NASA Robotics

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency put out a call for innovative food systems that maximize safe and nutritious food outputs to help support long-term space missions in 2020. A colleague any myself co-founded the team which ultimately won the Canadian competition and was awarded $540,000.

We proposed a novel modular polyculture indoor food production system called ‘CANGrow’. The complete system grows a diversity of biologically efficient food products and has the potential to provide a variety of nutrient-dense foods totaling over 500kg annually from a system just 2m cubed in volume.

Two prototype iterations, demonstrating each sub-system and a fully integrated working prototype, and multiple reports were presented across 4 rounds of judging over 3 years. A number of novel technologies were developed and many sub-systems were combined in order to offer the widest possible variety of foods with optimal yield and minimal input. These included liquid mycelium fermentation to provide a protein source and the ability to propagate plants from cellular material in agar as opposed to seed, increasing the variety of plants that can be grown as well as repeatability and reducing the seed input required for a long duration space mission. Water was recirculated with an inline UV filter and algae growth chamber on the drain water line to maximize water use efficiency. The final working prototype configuration could grow strawberries, cherry tomatoes, two root vegetables, microgreens, four unique culinary herbs, mini-head lettuce, algae powder, and the mycelial meat substitute. Full details cannot be shown as IP protection is being sort on aspects of the system and we are now exploring tresterial commercial applications for various configurations of the base technology.