Kyle Johnson spent much of the summer in Tulsa with his son. They made trips to Gathering Place and the zoo.

Johnson was also working on a considerably less ordinary problem: how to feed 15 people living on Mars.

He is the operations director for Autonomic Resilience Collective, a Bentonville, Arkansas-based team behind AEGIS Mars. The concept was developed for NASA’s Mars to Table challenge, which asked teams to design a complete food system for a 15-person crew spending 500 Martian days on the surface.

NASA awarded AEGIS Mars its $50,000 Human-Centered Design Award in September.

The design avoids relying on Martian soil and accounts for where food would be grown, handled and washed. Teams also had to consider the time crew members would spend producing and preparing their food.

Johnson told KJRH that the team heard about the challenge while in Tulsa and completed the entire project here.

“We heard about it in Tulsa, and we finished the whole project all in Tulsa.”