsustainable for the planet, dangerous for our health and rising more and more ethical concerns among the population."

Traditional meat production poses indeed a huge threat to the environment, being one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and pollution, in addition to using enormous amounts of water and land. Besides that, it significantly increases the risk of future pandemics and causes animal abuse and suffering. As people become more aware of these issues, cultivated meat could become an interesting and important alternative.

ESA's continued research in this field could contribute, via space technology transfer to ground applications, to a paradigm shift in how we produce and consume meat. This would lead to a much-needed transition that will bring huge benefits to the planet and humans, which aligns with ESA's commitment to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.