A team comprising experts from La Trobe’s engineering and plant sciences departments and the Gaia Project Australia have been named finalists in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge.
The goal of the challenge is to create novel food production technologies or systems that require minimal resources and produce minimal waste, while providing safe, nutritious food suitable for long-duration human exploration missions.
The Enigma of the Cosmos team will travel to Ohio in the US for the final on 15 and 16 August, where the winners will be chosen by NASA. The awards ceremony will be livestreamed on Marshall Space Flight Centre’s YouTube channel and NASA Prize’s Facebook page.
Their achievement as finalists was thanks to their vertical farm project, where leafy and micro greens can be grown in a controlled environment in just 28 days, instead of the three months it would normally take in soil. Designing and building the prototype that NASA could take to space to feed astronauts took six months.
Australian finalists face tough competition
La Trobe Engineering Lecturer Dr Alex Stumpf said the project was the only finalist in Australia and was competing with several international and US projects.
“Our team spent many long days and nights creating the world’s first expandable grow channel vertical farm system,” Stumpf says.
“We are extremely proud of the unit, and we are excited to see what the judges think of our system. I believe we will do well in the competition, but regardless of the outcome, the system and the ideas will lead to real impact back here on Earth.”
The future of farming
Gaia Project Australia founder and CEO Nadun Hennayaka says that, in addition to helping grow food in space and offering astronauts a varied and healthy diet, the team also wanted to test how the vertical farm operated on Earth.
“While we are creating a growing environment optimised for space, it has real impact on the future of farming on Earth as well,” Hennayaka says.
“With so many people living in high density city apartments, the depletion of soils and unpredictable weather patterns, using vertical farms will be the future for large-scale food production and even domestic growing.
“Growing food without soil, with exactly the right nutrients, leads to less crop waste and eliminates the threats of pests, disease and adverse weather conditions damaging the crops.
“In conventional farming, space is required between plants for people and machinery to operate, resulting in about 15 heads of lettuce per square metre. While robotic greenhouse setups can increase this to 25 to 40 heads per square metre, they come with high initial costs. Our system, on the other hand, maximises space efficiency without relying on complex robotic systems, allowing us to grow 50 to 55 plants per square metre at a third of the cost.”
Advancing agricultural research
Professor Mathew Lewsey, from the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food, says the system was helping to advance research on Earth and in space.
“We are using Gaia’s technology to train the next generation of plant technologists,” Lewsey says.
“As part of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space, our students are simulating how crops could grow during spaceflight and working to improve yield. They are applying what they learn to develop better varieties and growth conditions for use in vertical farms.”
