Crickets in Space: UCCS Students Test Sustainable Protein Beyond Earth
- ajcamarata9
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
In June 2025, a team UCCS engineering students achieved liftoff, not just for their experimental payload, but for a bold new idea in space sustainability: edible insects as future space food.
The student team, Sound of Crickets, launched live Acheta domesticus (house cricket) eggs aboard a NASA sounding rocket through NASA’s RockSat-C program. Their experiment investigated whether cricket eggs could survive the intense vibration, acceleration, temperature changes, and the free-fall environment of suborbital spaceflight and still hatch. The long-term goal is to assess crickets as a high-protein, low-cost, and self-sustaining food source for long-duration space missions.
Initial findings suggest that crickets may indeed be resilient space travelers. According to UCCS Biology Professor Abbey Swift, 47% of the space-flown eggs successfully hatched, compared to 58% in the ground-based control group.
“The babies looked healthy and were eating well,” Swift noted. However, they were unable to produce offspring, and the team is considering why this might be.
This experiment represents the first study of its kind worldwide, opening the door to serious consideration of insects as a sustainable protein source beyond Earth.
The Sound of Crickets team, Bryson Chittum, William Kilcrease, Anna Daetz, and Aaron Kerber, designed, built, and tested their payload as part of their UCCS Senior Design capstone. They were one of only seven university teams selected nationwide for RockSat-C, a highly competitive program that provides students with access to suborbital spaceflight reaching the Kármán line, 100 kilometers above Earth.
The launch took place at NASA Wallops Flight Facility, where students completed final testing, made last-minute design refinements, and presented their mission to NASA engineers.“This was definitely the coolest experience I’ve ever had,” said Kerber. Associate Professor Lynnane George, who advised the team, added, “I couldn’t believe how close we got to the rocket; it was incredible.”
Students from Widefield School District 3 played a key role by building and maintaining the ground-based control experiment, gaining hands-on experience with real aerospace research.“The RockSat-C program is a launch platform in more ways than one,” said STEM Programming Coordinator Nat Sobin. “Many of these students will go on to careers in the aerospace industry.”
Beyond technical challenges, such as designing an environmental control system to protect the eggs, the team gained invaluable experience in teamwork, communication, and real-world problem solving.
“Real space missions rarely follow the textbook,” said Chittum. “But seeing something we designed actually fly into space? That’s a dream come true.”
Building on this success and to investigate why the cricket population did not survive, a new UCCS senior design team is working with the UCCS Rocketry Club is developing a student-built rocket to fly a next-generation cricket egg payload in April 2026, to further expand this novel line of research.
Submitted by Dr. Lynnane George, Faculty Advisor, AIAA UCCS Student Chapter