The Future of Space Food is On-Demand
3D and 4D printing food in microgravity is the next big step beyond freeze-dried veggies and toothpaste tubes of tuna salad for astronauts.
No sci-fi fan can deny their desire for a food replicator machine when Captain Picard first started getting cups of “Earl Grey tea, hot” created out of thin air for his regular consumption on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Renowned writer Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While food replicators are still well beyond the type of technological magic we can perform with modern science, we have developed a way to transfer a 3D structure from computer data to reality via a process called 3D printing.
Charles Hull invented 3D printing with its first usage in 1983 through stereolithography. His device used UV light to “cure” a polymer resin layer-by-layer, thus building up a three-dimensional structure with each pass. While initially used only in research labs, 3D printing has become a real technology buzzword over the past decade. There are now large scale applications of the process and many small consumer-grade 3D printing devices available.
3D printing essentially works by repeating 2D paths to grow a 3D form, with printing…
