Canada GOOSE are waiting with bated breath to see if their entry will pass the muster.
The team from the University of Guelph is one of the final four institutions competing in the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge.
Final judging took place on Feb. 7 inside the campus’ Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility.
“We got a dozen crops going from basic micro crops to root crops like turnips, fruit crops like tomatoes, beans, and few others,” said Mike Dixon, professor emeritus and director of the facility. “We cover the waterfront of nutritional requirement for explorers.”
The Deep Space Food Challenge was launched in partnership with Impact Canada in 2021. The goal is to develop new technologies to produce food for both future space missions, and harsh or remote environments on earth.
Canada GOOSE (which stands for Growth Options for Outer Space Environments) is competing against two universities in Montreal (McGill and Concordia) and Ecoation Innovative Solutions Inc. from Kingsville, Ont. Each entrant received $100,000 for being in the final four.
Simulating the production of food like fruits and vegetables in an outer space environment seems like a difficult task, but Dixon said they were able to use simple, basic methods that are no different than what people use on earth.
“Controlling the light quality and quantity, carbon dioxide, water, nutrients, temperature and humidity… that’s farming,” he said. “We manage those environment variables very precisely.”
Perhaps the one difference between their project and an average garden is the amount of space available to use.
“Intercropping with different sizes of plants has allowed us to make more effect use of the whole volume of the system,” he said. “Space exploration demands that you make every use of every cubic centimetre the best you can.”
Dixon and his team have experienced no problems in growing the food. In fact, their only true hurdle over the last 10 months have been related to supply chain where equipment and supplies needed for the project were delayed in arriving.
“It held us up, it almost pushed us to the end,” said Dixon. “We weren’t able to comply with a couple of the requirements simply because we didn’t all have the technology, all the nuts and bolts that we needed to get together and push the ‘Go’ button.”
Despite the challenges, Canada GOOSE has been able to succeed in producing high-quality food through these given parameters. Whether it is good enough for the judges remains to be seen.
The winner is expected to be announced in March. First prize is $380,000.
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