Bioengineered Living Systems Workshop

Growing life beyond Earth starts with a question of profound consequences. What does it take for a living system to survive and grow when everything familiar is stripped away? Space agriculture is often framed as an engineering challenge, but at its heart it is a biological one. It invites us to think across scales, from molecules to organisms to entire habitats, and to recognise what must be understood and built to sustain life in extreme environments. Only by taking this whole-systems view can we clearly see the gap between what we can achieve today and what future missions will demand.This workshop was convened to spotlight the pioneering work underway in Australia to harness plant science for space exploration, and to do three things together:1. Clarify what today’s technologies can and cannot yet do.2. Imagine the next set of possibilities for sustainable plant systems beyond Earth.3. Identify the knowledge gaps we must bridge to realise that future.The program reflects this arc. We began by testing life, bringing phenomics and photobiology into conversation with the practical realities of measurement andperformance in constrained environments. We then moved outwards to the resources that make life possible, focusing on water and nutrient supply and management, and what it means to find or design life for challenging environments. Day two carried the systems thinking further into engineering life support systems, before culminating in an explicit discussion of the knowledge gaps we must fill.