Three companies building the tech to grow crops on the moon
Rockets, rovers and landers have dominated the attention of the commercial space industry as the United States focuses on sending humans back to the moon, but a handful of companies are focusing on a critical next step: feeding them once they're there.
NASA aims to assemble a moon base starting as early as 2028, and producing food will be key to eventually establishing a sustained presence there, allowing astronauts to thrive during long-duration exploration. Already the agency has spent years studying plant growth in microgravity on the International Space Station. But it will be years before astronauts can build a salad with produce grown entirely in space. It will likely take even longer for additional experiments and new capabilities to scale crop production there.
But some firms are under contract today to build the necessary technology, with the goal of creating a reliable and nutritious food system for humans on the moon - and potentially beyond.
This spring, NASA solicited Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) proposals for plant-growth technologies and has multiple contract opportunities for similar types of innovations.
To businesses already developing this type of tech, it's a promising sign that space agriculture systems could grow to be a larger part of the commercial space industry and that their experiments and technologies may be laying the groundwork for large-scale food production on the moon, Mars and deep space.
Across the industry, companies and research teams are building modular plant pods and refining larger lunar greenhouse designs, preparing to cultivate difficult-to-grow flora on the lunar surface and developing monitors that can detect plant stress before it hinders growth.
Together, these technologies offer a glimpse into what off-world crop production - in space stations, on the moon and on Mars - could look like.
"If autonomous controlled-environment agriculture and commercial space infrastructure continue to develop as expected, the addressable market could ultimately support a company with tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue," said Fartash Vasefi, co-founder and chief technology officer of SafetySpect, a firm that develops environmental and food safety technology.
The moon does not make for a natural garden. So astronauts will have to bring the ingredients for a garden up with them.
NASA has funded multiple initiatives to develop the growing environment for crops to feed crews living in orbit, on the moon or on other planets, with different teams developing growth chambers, greenhouses and other technology for off-world agriculture.
Two prominent cases illustrate how the same concepts and techniques for growing food on Earth may be adapted for inhospitable environments. Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF), a science mission experiment that Space Lab Technologies is developing for an Artemis lunar landing, will study how the moon's environment affects plant growth and nutritional content.
Meanwhile, Interstellar Lab is working toward a greenhouse that the company said will eventually be able to sustain human crews on other planets.
Selected as one of three Artemis 3 mission science experiments in March 2024, the LEAF experiment involves building a small, solar-powered growth chamber that will be deployed on the lunar surface during a future crewed mission.
The chamber will house three plants - two varieties of brassica rapa, which are in the mustard family, and thale cress - selected for their history of growth in space, food potential, small size and quick growth. Using power from built-in solar panels, the stout, boxy chamber will be propped on the lunar surface by four splayed legs as it autonomously provides the necessary light, nutrients, water and atmosphere for the plants to grow for three to five days. The crew will extract seedling samples and return them to Earth for analysis.
The experiment will study how the moon's partial gravity and space radiation affect photosynthesis and plant nutritional content. It will also investigate whether there are genetic traits that contribute to plants' resilience to lunar stress. The goal is two-fold: learn how to select or breed crops best suited for growth, nutrition and carbon dioxide-to-oxygen conversion in space, and refine the equipment to help plants grow best in lunar conditions.
Given shifts in NASA's original Artemis plans, LEAF doesn't have a scheduled launch, but it's being developed for one of the two Artemis lunar landings the agency has planned for 2028.
The plant growth chamber builds on nearly 10 years of NASA-supported tech development at Space Lab. Its first NASA contract in 2017 helped the company build a growth chamber that both watered and harvested nutritious aquatic plants in microgravity during a Blue Origin New Shepard flight in 2020 and 2025 - tech that it later adapted for LEAF. Since then, the Boulder, Colorado-based company has secured $19.3 million through 15 NASA contracts for space agriculture technology, including an autonomous plant-health monitoring device and even a concept for a greenhouse dome for Mars.
Such bioregenerative technologies are key to farther and longer space exploration, said Christine Chamberlain, Space Lab vice president and chief business officer.
"When we start having a more sustainable presence in space, either in LEO or a moon base or on to Mars, the need for being able to either recycle or reuse or regenerate what you consume will become more and more necessary to be able to sustain that exploration without having to take everything you need with you from Earth," she said.
Space agriculture technologies also have significant commercial potential, she added, because plants produced in these systems can be used for biomanufacturing, leading to other important materials in space, such as medicine, biofuel or plastics.
Chamberlain has seen this firsthand, as Space Lab has worked on a separate NASA-funded project for a regenerative lunar mineral mining facility that would grow plants to help sustain the extraction process.
