Lunaria One is an Australian initiative focused on growing greenery on the Moon. It has lined up a mission with Intuitive Machines, the American private space company targeting a 2025 launch. The aim is to learn whether seeds and small plants can survive the journey, land on the lunar surface, and begin to grow under carefully controlled conditions. The project sits within a broader effort to test bioregenerative life support concepts for long term space exploration, focusing on practical steps toward food production and ecosystem management in future lunar and Mars habitats. For audiences in Canada and the United States, the work signals how private and national space programs are increasingly treating agriculture as a key element of sustainable off world presence, and it highlights cross continental collaboration as a path to resilient space infrastructure.
Lunaria One is set to place a capsule containing seeds and plants into the Intuitive Machines lunar module. The craft will travel about 380,000 kilometers to reach the Moon, delivering the experimental payload to the surface. The mission seeks to demonstrate a compact, self contained system capable of carrying life from Earth to another world and hosting initial growth experiments after landing.
Aleph will test whether the seeds and living material can withstand long pre launch storage, the g-forces of launch, and the harsh extraterrestrial environment, including temperature swings from -130°C to 120°C. Lauren Fell, the director of Lunaria One, explains that the study aims to verify viability and establish methods to preserve growth potential under these extreme conditions.
Bioengineering professor Caitlin Birt, an adviser to the project from an Australian university, explains that the mission will identify the conditions under which photosynthetic organisms can maintain the ability to live and grow. The research seeks to map the environmental envelope needed for sustained plant activity in lunar gravity, radiation exposure, and interactions with regolith analogs used to simulate soil.
Data collected from Aleph are seen as essential for future missions to the Moon and Mars, where producing food and other resources on site could reduce the amount of provisions carried from Earth. The findings could inform habitat design, crop selection, yields, and storage strategies that support longer duration stays in space. The project also underscores broader benefits of space agriculture for Earth, including improving resilience after disasters and supporting food security in challenging environments. Earlier, reports touched on plans by another nation to establish a small lunar garden in the coming years.