Astronaut dinners Sea bass to go into space for lunar fish farm project

At first glance, there is nothing special about the sea bass circling around a tank in the small scientific facility on the outskirts of Palavas-les-Flots in southern France. But these fish are on a mission.

- Kim Willsher

When fully grown, they will produce offspring that will be the first to be launched into space as part of a scientific project called Lunar Hatch that is exploring whether sea bass can be farmed on the moon and eventually Mars as food for future astronauts.

The project is the brainchild of Dr Cyrille Przybyla, a researcher in marine biology for the French National Institute for Ocean Research (Ifremer).

"Fish is an excellent source of protein because it is the animal organism that we digest the best and it has omega 3 and important B vitamins that will be needed for astronauts in space to maintain muscle mass," Przybyla says. "The question was: how can we produce food that far away?"

The answer is, he says, to blast the eggs into space where they will hatch in the time it takes to get to the International Space Station (ISS). Initially, the fish will simply be observed, before being frozen and returned to Earth.

Przybyla is confident that should the world's space agencies decide to build a moon base, Lunar Hatch will be able to put sea bass on the menu at least twice a week.

Sending fish into space is not new. The first "aquastronauts" to make the journey were tiny fish known as mummichogs (Fundulus heteroclitus) sent into orbit on one of the Apollo missions in 1973.

Three years later, two Soyuz astronauts carried out experiments with an aquarium of guppies in the Salyut Soviet space laboratory.