KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Space and farming don’t exactly seem to go together at first glance. For one, there’s no rain in space. Or soil. Or sunshine, pollinators and gravity. Without these, there isn’t much hope of growing anything. So, if our future includes living in space, we need to grow food on board a ship with no gravity.

Students at University of Tennessee’s Herbert College of Agriculture recently developed an experiment that will be conducted on the International Space Station. The students competed against other college teams’ ideas through the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP). The SSEP is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S., and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally.

“This is a dream come true,” said Devin Vitello, a senior and plant science major at UT-Herbert. “I can remember going to the Kennedy Space Center as a kid and seeing all the rockets. I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way’ I would be a part of all this.”

Vitello and classmate Nathan Tucker are in a space science research class and winners of a contest to have their experiment sent into the earth’s orbit.

“Our experiment, or project, is looking at what a lack of gravity might mean to seeds and their ability to germinate so that space travelers might have fresh food,” Vitello said.

“We needed to start small with the very basic, so we decided on having 10 varieties of seeds like bok choy, basil, tomato, lettuce and a few others,” Tucker said. “We’d like to see how these seeds react to different radiation and gravity forces and compare the effect all this has on different seeds.”

UT-Herbert Science Plant Professor Kelly Walters helped make the experiment on the space station a reality for his students.

“There’s a real practical application into what the students are proposing,” Walters said. “Say you’re an astronaut and you want to go to Mars and you’ve been eating freeze-dried food and you get tired of that over time. So, there’s some physiological and psychological benefit to having these fresh foods in space.”

Walters said when the seeds are returned to earth, the students will plant them and observe what happens to them, experiencing science as a scientist.

“We’ll do all sorts of comparisons and research,” Vitello said, “we’ll check and see if there’s a difference in sustainability between the seeds, which was affected by gravity and which were not, which type of seed performed better than the others, and so forth.”

The SSEP was created in 2010. Students in fifth grade through college investigate topics including seed germination, crystal growth, food studies, cell biology and physiology and life cycles of microorganisms. Their experiments must fit within the size and engineering constraints of a mini-laboratory compatible with the Space Station’s experiment racks. SSEP provides free educational resources to help teachers and students understand the special challenges of doing research in the weightless environment on the International Space Station.

“SSEP is designed to empower the student as scientist, and within the real-world context of science,” said Dr. Jeff Goldstein, creator of SSEP and director of the NCESSE. “This gives student teams an opportunity to design a real experiment.”

Other universities have engaged in such contests that are tied in with NASA and the International Space Station. Two years ago, an agricultural and biological engineering student from Purdue University performed research on how plants would regulate carbon dioxide and oxygen by using hydroponic farming during space missions. Those Purdue teams competed in the Plant the Moon and Plant Mars Challenge, studying how well crops could grow in lunar or Martian soil simulants.

In 2017, a team of fourth-year Ohio State students competed in the “AgAir: Aviation Solutions for Agriculture.” They worked with NASA to improve a passive water-delivery system for on-board plants and a method of recycling natural waste to create nutrient-rich soil at the International Space Station.

The team built prototypes and conducted several 30-day plant-growth experiments that influenced the design of plant pillows (bags of soil designed to grow plants) used on future crops abroad the International Space Station. The team also designed a bioreactor (a container that efficiently decomposes materials) to recycle natural waste such as inedible plant parts, hair and urine to produce soil.