Future Aerospace Engineering Establishes First International Research Base in Japan

Future Aerospace Engineering Ltd is delighted to announce the establishment of our first international research base in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan.

The milestone follows almost two years of work behind the scenes and represents an important step in the long-term development of FAE and, in particular, our Farming Beyond Earth research programme.

For a small UK aerospace engineering and research company, establishing a presence on the other side of the world is a significant undertaking. Our ambition for Iwakuni, however, has never simply been about acquiring a property overseas.

It is about creating a place from which we can undertake research, build long-term relationships and become part of the local academic, scientific and wider community.

Farming Beyond Earth

One of the principal areas we hope to develop from Iwakuni is Farming Beyond Earth, FAE’s research programme exploring how we can produce food reliably in environments where conventional agriculture is difficult or impossible.

Long-duration human activity beyond Earth will ultimately require us to become much better at producing food within constrained and controlled environments.

That means understanding far more than simply whether a plant will grow.

Light intensity and distribution, nutrient delivery, environmental control, plant health, growth-stage identification, resource efficiency and continuous monitoring all become part of an integrated engineering problem.

These challenges also have applications much closer to home.

The same technologies that could one day contribute to food production in lunar or Martian habitats can help us investigate more efficient controlled-environment and vertical farming systems on Earth.

Why Yamaguchi?

Yamaguchi Prefecture provides a particularly interesting environment in which to develop this work.

We have already begun building relationships with researchers at Yamaguchi University whose work includes plant functional imaging, photosynthesis, canopy light measurement, plant growth modelling, supplemental LED lighting and the optimisation of light and nutrient conditions.

There is a natural overlap between these areas and the ambitions of Farming Beyond Earth.

Our initial conversations have therefore been about understanding one another’s research and exploring where future collaboration could make sense, rather than attempting to force a project together simply because FAE now has a presence in the region.

We hope those relationships will develop organically as our Iwakuni facility itself develops.

A bridge between Staffordshire and Yamaguchi

Our longer-term ambition is for Iwakuni to become more than an FAE laboratory.

We want it to provide a bridge between our research activities in the United Kingdom and Japan, creating opportunities for universities, researchers, students and businesses to work together on real engineering and scientific challenges.

Farming Beyond Earth provides an excellent starting point because it brings together aerospace engineering, agriculture, biology, artificial intelligence, sensing, environmental control and sustainability.

Over time, we hope that could include collaborative research and demonstrators, shared experimentation and potentially opportunities for students and researchers from both countries.

Putting down roots

FAE’s approach to Japan is deliberately long-term.

We don’t want simply to operate a research facility in Japan from the United Kingdom. Our intention is to establish ourselves properly within Japan, learn from the people and organisations around us and become part of the community in which we’re working.

In time, we also intend to establish Future Aerospace Engineering formally in Japan.

There is a considerable amount of work ahead. The Iwakuni site itself will need to develop, relationships need time to grow, and Farming Beyond Earth remains an evolving research programme.

But after almost two years of work, we now have something extremely important: a place from which to begin.

Future Aerospace Engineering has a home in Japan.

For a small company from Staffordshire, that’s a pretty big step and perhaps, one day, a small step towards learning how we farm beyond Earth.