Australian Space Forum

The Australian Space Forum is a bi-annual event held in Adelaide bringing together the best and brightest from Australia’s space industry and around the world. Each event features keynote addresses from space industry leaders and informative panel discussions on current space topics and industry trends.

This year the event also highlights life science research to enable long-term space habitation. By 2025, humans will have established the new Lunar Gateway Space Station as a necessary precursor to crewed Mars missions, however, critical technologies to enable remote habitation, where re-supply of resources from Earth is not a viable option, lag in their development. Unlike water, oxygen and fuel, food is not available for harvest on the Moon or Mars. Providing a nutritious, varied food supply to sustain physical and mental wellbeing for long-term Space habitation is one of the greatest obstacles for mission planners, as the current mass and volume of required food prohibit overall mission feasibility.

The technological ‘grand challenges’ of sustainable extra-terrestrial life support are inherently complex, highly interconnected, and yet to be tackled holistically. The forum will include a panel to explore the life science, psychology and clinical research translation into practice that is needed to support life off-world in the long-term.