Strawberry Fields Forever

Heather Hava has astronomical gardening skills. The CU Boulder graduate student develops advanced fruit and vegetable gardening systems for use by astronauts on Martian and lunar outposts. Think movie astronaut Mark Watney, played by actor Matt Damon in The Martian, who was stranded on the Red Planet and had to farm to survive. Hava designed and built a compact hydroponic chamber for growing plants in space and led the development of a remotely operated rover that can buzz around in a space habitat to check on, and even harvest, space gardens. Hava is working on commercializing her inventions through her two startup companies: Autoponics of Longmont, Colorado, and Stellar Synergetics, LLC of Golden, Colorado. In 2016, she received the $15,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for being the top graduate student inventor in the nation for technology-based advances that can improve food and agriculture. “The natural evolution of a society is to go out and explore,” says Hava, “And at some point we will move off the Earth and out into the solar system. Space gardening is one of the first steps to getting there.”