Freeman High School science students are determined to ‘Plant the Moon’

A physics class at Douglas S. Freeman High School may be the first to grow oyster mushrooms in moon dirt for NASA’s international Plant the Moon Challenge.

The group of high-schoolers, led by their physics teacher Orien Altman, certainly do have a challenge ahead of them – they were given only $200 to do what even NASA scientists haven’t been able to accomplish. But after weeks of doing their own research, the students are confident that they can tackle the notoriously inhospitable moon dirt and be the first to successfully grow pink oyster mushrooms.

Altman’s class will be joined by another physics class at Freeman led by Tom Gallo to be the first Richmond-area students to participate in NASA’s competition, in which elementary, middle and high schools from around the world have participated annually for the past few years.

Students can choose which plant they want to grow in the moon dirt, also referred to as “lunar regolith,” and when brainstorming for the project, senior Jailyn Pipes realized that mushrooms might be the perfect food to fuel NASA astronauts on the moon.

“They’re super resilient,” she said. “So if there was going to be anything that was going to grow in our lunar regolith that was going to be good enough to sustain astronauts in space, which is the goal of this project, I was like, ‘It’s gonna be a mushroom.’”

Also, junior Justin Elmore said, they didn’t want to be “boring” and grow something simple like potatoes or tomatoes. Student groups in the past have tried and failed to grow mushrooms for the competition, but Elmore said that he believes his class will be able to get it right.

“Now that we realized that mushrooms hadn’t been successfully grown before in this project, it’s almost like our duty to do it, and do our absolute best,” he said.

Altman’s class was split into two groups for the competition, with Pipes and Elmore being the “project managers” of each group. While both groups are growing pink oyster mushrooms using grow bags and a self-made grow chamber, each group has chosen different “substrates” – other materials that can be placed with the moon dirt – to spur the mushroom growth.

With their low funding, the students have had to get creative. Pipes’ group used three substrates: wood pellets, straw, and coffee grounds that Pipes picked up from the local Starbucks where she works. Elmore’s group went with five other materials: straw, manure, saw dust, ground-up wood pellets, and organic cat litter.

But the set-up is sophisticated; both groups will place the materials in separate layers, alternating between a substrate and the moon dirt, and use the straw to “bridge” the different materials. Realizing that the pH level of the lunar regolith was too high for the mushrooms, they also used aluminum sulfate, purchased by Pipes’ grandmother, to lower the pH level.

Once they inject the liquid mushroom culture into the bottom substrate layer, and the mushroom’s root structure, known as mycelium, starts growing in the more hospitable bottom layer, the straw will help it grow up into the layers of moon dirt, Pipes explained.

“We’ll be able to almost certainly do what the other groups couldn’t have by facilitating that travel of mycelium once it’s already gotten strong enough in the substrate layer,” she said.

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Since each group only received $100 for the project, Altman was able to receive grants from Freeman’s administration and parent-teacher-student association to purchase lab coats, gloves, and KN-95 masks that were necessary for handling the moon dirt.

While the lunar regolith they received from NASA is a 99% lab-created replica, inhaling it for long periods of time still can be toxic.

But other components of the project, such as the grow chamber students created by placing plastic around a shelf from their classroom, had to come from the savvy use of ordinary materials.

“You can see with our lower funding, our filter back here [in the grow chamber] is two face masks, duct tape, and some staples,” Pipes said. “We’re doing our best with what we’ve got.”

Students have put hours of work into the project each week – not just in class, but also during research sessions after school at the library or by coming into the classroom to help during lunch. Every student in Altman’s class has an assigned role, whether it was being a project manager, deputy project manager, or safety manager, and each worked on a different aspect of the project research.

“We have a lot of people that just got really, really into it,” Pipes said. “A lot of it was done based off of passion from students that are particularly interested in this topic. I have seen so many people stay after class to come help and make sure everything’s good and to clean up, and I think that’s going to be the defining factor in our project versus someone else’s, because we really really care about it.”

Even the dreaded task of making and dealing with the manure, used as one of the substrate layers in Elmore’s group, was taken on in stride by the students who were chosen to handle it.

“One student, he stepped up and did it with no complaints, washing all this gross stuff. And he stayed after with no one asking him,” Elmore said. “People have stayed 15 minutes through lunch just to help us make sure everything went well.”

Altman said that the project has been almost entirely student-led, with him taking a step back to let the students choose the materials, the set-up, the project construction, and conduct the experiment.

“They’ve been doing hardcore research. They have to design all of it. They have to pick the seed, how they’re going to do it, what they’re going to do – all that stuff,” he said. “I’m just ordering stuff from Amazon. They had to do all of it.”

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Once they are done growing and collecting data from the grow bags, each group will have to write a professional scientific paper about the experiment, which they will present along with their data at the Virginia Science Museum in Richmond if they are chosen as one of the top groups in the region. If the students do well in Richmond, they may even earn an all-paid trip to Florida to present their projects in front of NASA scientists at the Kennedy Space Center.

Altman hopes to conduct the project again with his class next year. Although it requires a lot of student effort and lasts from January through April, Altman said the challenge is a one-of-a-kind learning experience for these high school science students.

“This project, it’s like everything. We’ve done chemistry, biology, earth science, ecology, mycology, physics,” he said. “And a lot of them are juniors and seniors, so it’s kind of a cool opportunity to combine everything they’ve learned all throughout high school.”

Many of the students have already put the project on their college applications and resumes. And while they’ve had to sacrifice some physics lessons, many have found out just how passionate and driven they are about the NASA challenge.

“I’d honestly rather do this. This is very interactive, instead of sitting on a computer, looking up lessons and all of that,” Elmore said. “This is amazing, doing this in high school. I didn’t think I’d be doing this at a high school level.”

“It honestly barely feels like an assignment anymore, it’s something that I’m so excited to do,” Pipes said. “I have not stopped talking about it. It’s been a ton of work, but I’m just so so invested in this project."

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Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.