Earth and Space Exploration Award Grant

The Earth and Space Exploration Award, offered by the Earth and Space Foundation, supports innovative projects that bridge the gap between environmental preservation and space exploration. Grants are awarded to initiatives that utilize Earth's knowledge to facilitate space settlement or apply space data to enhance Earth's ecosystems. This dual focus aims to promote a sustainable future where humanity thrives both on Earth and in space, with funding available for a variety of relevant fieldwork and educational projects.

By funding innovative field and laboratory work, the Foundation seeks to bring the environmental and space exploration communities together to address the challenges now facing human society.
Projects supported have ranged from the use of space stations to study the effects of microgravity on miniature, self-contained biospheres to help us understand how the Earth’s biosphere works through to caving expeditions that improve our understanding of extraterrestrial caves for human settlement. We have also supported many studies that use satellite and space technology to help monitor habitats and threatened environments on Earth, and the study of extreme environments on Earth to help us understand space environments.
Categories of Exploration Supported
Below you can find a summary of the types of projects we support that advance the links between environmentalism and space exploration.
They fit into two types:
Using space to maintain the Earth as an oasisThis category includes:Use of space data and materials to improve Earth. Environmental work using technologies resulting from space exploration. The use of data from extraterrestrial exploration to help further our understanding of the Earth’s environments and the biosphere. Includes samples and data returned from missions in Earth orbit and beyond.Educational advancement at the interface of environmentalism and space exploration. Projects that improve public understanding of the links between environmentalism and space exploration.Using knowledge of Earth to build a space-faring civilizationThis category includes:Astrobiology-related fieldwork or ‘analog’ field work. Field research in Earth’s extreme environments that assists in the study of habitability elsewhere in the Universe, the study of the survival of life in extreme environments, and the search for life beyond Earth.Field research applying Earth’s environmental and biological resources toward the human exploration and settlement of space. Includes the use of extraterrestrial ‘analog’ environments on Earth to test space technologies, and human physiological and psychological studies in extreme environments.Astronomy at the interface between Earth and space exploration / astroarchaeology. Includes expeditions making astronomical observations from remote, difficult to access Earth locations, archaeological field projects studying the development of early civilizations that made significant contributions to astronomy and space sciences, field expeditions studying the way in which views of the astronomical environment shaped the nature of past civilizations.
Funding
There is one funding round per year. Awards are currently the equivalent of about £450.

Eligibility

Most types of fieldwork are eligible. They include university fieldwork and expeditions and projects from private or non-profit organizations. We also fund lab-based projects and education projects according to the categories above that fit the Foundation’s objectives.