How will 15 people eat on Mars for more than 500 days?

Cultivating crops, preparing fermented foods, growing fungi, and recycling nutrients: these are the components of the design that won first place in a competition organized by NASA to answer a difficult question: How can a large crew be fed during a long stay on Mars?

The agency asked participants to envision a system that provides meals for 15 people on the planet’s surface for 500 Martian days, approximately 513 Earth days, while minimizing the time the crew spends operating it. According to NASA, the judging panel reviewed 113 entries from 33 countries before selecting the winning designs.

Chineyere Okigbo, a resident of Philadelphia, won the first prize of $300,000 for her design, titled “Adaptive Food Infrastructure.” The design proposes producing half of the crew’s food off-Earth by combining controlled-environment agriculture with fermentation and fungi cultivation, while retaining some food shipped from Earth. In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Okigbo said the challenge goes beyond simply growing crops; the meals must also look familiar to astronauts.

This is a winning competition design, not a system proven to operate on Mars. The difficulty of the mission lies in providing diverse and nutritious food despite the long duration of the journey, payload constraints, and the limited resources available to the crew.