Can confirm that it’s 0 daily maintenance. Time sinks after assembly would be resetting the system and harvest. A system reset takes ~40 minutes with makeshift tools, and a full harvest takes 2.5 hours with me documenting, weighing, photographing, and beginning to prepare samples for testing as I harvest. Cooking time would be the same as beforehand.

Our calorie production per square foot can be higher than with aerogardens because of the emphasis on the substrate. The units are also quite light (even when the substrate is fully saturated), can be re-arranged to fit within a set area, pack up and fold out easily, have in built filters to keep things safe and fresh, and can provide a nice balance of macros and micronutrients. It’s definitely more advanced than aeroponic systems with (as mentioned before) quite a reasonable price tag for the value. This is not priced as much as many of the other space food production systems.

I'm not quite sure what part of the aerogardens you're wondering whether we align with, but feel free to ask further questions if I haven't answered your question!

I was waiting for this question! We’ve been working on integrating both our space design and our Earth design for the past 2 years. I’d like to break down the comment and my answer into a couple parts because I have a lot to say about it. To address the elephant in the room, the cost is to construct one of these is significantly less than the cost to construct many of the other space food production systems out there. I don’t want to quote you a price just yet because we are still negotiating costs with our space market. We also have several ways to lower the price to deploy on Earth which again, for negotiation purposes I can’t discuss.

In terms of time, the units require 0 daily maintenance. As one of our primary testers, I can confirm that even with our prototypes, the only maintenance I’ve been required to do is planting and harvest. Planting takes ~40 minutes, and I did it with a plastic spoon, an egg carton, $0.99 packets of seeds, and a small plastic Chinese takeout container. Harvest took me about 2.5 hours, but I was also weighing the harvest, measuring, taking photos, vacuum packing samples, taking photos, and taking notes. I spent significantly less time messing with the units than with my outdoor garden!

In terms of water, it takes significantly less water than an outdoor garden as well. We replant and adjust water content in between harvests. Times between harvests vary, but on the current cycle, it’s ~35 days. The general suggestion for an outdoor garden would be ~ 1 inch depth of water per week per square foot, or 0.623 gallons/square foot per week. At this point, the amount of water we used to restore the entire system after 35 days, about 1.5 gallons, was equal to the amount of water added to about 2.5 square feet of a regular garden per week. If a family is struggling to obtain safe and clean water, our system would be the better choice.

Space! These can be hidden in furniture if needed. Or they can be stacked. Or rearranged. Our current prototypes fit into the 4 foot by 4 foot area right now, but we are making a version whose footprint can be rearranged (think legos), as long as a 16 square foot area can be achieved. We’re based in a city and currently running a couple of these in our apartments for testing. While they are bigger than expected, they allow us to grow more than planters would and take up less space than some pieces of furniture.

Food insecurity is definitely NOT a food production issue, and we’re not pretending to solve all the systemic issues that exist. However, we hope to address some: lack of transportation and lack of fresh food available. People in urban areas often can’t travel to grocery stores, or their grocery stores don’t have healthy food options at a reasonable price point. Many food banks that we’ve spoken to aren’t equipped to ship out food regularly or struggle to obtain and ship out perishables. We’re eliminating the middleman.

Electricity would be our main concern, and we currently have existing no-power required backups for every system except one, which is cooling. We’re exploring options for this one, and there’s a couple interesting possibilities…but this comment is too long already for me to weigh pros and cons for each one!

What it does require: substrate, seeds, a one-time larger addition of water (and subsequent smaller additions of water, that even with a significant margin of error would be less than 10 gallons worth), electricity, and fertilizer. To address water loss, we recently added 1.5 gallons worth of water to our 2 foot by 2 foot prototype that had been sitting open for the past 2 months when we reset it. I overestimated the amount of water it required and accidentally overwatered it…

In terms of colonies and ships, it depends on the gravity of the environment. As long as there is some gravity, it should function as expected. In 0 g environments, things get more complicated. That’s one of the challenges we’ll face in the future. NASA explicitly said that 0 g would be addressed in a future iteration of design.

Just to clarify what you mean by "life support," do you mean for food production or for air?

I’m going to be completely honest and say that I’m not sure how NASA is tackling this or how much of an issue it is for their systems. However, this is something that they don’t want us to design for. I expect that if it is an issue, they’ll be attempting to deal with it at the habitat level. Our solution would fit within individual rooms in the habitat, so they'd never be directly exposed to and operating outside the habitat.

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Hello! Thanks for the interest and for checking in! I do agree that fungi are amazing. I'm certainly not a mycologist, but mushrooms are some of my favorite food! While we unfortunately don't have any plans to grow them in the system just yet, hopefully we can cultivate them someday.

There’s a couple! The first was how differently our substrate interacts with water than expected and how it distributes water than traditional substrate, combined with the water cycle within the units. We’re still feeling it out the specific watering regimen required for our mix.

