Space travel is a complex undertaking. Fundamentally, all life on Earth has evolved around the specific conditions of our planet. Naturally, taking life beyond our pale blue dot presents a raft of challenges. A particularly immediate concern for space travellers is food.
Although the cost of sending one kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit has plummeted in the last ten years1, it is still clearly unfeasible to send traditional farms and livestock into space. Packaged food is also not a long-term answer. Fresh produce is known to have higher nutritive value than processed versions, and a resupply mission to Mars is thought to require shelf lives of at least three years2. Growing fresh food on board removes this limit and provides a further benefit to a sustainable, circular system that utilises in-situ resource utilisation to reduce dependence on Earth-based resupply3.
The race to develop technologies for food cultivation in space presents significant opportunities for innovation and commercialisation. Government agencies, private space companies, agritech businesses, materials science organisations, and university spin-outs are all investing in technologies that could support long-duration missions and future extraterrestrial settlements.
As organisations commit substantial resources to solving these complex technical challenges, securing patent protection can be critical to safeguarding research and attracting funding. Importantly, many innovations developed for space-based food production have substantial potential for adoption in terrestrial agriculture, controlled-environment farming and resource-efficient food systems. This article highlights several areas that may offer particularly attractive opportunities for patent protection and technology transfer.
Crop selection and optimisation
Picking the right crop is a science in itself. NASA judges candidate crops on four things: total yield, harvest index, growth efficiency, and ease of care2. A good space crop provides lots of calories for very little water, light, and labour. Crops exhibit huge variety in their pros and cons for long-term space travel. Common crops, such as lettuce, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, microalgae (e.g. Chlorella), and radishes represent a snapshot of possible choices ranging from fast-growing to protein-dense but slow-growing crops3.
Algal photobioreactors and microbial protein systems (e.g. hydrogenotrophic bacteria) are shown to be the most efficient foods in terms of light requirements per calorie while also being fast to grow. However, the research also notes that there is a physiological benefit associated with eating more recognisable fresh plants, such as lettuce. Therefore, methods for optimising the growth of traditional foods will remain of great importance.
Developments in this area could include breeding new plant varieties that can better withstand stresses and producing apparatus that can help to optimise water and light delivery to plants.
Beyond the plant itself, the seed is its own site for innovation. Before a seed reaches a growth chamber, it will be treated or coated with a chemical or biological formulation designed to improve germination and growth. On Earth, seed-priming and coating technologies already span a wide range of chemistries. These include osmotic and hydro-priming agents that pre-condition the seed’s water uptake, antioxidant and plant-growth-regulator treatments that speed up germination, and biopriming with beneficial microbes that establish a protective, symbiotic relationship with the seedling from the moment it sprouts7.
These chemistries take on added importance away from Earth. Dry, unsown seeds represent the most stress-resistant stage of a plant’s life cycle. However, advanced seed coatings will need to further protect and support dry seeds and new seedlings for tolerating far higher doses of ionising radiation than found on Earth5.
Coatings may need to add radiation-protectant compounds, DNA-repair cofactors, or free-radical scavengers without causing toxicity to the plants. Additionally, the protective agents would ideally extend their effects further into early germination and seedling establishment than traditional coatings because a plant is at its most vulnerable to the elevated radiation and altered gravity at the seedling stage.
Because seed stock represents a fixed, resource-limited “upload mass” that cannot easily be replenished on a multi-year mission, using coatings that improve germination uniformity and success rate directly reduces the weight of the payload associated with seed stock. The same thinking extends to supporting the plant reproduction cycle itself, to safeguard successive generations of crops across a long mission5.
From a commercial perspective, innovations that improve crop productivity while reducing resource consumption may find applications well beyond the space sector. Controlled-environment agriculture, vertical farming and food-security initiatives face many of the same constraints around water, energy and land use. Technologies developed for space missions could therefore generate value in multiple markets, strengthening the business case for investment and patent protection.
High-efficiency LED lighting systems
Plants require light to grow. Away from Earth, achieving the correct lighting conditions to optimise plant growth is challenging to do without assistance from supplemental LED lights.
Light also represents one of the biggest energy costs of running a space farm. Particularly on a spacecraft, the power demand and the waste heat generated both need to be accounted for. High-efficiency lighting has been identified as a critical need for any Mars-ready food system3. Researchers have tested plant growth under different combinations of red and blue light at reduced gravity to understand what wavelengths are the most optimal4. Preparing ideal growing conditions for individual plants could result in major improvements in mission efficiency.
The chemical compounds that generate light also require innovation and adaptation for space travel. OLED compounds are very popular on Earth for being able to produce uniform and highly tuneable wavelengths, to mimic natural sunlight.
OLEDs work by exciting electrons within organic compounds. As the electrons return to a ground state, light is emitted. The issue is that these chemical structures are susceptible to damage and degradation as a result of ionising radiation. Unfortunately, outside of Earth’s protective magnetic field, interplanetary travel results in an increase in exposure to high energy solar radiation.
