SpaceG

About the team

As students pursuing a Bachelors in Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering, we are looking for an opportunity to expose ourselves to competitions that brings about awareness on sustainability, while also using our imagination to showcase what we could bring to the table to make the world a better place. We hope that this challenge would pave the way for us to, one day, bring an invention that would benefit mankind.

Our vision

When an astronaut goes to space, the uncertainty of space means that they should be expecting the unexpected. For instance, an 8-day long mission can unexpectedly turn into an 8-month long journey. Furthermore, resources like food and water have to be sent up to them, which is not only very extravagant, but also unsustainable. In the long term, the arrangement of sending essential yet resources does not really make sense. Thus, our group decided to leverage upon hydroponics and vertical farming to ensure that the hardworking astronauts are prepared for adversities or unfortunate incidents. Space hydroponic farming will allow them to have high quality and appetizing food for their voyage. We hope that our invention, which is a small step to the astronauts’ comfort, will allow them to take a giant leap in the exploration that will bring about benefits to the human race.

Our solution

Food can be the way to the heart! We want food that is not only of high quality/nutritious, but also delicious so the astronauts will be reminded of home. On top of that, we want to maximise crop harvest rate and minimise food waste generated in space. Thus, we chose to implement hydroponics and vertical farming, since the underlying technology and the breakthrough behind hydroponics farming research on earth is well suited for the space environment. Nevertheless, current hydroponics farms are too costly due to the infancy of the technology. With that said, space hydroponics farming would prove to be way cheaper than sending spacecraft to the International Space Station for food. Moreover, it is more sustainable as we will be massively reducing the carbon footprint from sending spacecraft just for a couple of meals. Thus, this presents an opportunity for us to explore the new age of eating foods that are grown in outer space. We hope that the research done for hydroponics in space, if successful, can be brought to earth.