Re: [DIYbio] Re: How difficult would it be to make a super food?

The original question was more in the context of "an ice age sets in and you only have frozen trees you dig out to use for fuel" (though that wasn't stated in any way, that's why I picked mushrooms.)  The space aspect is interesting though - maybe start making wooden cargo rockets so that nearly everything which makes it to space can be turned into food?  Any idea of the average percentage of weight of the vessel itself in orbit?  (That is, not the cargo weight?)

On Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 5:51:05 AM UTC-4, John Griessen wrote:

On 04/11/2018 10:24 PM, Daniel C. wrote:
> where everything has to be launched in the first place, why bother converting it from X to Y via a biological system when you
> could just launch Y?

There's always the case of being in a limited closed system for the near term.  So in that setting you have many byproducts
available as growing media that have degraded from their "new state" to some used condition after already having the launch energy
spent.
They are free by comparison to restocking anything not yet launched.  The fraction of weight left over after a launch to orbit is
something like .2%.  Another way to look at it is to price things by weight -- launched to orbit costs:

Atlas V                 $20.2k/kg     as of 2015
Falcon Heavy                 $17k/kg  as of 2016
Soyuz FG                 $7.2k/kg     as of ?
SpaceX Falcon-9         $2.7k/kg  as of 2016
SpaceX Falcon-9 re-used $1.9k/kg  as of 2017
SpaceX planned BFR          $75/kg  future ??