Mission to Mars? Vertical Future to develop prototype for growing crops in space – BusinessGreen

Vertical Future has been awarded 1.5m from the UK Space Agency to boldly go where no British vertical farming company has gone before: to develop agricultural technologies for potential use beyond the Earth's orbit.

The UK company today announced it has been selected to deliver the second phase of the Autonomous Agriculture for Space Exploration project led by the UK Space Agency, which will see it adapt its technology to provide a prototype system for use in space.

Vertical Future said the aim was to develop a vertical crop farming system for use in the world's first commercial space station, which is currently being constructed by US specialist Axiom Space and is scheduled to launch into orbit in 2026.

As part of the project, the company - which develops autonomous farming technologies for cultivating leafy greens and crops for use in pharmaceuticals - said it aimed to develop the first remotely-monitored farm system to track the productivity of crops growing in low orbit from back on Earth.

Moreover, Vertical Future suggested the technologies tested through the initiative could be developed "into the 2030s as a key enabler for Mars missions".

"Following this, the goal is to implement the solutions onto the Lunar Gateway, the Lunar surface, and eventually the Martian surface," the company said.

The company also stressed that testing, researching, and developing vertical farming technologies and techniques for use in space could unlock benefits and improvements for controlled environment agriculture projects on Earth.

It cited the threats of worsening climate impacts and food insecurity to the global food system as key drivers for further developing vertical farming systems, which typically require far less water and energy to grow crops and are also protected from extreme weather.

Dr Jen Bromley, Vertical Future's chief scientific officer and autonomous agriculture project lead, said producing food, biomaterials, and medicines in space would be critical if humans are to travel from Earth.

"Plans are able to be the biofactories to cover all of these needs," she explained. "The ability to reliably grow off-Earth is not yet realised as the technologies to achieve this haven't yet been implemented away from Earth at the scale required to sustain life.

"The autonomous agriculture project puts Vertical Future and the UK at the front and centre, leading and defining a new category for the commercial space sector: Agri-Space. The skills and sector-specific knowledge brought by our incredible partners are crucial to delivering the project, including sensor development critical to delivering an autonomous growing environment and enabling fine-tuning of parameters that cannot be tested outside of a micro-gravity environment."

The project boasts a host of international collaborators, including the Australian Space Agency, Axiom Space, and operations experts Saber Astronautics, with additional support from the South Australian Space Industry Centre (SASIC).

Research partners for the project also include the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space - a joint venture between the Universities of Cambridge, Adelaide, and Western Australia - and the University of Southern Queensland's iLAuNCH programme.

Professor Anu Ojha, director of championing space at the UK Space Agency, said bringing together a range of international partners for the project alongside UK expertise "supports new space capabilities and catalyses investment".

"Supporting innovative projects like the development of a robotic space farm' facility to grow plants in space is a great opportunity to showcase the UK as a spacefaring nation, whilst enhancing the wider UK space sector, creating jobs and generating further investment," he said.

The initiative forms part of the UK Space Agency's 20m International Bilateral Fund programme, which today announced a fresh wave of funding recipients, including projects to develop space-based nuclear power technologies and enhance monitoring of the Earth's inland and coastal water quality from space.

Rolls-Royce Submarines and BWXT Advanced Technologies have been awarded 1.2m to identify optimum technologies for fission nuclear systems in space, while a project led by the University of Leicester has also secured 800,000 to explore "a range of mission opportunities" for UK space nuclear power technologies.

In addition, the University of Strathclyde's Aerospace Centre for Excellence is leading a project which has secured 1.5m funding to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help improve space operations' sustainability and reduce man-made space debris.

According to the UK Space Agency, millions of man-made space objects are orbiting the planet, of which almost 37,000 measure larger than 10cm and an estimated 130 million measure less than 1cm, with sources ranging from defunct satellites to astronauts' discarded toothbrushes and flecks of paint.

One of the key aims of the project is to use AI and machine learning to better predict the motion of space objects and thereby reduce the risk of debris-causing collisions.

Professor Massimiliano Vasile, director of the Aerospace Centre of Excellence at Strathclyde, said more sustainable operations in space were "essential to enable any future space activity".

"The sector is based on a model that isn't sustainable because we keep on launching materials into space - meaning there is a constant drain we take from Earth," he explained. "Eventually nothing will be able to use space and it will be so crowded you can't launch anything."

Vasile said the aim was "to increase automation to help avoid collisions - a little bit like self-driving cars".

"We also want to use AI to determine the impact on the space environment to allow for informed decisions," he added. "When countries decide on policies to licence new missions they need to understand the global impact of that mission on the space environment insurance companies also need to understand the global impact to quantify how risky it is."

Others working on the project include the University of Arizona, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Waterloo in Canada, the Alan Turing Institute, as well as commercial space firms LMO and GMV in the UK, Nominal Systems in Australia and Columbiad in Canada.

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Mission to Mars? Vertical Future to develop prototype for growing crops in space - BusinessGreen