Aleph Farms, an Israeli food company that engineers beef steaks from cow cells, announced Monday it had successfully grown meat on the International Space Station for the first time - a step forward in the company's goal to create slaughter-free eco-friendly meat.
Food tech startup Aleph Farms has become the first to produce lab-grown meat - also called clean meat and cultured meat - in space.
"In space, we don't have 10,000 or 15,000 liters (4,000 gallons) of water available to produce 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of beef".
"This joint experiment marks a significant first step toward achieving our vision to ensure food security for generations to come, while preserving our natural resources".
The RSC Energia spacecraft. Just without beef's huge environmental impact, its heavy resource requirements, or its contribution to climate change.
Co-founded with food-tech incubator The Kitchen and Shulamit Levenberg of the Israel Institute of Technology, Aleph Farm's method relies on mimicking a natural process inside the cow's body.
The first lab-grown burger was made by a Dutch company in 2013 at a cost of over $300,000.
And the next frontier was apparently space.
The experiment was the result of an worldwide collaboration between Aleph Farms, and Russia's 3D Bioprinting Solutions, which develops implementations of 3D bioprinting technologies, alongside the US's Meal Source Technologies and Finless Foods.
Next, the small-scale muscle-tissue was placed under zero-gravity conditions and assembled in a 3D bioprinter. All under microgravity conditions. An experiment on the International Space Station reveals the potential for generating consistent supplies of meat for future deep space missions.
"We're the only company that has the capacity to make fully-textured meat that includes muscle fibers and blood vessels - all the components that provide the necessary structure and connections for the tissue", Aleph's CEO and co-founder, Didier Toubia, told Business Insider a year ago.
The "3D bioprinter is equipped with a magnetic force which aggregated the cells into one small-scaled tissue, which is what meat is constructed by", Yoav Reisler, an external relations manager at Aleph Farms, told Space.com in an email.
Hailing a "successful proof of concept", Aleph Farms said the cutting-edge research "in some of the most extreme environments imaginable serves as an essential growth indicator of sustainable food production methods that don't exacerbate land waste, water waste, and pollution".
"It is time Americans and Russians, Arabs and Israelis rise above conflicts, team up, and unite behind science to address the climate crisis and food security needs", the company said.
