Regulatory food safety challenges when transitioning to a space food production system

Kurzfassung

Exploration missions beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) demand resilient and sustainable food systems that can gradually reduce reliance on Earth-based resupply. While near-term solutions may involve supplementing pre-packaged menus with fresh crops to improve nutritional variety, future missions will require scalable, bioregenerative food production that can reliably meet nutritional and organoleptic demands. However, as missions shift from relying on pre-packed provisions to in-situ food production, new regulatory challenges will emerge, necessitating the establishment of updated food safety and handling frameworks for both vehicle integrations and planetary systems. This includes developing standard operating procedures for food safety, hygienic handling, processing, storage, and traceability of space-produced food. Moreover, reviewing hardware requirements will help identifying gaps in the implementation of certain production or post-harvest technologies for future exploration architectures. To properly collect data for such regulations, a few areas have to be identified first. First, by developing coherent, system-level frameworks and realistic phased scenario-driven approaches, key parameters and requirements can be identified. Second, ground test demonstrators will play a key role. By testing technologies, operational procedures, and hardware configurations in a controlled environment, these platforms will help identify performance gaps, scientific and technical bottlenecks, and areas where further innovation and research is needed. Moreover, data collected from the ground test demonstrators can be correlated with data sets from flight tests, which allows to further calibrate procedures and regulations according to harvest procedures, physiochemical and material properties of food in low gravity and microbial hazards. This will in turn allow for the identification of future data sets needed to further calibrate the systems.