By Bethany BROWN

La Crescenta resident Jake Zawacki Goff was one of 18 national winners of the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge. The Challenge invited teams or individuals to create novel and game-changing food technologies or systems that require minimal inputs and maximize safe, nutritious and palatable food outputs for long-duration space missions, and which have potential to benefit people on Earth.

His Project MIDGE (Modular Inflatable Dynamic Growth Environment) – a self-contained garden to grow food in space or in any environment with harsh conditions – won him $25,000 and a spot in Phase 2 of the challenge in which he is presently hard at work. Additionally, NASA won the rights to the first bid.

“I had a lot of fun with it,” Zawacki Goff said. “The thought process I went through was … it’s expensive to get anything heavy into space and you need as much product as you can fit into such a small area. So I asked myself, ‘Well, how can I do that?’ I thought [about] bubble wrap and bounce houses, things with an inflatable structure, and from there I worked out a way to build an inflatable greenhouse that uses air channels. You can use a very small amount of air input over a very long amount of time to keep the structure fully inflated while also providing a lot of insulation.”

Zawacki Goff – a 2018 Clark Magnet graduate and student at Glendale Community College – said he has been interested in plant growth for a long time so when his uncle first told him of the challenge after seeing it posted online, he knew it was perfect for him. He conceptualized MIDGE as he navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and the forced lockdown gave him ample time to focus and create, allowing him to ultimately complete it within six months.

He said the idea behind MIDGE is that it’s configurable in many ways. It is made of different panels that can be snapped together – “like Legos” – which allows it to fit into any floor plan due to its customizable size and shape. As he continues developing his Phase 2 submission – which calls for a physical product and a “kitchen level demonstration” unlike the first phase – he said the key is to get [the build] as small as possible and have many replacement parts readily available. He plans on his finalized product serving as a full herb garden and being somewhere around two cubic meters in size and more cylindrical or hexagonal in shape so that it may be stacked together like a beehive.

“Ideally, I’d like to have a small prototype that we can continue to build off of. Eventually I’d really actually like to see the technology in space, in use and kind of becoming a highly adaptable system that a lot of people can benefit from,” Zawacki Goff said. “I didn’t just design this for space alone; it’s something to be used in any challenging environment. I designed it so [people] can grow bananas in Alaska for example. We’re going to be having increasingly different conditions on Earth so I think it’s important to design systems that can get around that and be much more robust.”

Zawacki Goff estimated it will take close to nine months before he has a fully functioning prototype, and he intends on continuing to work rigorously to bring MIDGE to life. His focus moving forward will be on the technical coding needed to ensure it’s a fully automated system.

Phase 2 finalists will be determined early next year and winners will be announced in March 2023.

For more information on the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge, visit https://www.deepspacefoodchallenge.org.