The simple fact IS humans are not going to be able to take livestock to space. The mass balance with chemical and nuclear fission even fusion rockets is against it.
There is no way to lift out of earth’s gravity well the mass needed to feed,water and reproduce livestock. It’s ten to one feed to whole animal with cattle, then you have to skin and gut it you lose all the bones, gut track mass ect. It’s 40% weight on the hoof to edible meat. This says nothing of the oxygen and more importantly the water requirements. Cattle need 2,000 gallons or more per finished pound of meat.
Like it or not when humans go to space they are vegans or they are eating fermented and bioreactor based proteins.
Here on earth 6 billion people live with chronic protein deficiency. Here again there is not enough land or water to have all 8 billion humans eat like Europeans or Americans the math is clear on that.
It’s when not if biotech brings mass cultured proteins to the market. Once it scaled up it will be the cheapest form of protein in the market and economics will decide. One has a choice buy a ground feedlot beef for $8 per lb or buy cultured ground beef identical in DNA to the cow it was biopsied from for $2 or less. People will chose by their wallets. Don’t want $2 biotech don’t buy it , but the price of feedlot beef will shoot up as demand drops and its supply shrinks.
Who in their right mind would sacrifice the taste / smell / procedure of enjoying a delicious meal from what God put before us to enjoy? Look at the physiological damage done to a human with just being in the space station more than 6 months? We are made to exist with a force so as so our muscles can be utilized. We don’t even know the planet we are on now and to contemplate zipping around in space as the next logical procedure is naive.
I read a lot of scifi and one series solved that ‘problem’. They took fertilized eggs, embryos, of the livestock frozen in liquid nitrogen. That way they could take thousands of cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, chickens of various varieties in a very small space then gestate them in artificial wombs...........................
“Cattle need 2,000 gallons or more per finished pound of meat.”
If you don’t know that basic biological fact, what is the probability you’d be wrong on a complex subject involving land management, animal farming, demographics, economics, nutrition, cultural preferences, etc? The math is clear on that, it’s 99.87%.
“ The simple fact IS humans are not going to be able to take livestock to space.”
Nonsense.
I do it monthly