Matthew Montgomery spent more than a year inside NASA’s simulated Mars habitat growing vegetables with hydroponics, recycling resources and learning to live within limits. The experiment brings back an old startup ambition: growing food on Mars to help save Earth.
Imagine spending 378 days without opening a window, hearing a bird sing or walking outside to feel the rain. Your world is a 158-square-metre habitat. Every drop of water matters. Every calorie, every watt of electricity and every seed has to earn its place. On October 31, 2026, four engineers emerged from NASA’s Mars Dune Alpha habitat in Houston, Texas, after completing the agency’s second yearlong simulated Mars mission.
One of them, science officer Matthew Montgomery, had spent much of his time growing vegetables. I was particularly interested in his experiments because growing food on Mars was one of the early ambitions behind flux, an agricultural technology startup I co-founded more than a decade ago.
At the time, people thought we were a little crazy. We were building a machine-learning system called Eddy to help farmers understand what their plants needed, particularly in hydroponic farms. We even organized a gathering of future Mars farmers in Jaffa in 2016.
The thinking was simple. If you can grow a tomato on Mars, where every resource is limited, perhaps you can learn to grow one more intelligently in Tel Aviv, Toronto or a drought-stricken village in Jordan.
Growing vegetables without Earth
Montgomery arrived at NASA with experience in controlled-environment agriculture, including studying how LED lighting affects crop growth. Inside the simulated Martian habitat, the crew cultivated vegetables in a hydroponic system, growing plants without conventional soil by delivering nutrients through water.
NASA photographs show peppers, leafy greens and other crops thriving under artificial lighting. Montgomery also investigated seed germination using simulated Martian soil, comparing results with a control experiment. But growing food was never simply about nutrition.
In an interview with Nature, Montgomery described the psychological benefit of tending living plants. Even on a simulated Mars mission, a patch of green connected the crew to the world they had temporarily left behind.
In NASA’s own post-mission account, he offered another observation: “It’s really the people that make exploration possible.”
A greenhouse is a spaceship
Hydroponics sounds wonderfully futuristic, but anyone who has operated a system knows how quickly things can go wrong. Water pumps fail. Nutrients fall out of balance. Fungi arrive uninvited. Plants get stressed. Electricity bills become astronomical.
This is why our earlier explorations of Martian food systems were never really just about Mars. We wanted to understand the engineering of survival. A greenhouse is a little spaceship. It has inputs and outputs. Water, light, nutrients, oxygen, heat and human labour have to be managed. When we examined the Emirates Mars ambitions, including concepts for pressurized biodomes and solar-powered settlements, the same question kept returning: how do you create a habitable environment where nature doesn’t provide one for free?
Montgomery and his crewmates confronted a version of that question daily. Their communications with mission control were delayed by up to 22 minutes each way. During a planned two-week blackout, they had to operate without ordinary contact with Earth. There was no calling someone to troubleshoot a broken pump in real time.
Earth is our original Mars habitat
The most compelling lesson from NASA’s experiment isn’t that humans might someday colonize another planet. It’s that we already live inside a closed and extraordinarily fragile system. Earth has an atmosphere, abundant life and a water cycle that makes our existence possible. Yet we behave as though its resources are infinite.
On Mars, nobody would dream of wasting drinking water (even their pee!), throwing away nutrients or designing a food system that consumes more energy than it can reasonably support. (Remember when I went to Brain Bar in Budapest and talked about pee-ponics?)
Why do we tolerate those inefficiencies here?
Our reporting on Martian farming experiments has repeatedly returned to closed-loop systems, where materials are recovered, reused and valued rather than discarded. More recently, research into closed-loop aquaponic systems demonstrated how recovering nutrients and improving water circulation can reduce waste and energy consumption in food production.
These technologies won’t solve every agricultural problem. Artificial lighting and climate control consume energy, and hydroponics is not automatically greener than farming in healthy soil. The challenge is to measure the entire system and make intelligent choices about where resources go. Perhaps that is the real gift of Mars research.
By imagining ourselves stranded on another planet, we begin to understand the miracle of the one we already inhabit. We don’t need to move to Mars to learn how to live within planetary limits. We need to bring that Mars discipline home.
