In January 2024, we met for the first time and quickly began brainstorming ideas, joking about going for the space village. Nine months later, we had held multiple meetings with organizations like NASA, Solar Foods, and Enifer, been interviewed by various newspapers, and were preparing to present our case to the judges. A few weeks later, it was announced that, for the first time in ABOA's history, we had met the criteria for the gold medal!

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AstroVita project description: To make long space exploration missions possible, we cannot rely on continuous shipments from Earth, and life support systems need to be regenerative. Currently, oxygen and water are recovered and regenerated on the ISS, but long missions call for closing the carbon cycle as well. Growing plants for this purpose requires large amounts of resources in the space setting. At the same time, cellular agriculture is emerging as a promising new technology for producing food on Earth with low land use and resource requirements. Could we utilize this technology in space? This is the question we set out to solve. In our project, AstroVita, we mapped out potential opportunities and challenges in utilizing cellular agriculture in space, developed a synthetic biology solution to improve the vitamin content of microbial food, and modeled a microbial system for use in space.