"Ancient Hawaiians were the first space explorers" started as a joke between two college seniors. NASA just paid them $50,000 to prove the idea works.

  • $50,000 awarded to University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo seniors Leilani Jensen and Raven Kromer
  • 1 of 5 winning designs chosen out of 113 submissions from 33 countries
  • 15 astronauts the winning food system is designed to feed
  • 500 Martian sols — about 513 Earth days — of self-sufficient food production required

An ancient system, redesigned for Mars

Jensen, a tropical agroecology and environmental science double major, and Kromer, who studies astronomy and English, entered NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table with a design called "ʻOhā Kanu" — named for a young taro offshoot (ʻohā) and the act of planting (kanu).

Their concept doesn't start from scratch. It adapts the ahupuaʻa, the traditional Hawaiian land-management system that divides territory into zones running from mountain to sea, each contributing a different kind of food and resource to a shared, closed loop. The students rebuilt that zoned structure for a Martian habitat: hydroponics, aquaculture, field crops and orchards working together instead of as separate systems, according to University of Hawaiʻi News.

"We drew upon traditional and Indigenous perspectives for how to produce food," said Jensen. "It was not about designing for maximized productivity. It was designed so that there's always food on the table, no matter what happens."

Built to never need a resupply

The challenge's test scenario asked teams to design a food system that could feed a 15-person crew for 500 Martian sols without relying on supply shipments from Earth — a problem that rewards resilience over raw output. ʻOhā Kanu's zero-waste, multi-zone layout was built specifically to keep producing food even if one part of the system fails, the same resilience logic that let ahupuaʻa communities survive droughts and storms for centuries before refrigeration or imports existed.

The students also built out a two-week sample Mars menu, including a peanut stew, to show the system could support real meals rather than just theoretical nutrition targets.

ʻOhā Kanu was one of five winning designs nationwide, selected from a field of more than 100 finalists that included corporate and university research teams. NASA split $650,000 across the five winners; first place and the largest share, $300,000, went to a separate design called "ANI" from Philadelphia-based competitor Chinyere Ukeje. Jensen and Kromer's $50,000 placed their Hawaiʻi-rooted concept among the challenge's top tier regardless.

Why NASA is funding food systems, not just rockets

NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge sits inside its Centennial Challenges program, which crowdsources solutions to problems the agency hasn't solved in-house. Keeping astronauts fed on a years-long Mars mission is one of those problems — current spaceflight food is pre-packaged and has a shelf life, which doesn't work for a mission with no resupply option.

"We're thrilled to keep advancing the future of space food systems with this challenge," said Jennifer Edmunson, who manages the Centennial Challenges program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "It is amazing how much ingenuity this challenge has helped us identify from participants near and far."

For Kromer, the win is also a quieter correction to how Indigenous knowledge gets treated in STEM. "One of the jokes we made was, 'Ancient Hawaiians were the first space explorers,'" she said — a system built to sustain life with zero outside supply, centuries before anyone needed it to work on another planet.