From Fish Tanks to Lunar Soil: RRCC Students Are Solving Space's Food Problem
May 28, 2026 | By Yesenia Robles, RRCC, MarCom
As plans to send people to live and work on the moon inch closer to reality, one issue needs more answers: how to grow healthier food in space.
“We send people to space, and we have to be able to do things like feed them and keep them healthy,” Albert said. “These projects inform the base of scientific knowledge,” said Dr. Lynne Albert, one of the team’s faculty advisors.
The newest of the four Space Grant teams at Red Rocks Community College encourages students to study this question. Students have looked at how bacteria colonizes when growing radishes in lunar soil, and this past school year students explored how rice and arugula grow when fertilized with fish tank runoff water.
Wesley Taylor is one of the RRCC student leaders for the Astrobio or Plant the Moon team, and answering these questions has shaped a new career path for him.
“I’m open to a lot of things,” Wesley said. “We have all kinds of projects and as long as you have any kind of interest in space, there’s a place for you.”
Courtesy photo
This year, students on the team say they learned that growing plants with the water runoff works really well. They’ve also developed ideas about how growing a sequence of different plants might take metals out of the lunar soil to make it more feasible to grow edible and healthy food.
The creation of the Astrobio team has also helped attract a more diverse group of students to the space grant teams, including more women.
“It’s been really successful both years we’ve run it,” said Dr. Albert. “We do pull on a more diverse background in this program. It’s nice to diversify through these biology projects.”
The team is one of four Space Grant teams supported by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium at RRCC.
And the team has earned multiple awards. Last year, the team won for Most Innovative project and took a first-place award at the annual symposium. And in 2025-26, the team earned the Best Experimental Design award in the international Plant the Moon competition.
The teams provide real-world career exploration
Wesley came to Red Rocks Community College as an adult looking for a new career. He already earned a bachelor's degree and was working in a hospital when he came to Colorado and enrolled at RRCC.
This is one of the awards the team earned in fall 2025.
Wesley’s interest in biology and science developed in a previous job at the Denver Zoo. And once enrolled in Dr. Lynne Albert’s class, he heard about the opportunity to join the space grant team to put learning into action and explore the multiple fields he was interested in.
“It’s been good to get this kind of research experience,” Wesley said. “I’m interested in agriculture, genetics and microbiology. Astrobio combines all three.”
Growing things in lunar soil results in the plants containing heavy metals that aren’t good for consumption, but student projects are studying ways to use the soil, and experimenting with different ways of extracting some of the metals that alter bacterial DNA to prevent them from going in the plants in the first place.
Photo by Regina Ayala, RRCC
“It’s really helpful to know what’s growing in the dirt with the plants,” Wesley said and he wants RRCC students to consider joining the Astrobio team.
“You don’t have to be a STEM major to join the club,” he said. “We have all kinds of projects, and you can learn a lot of skills.”
Wesley came to RRCC looking for a new career. He found something bigger — a research focus that combines agriculture, genetics and microbiology, and a team that gave him the experience to pursue it at the graduate level.
He's graduated now. Graduate school is next. And somewhere down the road, the work he started in a community college lab may help answer one of humanity's most pressing questions: how do we feed ourselves beyond Earth?
Learn about the other Space Grant teams here:
Sand in the Gears, Inspiration in the Lesson
Zero Gravity Impact. RRCC Students Launch Into Space This Summer
To the Edge of Space: Students Getting Real World Experience Designing Projects