At the Nation of Makers annual conference, held June 15–16 in Chattanooga, Tenn., Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden launched its Growing Beyond Earth Maker Contest, a three-year multidisciplinary endeavor to leverage the ingenuity of minds across the United States to reinvent the systems used to grow edible plants on the International Space Station (ISS) and beyond.
The contest is open to professional, college, and high school teams. Entries to the contest will be assessed and judged by NASA engineers and botanists, and winning proposals will be considered for implementation on future NASA missions.
Grants totaling approximately $1 million from NASA ($750,000) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services ($250,000) support the new, first-of-its-kind community workspace dedicated to the technology of growing food. It will serve students in elementary, middle and high schools, local community members of all ages, and makers throughout the U.S.
As NASA looks toward a long-term human presence beyond Earth orbit, they face specific science, technology, engineering, and mathematics challenges related to food production in space. Through the Maker Contest, Fairchild’s goal is to harness the creativity and talent throughout a national network, and its local community, to address those challenges, which include:
In the first phase, Fairchild hopes to attract as many as 100 teams to participate. In the second phase, judges will award $500 to 15 teams to support prototyping and testing of their design. In the final phase, three top winners will be chosen in each category—professional, college, and high school. The winners will receive a stipend to attend the 2020 Nation of Makers annual conference. Designs must be submitted by Feb. 3, 2020, and the winning designs will be announced Feb. 14, 2020.