UK Space Agency awards grant to grow food in space

The UK Space Agency has granted agritech firm Vertical Future £1.5 million towards its mission to take vertical farms into outer space.

VF, a UK-based vertical farming technology and manufacturing specialist, is to begin the second phase of its Autonomous Agriculture for Space Exploration project, which will see its controlled-environment-agriculture systems on Earth, adapted to become Low Earth Orbit growing systems – located on a space station built by Axiom Space.

Currently, VF designs and manufactures autonomous CEA systems for use cases on Earth including food, pharmaceuticals, and more.

The initiative is part of the UK Space Agency’s £20 million International Bilateral Fund program.

After its initial LEO plan is launched (Axiom Space’s station is due in orbit in 2026), VF aims to send its CEA systems to the moon and even to enable Mars missions in the 2030s.

“The further we go into space, the more we will need to produce while we’re there, be it food, biomaterials or medicines,” said Jen Bromley, chief scientific officer and autonomous agriculture project lead at VF.

“Plants are able to be the biofactories to cover all of these needs. 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.”

VF claims that the technologies developed and enhanced in this project will improve controlled environment agriculture productivity on Earth, which it is able to deploy now to places on Earth where climate change such as wildfires and floods, or international unrest impact food supply and production.

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“This project embodies our commitment to improve life on Earth and foster the possibilities beyond it, building a home in space that benefits every human everywhere,” says Jana Stoudemire, director of in-space manufacturing, Axiom Space.

“CEA systems address not only physiological benefits but psychological benefits to crew health and can serve as biomanufacturing facilities as well,” Stoudemire adds. “Autonomous agriculture systems support future commercial LEO destinations and enable exploration initiative for Lunar and Mars missions.”

The project is also supported by NASA, the Australian Space Agency, and is joined by research partners from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space, iLAuNCH, and the South Australian Space Industry Centre.

In other out of this world developments, find out how Rolls-Royce is using quantum computers to build nuclear reactors on the moon, here.