Towards the Future of Space Bioprocess Engineering

Inspired by new measurements and imagery from the Perseverance mission, there is reinvigorated public interest in a crewed mission to Mars in the 2040s. To realize such a mission, we must work to solve multiple science and engineering challenges as described by NASA's Space Technology Grand Challenges (STGCs) for expanding human presence in space, centered around advancing technologies to support the nutritional, medical, and incidental material requirements that will sustain astronauts against the harsh conditions of interplanetary transit and habitation on the surface of an inhospitable alien world. Advanced biotechnologies that support flexible biomanufacturing from in situ resources can provide a mass, power, and volume advantage compared to traditional physicochemical strategies. However, critical bottlenecks remain that must be overcome to make Mars biomanufacturing practical and robust. Here we begin with a brief review of the recently codified field of Space Bioprocess Engineering (SBE) - the multidisciplinary approach for the design, realization, and technical management of a biologically-driven system in a space mission context - and we outline the concept of “Hilbert-like” problems that may shape the field in the future. We then describe a number of categories for such problems and expand on a number of preliminary Mission Design and Modeling problems that underpin SBE, in the fields of mission architecture formation and value benchmarking. We end by enumerating a list of problems and challenges across Mission Design and Modeling (MDM), In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), In Situ Manufacturing (ISM), Food and Pharmaceutical Synthesis (FPS), and Sustainability and Loop Closure (SLC). The Space Bioprocess Engineering problems provided here are based on an effort by the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES, https://cubes.space/). We recognize that more feedback is needed to better define the envelope and specifics of SBE challenges for the field, and we provide a link to a set of questions here: https://forms.gle/YKtuPU9MXZ3mi7gE6