SPECIAL SESSION #07
Space Farming - how to feed future astronauts on Moon and Mars
ORGANIZED BY
Daniel Schubert
Daniel Schubert
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
SPECIAL SESSION DESCRIPTION
This session addresses Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) technologies for space exploration cultivation strategies, and mission-ready operations into an integrated system development pipeline. Discussions will focus on how plant traits and ideotypes align with space system constraints - mass, volume, power, thermal management, water recovery, reliability, and limited crew time - and how these constraints translate into robust, reproducible “grow recipes” (light spectrum and photoperiod, temperature, humidity, CO₂, airflow, and nutrient delivery). The session will cover data-driven approaches for cultivar screening and protocol optimization using sensors, phenotyping, and modelling, as well as automation, fault tolerance, and verification methods that support closed-loop performance and safe, high-quality food production for lunar and deep-space habitats. Topics may include crop and cultivar selection, recipe parameterization and validation, resource-efficiency trade-offs, fullscale system designs, monitoring and control architectures, and pathways for ground-to-flight standardization and technology maturation.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Daniel Schubert studied at the Technical University of Berlin and has an engineering diploma in industrial engineering with an emphasis on aerospace and production techniques. In 2011, he initiated the EDEN group at the DLR Institute of Space Systems for technology investigations on Bio-regenerative Life Support Systems and since served as the team leader of this group. His research expertise is set on habitat interface analysis and plant accommodation and dynamic plant production planning. In the same field he accomplished his PHD at the University of Bremen in 2018. Throughout many projects for ESA, EU, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Wirtschaftsförderung Bremen (WfB), Dr. Schubert and his team developed many greenhouse concepts, vertical farming feasibility studies, and habitat technologies.
