Scientists Successfully Grow Lab Meat In Space, So Future Mars Explorers Can Live Healthy

Back in 2018, Israeli food tech startup Aleph Farms made a breakthrough. They were working on developing alternate meat sources and managed to create the world's first lab-grown steak. Now, they've managed to recreate that under tougher circumstances in space.

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The fake-real meat Aleph Farms created basically starts off as a cell culture in a petri dish. In this case, bovine cells are grown until they multiply a significant amount. Then a 3D bioprinter is used to construct the meat mass into small-scale muscle tissue, so that you can get an actual steak instead of a drippy mess of meat.

This is the first time this process has ever been attempted in space however, and it's noticeable for two reasons. One is that 3D printing automatically becomes harder in space, where there's no gravity to keep the material within its confines. Additionally, previous methods at growing lab meat did require a lot of water to produce just a kilo of beef, which isn't available in space.

And there are multiple benefits to this kind of meat. For one, you don't have to worry about animal cruelty or how well the cows that gave the meat are treated, because it's real meat but it's grown from cells not taken from a slaughterhouse. And because it's grown in a lab, there was no investment of crop feed and grazing land needed for cows, meaning they're not eating into our food production.

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Thanks to this space-growing experiment though there's another clear benefit. When we begin sending astronauts on long trips to other planets, they won't have to rely on just grown vegetables. Instead, they can receive a healthy amount of protein without having to carry and breed herds. Instead, they can just freeze livestock cells and keep multiplying and harvesting them in a lab setting for an endless supply.

Supposedly, the texture of this meat is about the same as you'd find in the supermarket. Whether it tastes the same though is anyone's guess.