(Newswire.net — August 19, 2015) — The Moon is conquered, next stop – Mars. However, the journey to the ‘red planet’ would take too long given the distance and maximum spaceship speed today’s technology can provide. The main problem scientists are dealing with is food and water supplies for such long trip.
Obviously, storing such large amounts of supplies for a trip to Mars is out of the question, not only because it would require an enormous cargo bay, but it is not advisable to rely only on supplies carried from Earth.
The solution lies in manufacturing food and water, however, the scientists in a confined space without gravity, find that recycling is more plausible than producing. Therefore, NASA granted $200,000 per year to scientists to find a way to recycle digested food and water.
NASA granted $1.6 million for “innovative, early stage technologies that will address the high-priority needs of America’s space program,” the space agency said in a press release. Reportedly, NASA selected eight university-led proposals to receive of grants over a three-year period, and one of the projects is turning astronaut poop into food.
The project called “Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials” is run by Mark Blenner of Clemson University in South Carolina.
“Technology drives exploration, and investments in these technologies and technologists is essential to ensure NASA and the nation have the capabilities necessary to meet the challenges we will face as we journey to Mars,” Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, said in the statement.
“The faculty selected and their colleagues help assure a robust university research community dedicated to advanced space technology development” Jurczyk said.
The idea of recycling human waste is not linked to astronauts, in fact amid California drought, many scientists brained way to recycle fresh water from sewage water.
Billionaire activist Bill Gates also funded an innovation in water filtration, called OmniProcessor. Reportedly, the process is turning human poop into drinking water, and it is designed to supply billions of people who lack safe sanitations.
It burns the waste to produce electricity and potable water, and is designed to be used by the 2.5 billion people – or 40 percent of the global population – that have no access to safe water sources.
To prove the process works, officials from the Seattle engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy who built the processing installation, drank the water it produced out of human waste.