Growing Beyond Earth: Year 3 Evaluation Report 2018-2019

Growing Beyond Earth (GBE) is Fairchild’s NASA-funded classroom science project designed to advance research on growing plants aboard spacecraft. As NASA looks toward a long term human presence beyond Earth orbit, there are specific science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) challenges related to food production. GBE is addressing those challenges by expanding the diversity and quality of edible plants that can be grown in space. On Earth, GBE is also improving technologies for gardening in urban, indoor, and other resource-limited settings.

GBE is unique in its focus on real scientific research, enabling student “citizen scientists” to contribute data toward NASA mission planning. Each classroom receives a Fairchild-designed plant habitat that is analogous to the plant growing equipment aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Fairchild and NASA scientists train teachers to conduct in-classroom GBE experiments, and students then share experimental data online with NASA.

To date 10 student-tested varieties have been selected by NASA researchers to be ground tested at Kennedy Space Center’s Food Production Research Area and in 2019 two of those varieties were tested aboard the ISS.