Bolton, Ontario’s Canadensys Aerospace has received a contract with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to work on lunar agriculture. According to the announcement, they will specifically be assisting with design work on subsystems for a “Ground Test Demonstrator” (GTD) of a Lunar Greenhouse.
The GTD is, according to the announcement, a “collaboration between the CSA and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR),” and will “allow Canadian and German scientists and engineers to collaborate in exploring the technologies required to build a self-sustaining bio-generative life-support system (BLSS) on the Moon.”
Canadensys will be working with academic partners at the University of Guelph and McGill University to “refine the design for the Nutrient Delivery System, Illumination Control System, Plant Health Monitoring System”, and a “robotic ‘versatile assistant’ to enable un-crewed operation of the greenhouse.” No funding amount was mentioned in the announcement.
Ground test demonstrator of a Lunar Greenhouse
While the announcement itself did not provide more details on the Ground Test Demonstrator, and Canadensys did not respond to inquiries at time of writing, the project was described in more detail in a CSA profile of CSA Exploration Scientist Jared Stoochnoff.
Stoochnoff said that he and the CSA’s Food Production Initiative were “hard at work trying to develop a space-ready lunar greenhouse that we call the Ground-Test Demonstrator,” which will “provide Canadian engineers and scientists a controlled environment for testing food production technologies and protocols.” Stoochnoff’s specific role, according to the profile, is to “define system requirements, for example lighting, irrigation, air management, plant health monitoring, robotics, etc.” as well as to “assess proposals from contractors” like Canadensys.
A 2023 publication in Acta Astronautica from the DLR’s Volker Maiwald, Kim Kyunghwan, and Vincent Vrakking, as well as CSA scientist Conrad Zeidler, also provided more information on the GTD; as well as describing the subsystems that Canadensys will be helping to design. The paper described the GTD as a successor to the DLR’s EDEN ISS project. Located in Antarctica at the Neumayer III research base, EDEN ISS used a Mobile Test Facility to explore agriculture in closed-loop life support systems in hostile environments. Some of the systems in the announcement, like the Nutrient Delivery System, were also part of EDEN ISS, and Canada was one of the contributors to EDEN ISS during its run from 2018 to 2022.
The publication said that the Ground Test Demonstrator will actually be called the “EDEN Next Generation GTD” by the DLR, and that they intend it to be “as close as possible to the actual lunar greenhouse in processes and design, further enhancing the analogue testing to space analogue hardware.” The GTD will allow “subsystems to be tested [and] procedures developed…[so that] the overall system can be pareto-optimized to be as efficient as possible,” they said, “while requiring as little resources (power, water, crew time) and launch mass as possible.” The GTD is intended to be “a versatile science platform,” they said, which will “to mature technology, processes and the overall system via tests” up to the point where stable operation can be demonstrated.
The CSA’s LinkedIn page also pointed to a current event related to the GTD, the Concurrent Engineering Design Study. The CSA said that “Canadian industry and academia” will be joining them in a meeting with NASA, DLR and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) in Germany from March 7 to 15. The meeting will focus on efforts to “mature conceptual designs for all controlled environment agriculture technologies and operations required for a space-ready lunar greenhouse.” This meeting will likely include Canadensys and their designs for the systems, as well as the others detailed in the 2023 report.
Canadensys’ variety of lunar activities
In any case, the announcement points out that this is only one part of Canadensys’ lunar efforts, including on efforts focused on lunar agriculture. They also cited Canadensys’ work on “developing prototype lunar greenhouse systems under CSA’s Lunar Surface Exploration Initiative (LSEI)”, and “conducting sub-system research as part of CSA’s Space Technology Development Program (STDP)” as examples of lunar-focused work.
As covered in SpaceQ, Canadensys will also be designing the first Canadian lunar rover. The company also contributed to the recent Intuitive Machines lunar landing, as seen in SpaceQ’s recent interview with Canadensys president Christian Sullaberger on the mission and the company’s contribution.
On the Ground Test Demonstrator project, Sullaberger said in the announcement that “this activity augments our other efforts in the field of lunar food production”, and that Canadensys is “proud to be developing space greenhouse systems to support international Artemis astronauts during lunar surface missions.” Gilles Leclerc, the Director of Government and International Affairs at Canadensys, said that the project will “strengthen space collaboration between Canada and Germany,” and also “positions Canadensys as a key international provider of agriculture services on the Moon.”