Something else extremely unexpected that happened was that we had a random weed pop up at the very end of a grow cycle! Current theory is that it came from one of our seed packets, as our substrate ingredients are inert until mixed together. It hasn’t happened before or since. I still have samples of that weed stored.

Not an issue, but I was surprised by the water cycle we have going! I knew it would happen, but for some reason the first time it happened, I called one of my friends and gushed about how I couldn't believe that a water cycle was formed.

Glad that you weighed in! We decided against a hydroponics system for several reasons, including that our planting patterns wouldn't work very well with a hydroponics system. Our heating and cooling (and humidity) systems are significantly less taxed with our current system as well. The in-built filters are more easily integrated with the rest of the system. The entire system as a whole weighs significantly less. We were working with an aquaponics research group a while back, and our current 2 foot by 2 foot by 26 inch system weighs less than the water that their 36 inch by 16 inch by ~6.5 inch unit used. While intermittent spray systems may consume less water, they also require more energy for the spray systems (in addition to the increased cooling and humidity regulation costs).

As for cost, I had a good (well-meant) laugh at the overestimation of the price. If only we had access to several billion in funding! I fear that you overestimate the price of a single unit by several zeroes. I can't tell you the exact price as we are negotiating the selling price with the space sector, but a full solution will be significantly, significantly less than that.

Edit: a word.

We had to fill out an entire HACCP and friends plan for this! While I won't go over everything that could possibly go wrong, I'll hit some of the highlights.

1. The wrong micro-organisms could grow within the system. This would have certain "cues" that would show up in sensor data. If this happens, the entire unit can be emptied out, the substrate can be dried out, and the frame can be disassembled and disinfected.
2. Speaking of sensor data, while the system only needs a few sensors to operate, we have multiple redundant sensors installed in the case that one fails. If they somehow all go berserk and fail, the user can easily swap in another one.
3. We have humidity stabilizers that can pop with mishandling. It's bad for the plants (though not for humans) if these get punctured and leak out into into the substrate. We've segmented them off, have drip trays in case of punctures, and instructions on how to change them out. To clarify what I mean about the humidity stabilizers being not harmful for humans: you can literally drink the gel inside them. It wouldn't be tasty, and it'll give you a major stomach ache, but it's 100% food ingredients in there.
4. Finally, let's say something unforeseen goes terribly, terribly wrong in one of the units, and it can't be fixed - maybe some sort of weird Martian bacteria gets into it or the electronics (and all the backups and all the replacements) on a specific unit mysteriously fail in some way that can't be fixed. Because the system is made of several units, the others are all separate and unaffected by the issue. In the case of a weird bacterial infection, the infected unit can also be sealed. The seal would act as a quarantine in this case!

There's a lot more on our documents to NASA, but I didn't want to make this comment too long!

A couple, actually! Our solution is substrate based, which means that we can use some clever planting methods to grow multiple types of food in the same area – more variety is good for the palate. We also can grow root-based crops (which are comparatively high in calories) with much less fuss than a hydroponics or aeroponics system. Because ours is entirely based on plants, human waste from the astronauts can also possibly be composted to “refresh” the system so to speak. Note that I'm only bringing this up because this was a question that NASA asked us, and in no way am I saying that the astronauts can or should use one of these as a toilet. Composting waste should only be done safely and responsibly.

Our solution is also surprisingly light. I’m not a big person (5’2, doesn’t lift weights), but I can move our 2 foot by 2 foot around alone with a fully saturated substrate. I can’t remember what the weigh in was for our second plant, but I fully expect that a couple of astronauts in decent physical condition can move even a fully planted unit around. Not that they have to move the whole thing around – it breaks down easily.

Also, extremely low water consumption! It’s surprisingly lower than we originally expected. As mentioned before, to restore our 2 foot by 2 foot unit after a 35 day cycle and 2 months sitting unplanted and open, we added 1.5 gallons. That was an overestimation of the water that the system needed.

We’re using our own mix of inert materials to create the substrate. I can’t tell you exactly what we’re using, but it’s cheap and very light, with a bulk density of about 12% that of loose soils. Shipping something to space costs a LOT, so we’ve been trying to make it as light as possible.

While any fertilizer can be used, NASA did ask us whether the system could be used beneficially in any other part of the habitat or trip there. It is possible that the astronauts can turn their waste into fertilizer for use in the system, though it must be done safely and responsibly. In terms of decades or centuries long fertilization of the system, I’m not entirely sure to be honest. With our current technology, there’d almost certainly be some loss in terms of water filtration, so a perfect system can’t be achieved. How long would that be? I’m not sure because I haven’t seen the details of their water filtration system.

TL;DR: It’s unlikely that it’ll be able to run itself forever with our current technology, but we expect to get a good 3-5 years out of it.

LOL! Let's hope that it happens!