Also working toward greenhouses for other worlds is Interstellar Lab, which got its start in 2018 concepting lunar greenhouses that could be replicated on Mars. Since then, the biofarming tech startup, which has an office in Paris and at the Kennedy Space Center, has developed smaller autonomous closed-loop systems to grow plants in space.
One will be aboard Vast's Haven-1 space station, which is set to launch next year. Throughout four missions over three years, astronauts will bring compartments with different seeds and crops for the plant growth chamber. The system will use AI to optimize and autonomously manage temperature, lighting, irrigation and more growing conditions in real time, then collect and analyze data on the plants' growth.
Interstellar Lab has also created prototypes of a similar system with six growing chambers, which won NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge grand prize of $750,000 in 2024, for NASA to operate in low Earth orbit (LEO). The company has received $1 million from the agency for this Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 tech.
Both LEO systems will serve as precursors to lunar plant pods. Their modular design allows for testing of different crops and growing conditions to eventually find the best options for a larger system, said Barbara Belvisi, founder and CEO of Interstellar Lab.
Next, Interstellar Lab will attempt to grow a rose in a mini greenhouse on the moon before it moves to crops. Roses require more precision and control to grow than leafy greens or microgreens, Belvisi said.
"If we can grow a rose, we can pretty much grow anything," Belvisi said. The pod will be installed by Astrolab's FLEX Rover as part of Artemis 4 and will study the flowering process. "If you can master flowering, you can master fruiting."
This system will need to be more self-sustaining than orbital chambers to protect the plant from the harsh lunar environment outside its walls while providing the ideal conditions and elements inside.
Belvisi is betting on greenhouses as a long-term bioregenerative system that most efficiently captures carbon dioxide, produces oxygen and helps feed astronauts all at once - on the moon and beyond.
"A self-sustaining civilization on Mars without a greenhouse is not going to happen," she said. "The moon is preparing humanity to become multiplanetary, and a requirement for humans to live on Mars will be to be able to grow their own food and to find a system that will generate the oxygen as well, because this is what we need to survive."
This makes the commercial market for greenhouses in space "enormous," she said, but its growth depends on how quickly rockets, landers and humans get to the moon. There, environmental conditions are actually more difficult than Mars, Belvisi said, given the lack of atmosphere, the extreme temperatures and long periods of darkness. But growing crops on Mars, which the company hopes to eventually accomplish, will bring a different set of challenges - namely figuring out how to keep plants dormant during the approximately nine months it takes to travel there.
For now, the moon is the immediate focus and, near the end of the year, Interstellar Lab plans to update its lunar greenhouse design. NASA has recently released requests for information on similar technology.
Beyond having the right environment to grow, crops will need close monitoring to ensure they're healthy enough to sustain the crews that will depend on them.
SafetySpect is developing a plant health monitor to support lunar crop growth that's rooted in technology it developed for food monitoring on Earth.
With more than $700,000 in SBIR awards from 2020 to 2024, the North Dakota-based company developed and refined a handheld device to help different government agencies confirm the composition and freshness of food to prevent product fraud, mislabeling and spoilage.
The device uses spectroscopy, or the analysis of how matter interacts with light, to measure the molecular and biological makeup of a food sample and identify biomarkers for freshness. It then couples that data with machine learning algorithms to identify the food sample and its shelf life.
This is the foundation of the plant stress detection tech SafetySpect is developing for NASA. The company received a $156,000 phase 1 NASA SBIR award last year to develop an imaging device that scans plants for early signs of stress and correlates them with environmental conditions such as humidity, temperature, pathogens and light intensity.
After receiving feedback from NASA and other stakeholders on the initial system, SafetySpect recently applied for a phase 2 award to develop an AI-enhanced handheld monitor that would be easier to use in space.
"We can literally adapt the training model in space inside the handheld system, because … we are seeing what is happening to the plant," Vasefi said. "So we make sure that we basically recalibrate our model to make sure that that bad event - the death of the plant - never happens."
The device is portable, battery operated, and includes an edge-computing chip from NVIDIA to run an AI model in the device independent of cloud connectivity, Vasefi said. Because it's also capable of evaluating bacterial load, the device could eventually be used for food safety analysis in space, too, he added.
The phase 2 award would support pilot studies as a step toward full commercialization of the device, Vasefi said. The company plans to perform tests at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the University of North Dakota's inflatable lunar habitat facility, collecting data on multiple plants and their response to different stress conditions to train its model. The company is also in talks with Vast to test the device in a simulated environment. The goal, Vasefi said, would be to use the system on a space station before the moon and Mars.
"We are at the earliest stage of validating that this tool can actually look at the stress or pre-stress condition and become a very valuable alerting system for the operator to ensure that in long-[duration] missions, the astronauts have access to vegetables and fresh food," Vasefi said.
This article first appeared in the August 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
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