Ohalo III, The First Operational Crop Production System and Prototype for a Mars Transit Vehicle (Ohalo)

Food and nutrition are critical to health and performance and therefore the success of human space exploration. However, the shelf-stable food system currently in use on the International Space Station (ISS) is not sustainable as missions become longer and further from Earth, even with modification for mass and water efficiencies. Bioregenerative foods as part of the astronaut diet are expected to provide whole food nutrition, improve menu variety, and positively impact behavioral health. Significant advances in both knowledge and technology are still needed to inform productivity, nutrition, acceptability, safety, reliability, and operations of bioregenerative food systems. Ohalo III will serve as a testbed for the validation of crop production systems and technologies on the ISS. Ohalo III is a prototype crop production system that will validate water delivery, volume optimization, and advance knowledge on crop production operations which will inform design decisions for a future crop production system intended to be deployed on the Deep Space Transit mission. Ohalo III is being designed, built, and tested at the NASA Kennedy Space Center and the project and hardware development goals include the following:

• Configuration includes one growth chamber housed in an EXPRESS rack deployed to ISS.
• Designed to provide a removable/customizable light cap, control system, structural containment.
• Designed to incorporate and test advanced concepts for water delivery and volume optimization.
• Serve as an operational system to validate crop production productivity, resource consumption, waste production, and system reliability.
• Function as a prototype for Deep Space Transport food production concepts.
• Designed to minimize flight-crew maintenance while maintaining ease of service and repair.
• Designed to grow a variety of pick-and-eat crops.
• Serve as a test platform for new plant growth technologies.
• Additional/evolvable elements to include: seed delivery, sensors for plant health, food safety monitoring, robotics and automation for selected tasks, evaluation of waste collection and cleaning concepts.

Target launch to ISS no earlier than August of 2026

Ohalo III will serve as a platform to develop advance water delivery and volume optimization concepts that will enable future crop production operations on long duration exploration missions. Following these evaluations, Ohalo III will continue to serve as the first operational crop production system in space where it will provide valuable information on the productivity, reliability, and operations associated with growing crops as a component of the exploration food system. In this capacity, Ohalo III will serve a prototype for the crop production system that is eventually deployed on the Mars Transit Vehicle and will also inform early lunar and Mars surface crop production systems.

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