Adapting and innovating upon current OLED compounds to improve their lifetime and radiation resistance while maintaining the correct emission spectrum is therefore a key problem to solve when it comes to plant growth away from Earth. This challenge may have different solutions across different OLED technologies (fluorescence, phosphorescence, and delayed fluorescence).
Additionally, adaptive spectral-tuning controllers or novel LED architectures that boost efficiency are a clear, hardware-related area for solutions.
Innovations that produce more usable light for the same power input, or that more efficiently tune the spectrum required for optimal plant growth, would therefore contribute to solving a problem that touches every other part of the interconnected system within a spacecraft.
Microgravity-adapted root growth
Root systems behave fundamentally differently off-Earth. Critically, roots do not know which way is “up” in space. On Earth, plants have evolved roots to function around the natural water and air supply to soil under Earth’s gravity. Microgravity during space travel, and stronger or weaker gravity on other planets, alters the conditions around the plant’s root-zone. This affects the hydrodynamics of a soil-root system, causes a change in capillary flow, and can produce hypoxic root zones and altered nutrient uptake3.
Current experimental space crops are grown in specialised materials including gels, mats, and granules which can help to guide and retain roots in an optimal configuration. These growing materials can wick water and air to the roots in a way that replicates the conditions found naturally on Earth.
These are often combined with specially formulated slow-release fertiliser pellets to address nutrient absorption issues5. The design of new growing materials and specialised fertilisers that mitigate the negatives of space travel will be of crucial importance for future space missions.
Soils
Looking further ahead, space agencies will want to grow food directly in treated Martian or lunar regolith in order to cut cargo mass and make use of available extraterrestrial resources5. These soils have several known issues that make it difficult to grow plants; these include the particle size of the soil being too small (causing a lack of structure), poor water holding capacity and poor ventilation to roots8. These soils are also completely dead, lacking any of the complex microbial communities found on Earth. Experiments on Earth have relied on adding organic matter and manure to reduce plant stress in synthetic Martian soil. However, in the absence of abundant organic matter, different solutions to these problems will be needed. Treatments and additive agents will be required to improve the growing conditions of foreign soil, ideally ones that are simple and efficient to implement with limited resources6. It is clear that this technical field has high potential for innovation and patent protection.
Both in microgravity and in non-Earth soil, developments in hardware may also be required to create grow beds that can properly manage water, air, and drainage – this is also an area with substantial potential for innovation.
Conclusions
The challenges of growing food in space represent a compelling opportunity for innovation, collaboration and commercial development. While these advances are essential to reducing reliance on Earth-based resupply missions and enabling more self-sustaining space exploration, their impact is unlikely to be confined to the aerospace sector.
Many of the technologies being developed today, from advanced lighting systems and novel seed treatments to alternative growing media and resource-efficient cultivation methods, have clear potential to address pressing agricultural challenges on Earth.
By implementing an intellectual property strategy at an early stage, innovators can protect their products and gain competitive advantage, attract investment, facilitate partnerships and create opportunities for future licensing and commercialisation.
References
1 : Terzi et al., From Sputnik to Starship: Estimating the experience curve of space launch technology, PNAS Nexus, Volume 5, Issue 7, July 2026.
2 : Perchonok MH, Cooper MR, Catauro PM. Mission to Mars: food production and processing for the final frontier. Annu Rev Food Sci Technol. 2012;3(1):311–330.
3 : Asif Raihan, Toward sustainable living in space: A review of environmental control and life support system technologies, Space Habitation, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2026
4 : Valbuena MA, Manzano A, Vandenbrink JP, et al. The combined effects of real or simulated microgravity and red-light photoactivation on plant root meristematic cells. Planta. 2018;248(3):691–704
5 : De Micco V, Amitrano C, Mastroleo F, et al. Plant and microbial science and technology as cornerstones to Bioregenerative Life Support Systems in space. Npj Microgravity. 2023;9(1):69.
6 : Pooja Kasiviswanathan et al., Farming on Mars: Treatment of basaltic regolith soil and briny water simulants sustains plant growth, PLoS ONE 17(8): e0272209. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272209
7 : K.K. Sharma et al., Seed treatments for sustainable agriculture-A review, Journal of Applied and Natural Science 7 (1) : 521 – 539 (2015)
8 : Jinghang Ding, Yuxuan Xu, Jungang Tan, Hong Zhang, Xin Xiong, Chuang Mei, Mingjie Li, Gengxin Xie, How to make lunar soil suitable for cultivation? – A review, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 948, 2024.
This article was prepared by Patent Attorney Louis Campbell
More articles from our world space week series below:
- Patents Beyond Earth: Is Space a No Man’s Land? Part 1
- Patents Beyond Earth: Do we need s Martian Patent Office? Part 2
- Sustainable Technologies in Space: Protecting Innovation for a Greener Frontier
- Materials at the Final Frontier: How Engineering Innovations Are Powering the Future of Space
For more information contact our Transport, Aerospace & Defence team