Long Island Space Society    http://www.lispace.org/

29 January 2003 LI Space Society general meeting
Touro College School of Health Sciences, Bay Shore

Unfortunately our scheduled night coincided with one of this
year's snow storms, and turnout was much less than we had hoped.
Nevertheless, there were a handful on hand to hear from the Touro
researchers on their work, and enjoy their hospitality. Dr. Benjaminson
offered to make Touro College available for future meetings - particularly
if we were interested in a Sunday meeting (Saturdays the building is closed,
and he thought weekday evenings were harder to get people out). We'll
definitely keep this in mind, as it's a pretty convenient location.

At the beginning of the meeting Arthur Smith mentioned a few of our upcoming
ideas for events and action, in particular sharing an article from
space.com on NASA's proposed "Prometheus" project, on expanding
the use of nuclear energy in space travel.

The main body of the time was spent hearing from Dr. Benjaminson and
Dr. Gilchriest - they have formed a company "North Star Research" which
has been competing for NASA "Small Business Innovation" grants, and
the subjects they discussed were three different "innovation" projects
they have worked on recently geared toward supporting long-term spaceflight.

Dr. Benjaminson started the session, with a discussion of two projects:
one on growth of mushrooms from plain cellulose waste, and a related
second one on generating cellulose via a relatively simple
organic procedure (using a certain type of protozoan)
for extracting bacterial waste from water, as part of an in-flight
water purification procedure. A lot of their study was on finding the
ideal conditions for growth and conversion; the parameters do seem
suitable for actual use in space.

Dr. Gilchriest talked about their third project, which received rather
a lot of publicity recently (much of it not very accurate) -
on "growing" muscle tissue in a petri dish. The space-related
purpose is a way to provide meat without having to actually grow
the animals. Surprisingly, despite at least one long-running previous
example, it seems this hasn't been studied very much by anyone else.
The Touro group looked at goldfish, and the parameters again for
ensuring growth; I think the interesting thing here is mainly just that
it is possible - it was pretty clear a lot of further research was needed
before this one will be a practical application for human space flight.