Far as weight goes, wouldn't 1-2.5 tons of payload capacity per person be enough? And as far as volume is concerned, I'm pretty sure there's lots of ways to increase that dramatically while you're in space (e.g. inflatable habs). All you really have to do is figure out how to keep them comfortable until the starship is outside the atmosphere and whatever larger spaces have been constructed/inflated.
Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially. If you supply 80% of the energy demand that way, you'd easily half the "proper food" mass that you need to ship.
> Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially.
Has that ever been done for human consumption before? Relying on a novel technology in a setup where, if it breaks, everyone on board dies, seems rather dubious.
That's not even being studied right now so give it 20-25 years before it's even considered as a long term diet. Also we have to keep them sane as well as simply alive and good food is a big part of long term mood maintenance. You're going to be asking people to eat this for at least 7 months if it's a 1 way trip and you have a working food system on the other side.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x feeds nutritional algae, yeast, and a variety of mushrooms ( pearl oyster, blue oyster, elm oyster, coral tooth and enokitake), though the mushrooms were tested with a simulated (I assume this means petrochemically derived, purified, and reconstituted to match the real mixture) analog of the real electrochemical acetate feed, which they tested with the first two organisms.
There were also experiments with "undifferentiated lettuce tissue", using C13-labeled acetate to investigate whether crop plants are able to properly feed off of acetate as their main food source, instead of photosynthesis-based small molecules.
What I'm suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance.
Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor.
Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking.
Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit.
The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation...
[0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.
