Deep Space Food Challenge
“The Deep Space Food Challenge is an international competition where NASA offers prize purse awards to U.S. teams and recognition to international teams. Teams are invited to create novel and game-changing food technologies or systems that require minimal inputs and maximize safe, nutritious, and palatable food outputs for long-duration space missions, and which have potential to benefit people on Earth.” - Deep Space Food Challenge
To tackle this project I chose to investigate the best way to effectively grow food in a compact space, using the added component of low gravity to alter how plants are typically grown. The design I first played with was inspired by several different ships from comics I was reading at the time.
I set out with this initial idea in mind to determine how plants grew, and if it was entirely based on gravity. I used a species of basil, as basil grows relatively fast and has a long root system which would help me observe the outcome of the variables.