Coloring the Grayscale Moon
The Cosmic Design of Phnam Bagley
I’d be dubious, too, looking at those dark green balls of microalgae. But they must taste better than they look.
“That’s delicious,” says the CNN reporter in wide-eyed surprise. “I could eat this, all the time. That’s really good.” The reporter has the same reaction after a sip of coffee powder mixed with coconut oil and ghee.
Take note: This is space food. Space food is not supposed to elicit this kind of reaction. It’s not supposed to be delicious. It only needs to be reasonably nutritious to serve its purpose, which is to keep astronauts alive and functioning.
But merely keeping astronauts alive—as necessary as that is—doesn’t cut it for industrial designer and space architect Phnam Bagley, who created the balls of microalgae. Phnam might agree with a thought that keeps circling in my head as I write this: There’s a big difference between being kept alive and living.
I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity.
Chris: Before we get into the microalgae, I wanted to start with your work to make living in space “more human,” as you say on the website for your design firm Nonfiction. What do you mean by this?
Phnam: We’re surrounded by color on Earth: the sky, the trees, our skin, the color of our clothes. We’re surrounded by a variety of textures, things we can touch, like our hair or the keyboard you’re typing on. But on the Moon, many of these sensory experiences don’t exist. Without them, people won’t function at their peak. We need peak function when we send people to live and work in space.
Chris: Speaking of color, I’m intrigued by the beacon that you envision on the Moon. In the image below, the beacon stands out with shades of blue and purple, and would serve as a welcoming entryway to a subsurface habitat.
Phnam: It’s the idea of bringing color, texture, and natural environments to a place that’s so foreign to us: the grayscale, desolate landscape of the Moon. It’s about dealing with the psychology of isolation, of living in a place that’s basically “designed” to kill you. How will it feel to be away from your friends and family and all of humanity while you’re living and working on the Moon? This can only be done sustainably by thinking deeply about our human needs.
Chris: Color and texture and beauty—which remind us of Earth and home—are more important than we realize. Is that what you’re saying?
Phnam: I’m a very “unreasonable” human. I have needs. I have bad days, just like anyone, and I guarantee that when we start sending a wider range of people who don’t fit the mold of the typical professional astronaut, you’ll start to see cracks in human behavior. That can be dangerous in an extreme environment. This makes human-centered design incredibly important. Color, texture, and other sensory experiences aren’t secondary concerns.
Chris: Thinking of your microalgae, I imagine that food is on the same level as other aesthetic and sensory experiences.
Phnam: With food, pleasure is just as important as nutrition, and we associate it with joy and community. It shouldn’t be any different in space—but we have no real solution to feed astronauts on long-term missions. What we have is freeze-dried and pre-packaged. It’s unappetizing. This can lead to weight loss and other problems.
Chris: Is that why you built the Space Culinary Lab?
Phnam: We designed our Space Culinary Lab for the Deep Space Food Challenge sponsored by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. The Lab offers coffee with nutritious creamer, barbequed chicken (“barbequed” with a laser to simulate grill marks), bok choy and buttered greens with the hydroponic garden, and the microalgae-based snacks. Everything worked well, except for the microalgae.
Chris: What happened with the microalgae?
Phnam: We became professional microalgae killers!
In general, NASA is worried about the prospects of growing microalgae in space and relying on it as a food source. It’s very nutritious, but we don’t know how to grow it reliably, and it’s hard to keep microalgae alive in small containers. We went through hundreds of cultures. We started and killed them and started and killed them, again and again, trying to find the right ratio.
Watch Phnam’s TED talk: “Gourmet food for the final frontier”
Participating in the Deep Space Food Challenge was very good for our business. Many of our competitors liked the human aspect that we brought to space food, and now we’re working with them. Plenty of people are working on food systems in space, but few are working on the “pleasure” aspect of food.
Chris: Shifting focus a bit, you’ve said that design teaches critical thinking skills. Can you expand on critical thinking in design? How do you bring value to your clients and the broader world?
Phnam: I have two answers that may contradict each other.
First, yes, being trained in design at school, in internships, and in the professional world, forces you to have a critical eye. As designers, we look at the way the world is and we try to find ways to make it better, whether by reducing costs, by making an object or environment more beautiful or meaningful, or as an industrial designer, working to attract more customers so they can experience the benefits of a technology. All these things make design great.
The contradicting statement is that designers are trained to value certain things: aesthetics, visual storytelling, high-end renderings and animations. These are important, but less so than the impact of what you design. And that’s the core of what we do as a company. I care more about how many lives we’re going to make better. I care more about how much comfort we can bring to people on Earth and to those who venture out into space.
Chris: Speaking of bringing comfort to people on Earth, that reminds me of the argument you hear from critics of space exploration who say that we’ve got plenty of problems to solve on Earth. They say things like “Mars is not an escape hatch,” which is true, but seems to miss the point. Why design and innovate for space?
Phnam: Why innovate at all? We don’t need to innovate to survive. We could live with what we have now. We could stop innovating today and we’d be fine. In 1924, if I told a roomful of smart people at some prestigious university that 100 years in the future we’d be flying from one place to another for an average ticket price of a few hundred dollars, I’d be shot. Me and my blue hair. But the point is that life is better with innovation, and that includes what we’ve done and are doing in space.
Chris: So much of what we’ve done in space relates back to Earth. GPS and turn-by-turn directions on our iPhones is just one example.
Phnam: We come from this planet. We have an emotional and symbolic relationship with it, and relating to Earth in this way makes sense from a business perspective. Right now, it costs so much money to develop systems in space, from space stations to rovers and so on. You’re not making money doing this, but you do make money by developing technology in extreme environments like microgravity or the surface of the Moon, by translating that innovation into things that can be deployed on Earth. That’s where you see a return on your investment.
There are certain qualities of microgravity, for example, that enable us to make things in space that we can’t make on Earth. Imagine the manufacture of biological medication fitted precisely for each individual. In the near future, we’ll customize medication in space and bring it back to Earth.
Chris: I like your optimism.
Phnam: I like to think of myself as an optimist—a hopeless optimist, really. I truly believe that we’ll solve big challenges like climate change, we’ll all have wonderful lives, everyone will have agency, and all that. I think it’s possible because I focus on these problems at work. It’s easy to peg humanity as unreasonable and violent, but there are many wonderful stories of connection and serendipity. The richness of humanity gives me the filter of optimism.