Preparing the Digital Seedbed for Space-Ready Hydroponics

Born in the Ochil Hills of Scotland, Ochil Astronautics brings together rugged engineering discipline and the practical resilience of farmland. The company is dedicated to developing hardware systems that enable fresh, nutritious food to grow in the world’s most extreme environments, from disaster-relief zones to remote field operations and, ultimately, space.

Founder Stuart Preston draws on nearly two decades of RAF and defense-engineering experience, combined with agriculture heritage. This unique blend of technical precision and farming insight sparked the idea behind Rugged Garden, a modular, impact-resistant hydroponic system designed to deliver fresh food wherever it’s needed most, including future orbital habitats.

Time, tools, and space-ready thinking

Building an ambitious hardware startup while operating with limited resources created several challenges:

• Severe time constraints
• With core engineering work competing against business development, marketing, customer engagement, and day-to-day operations, the company faced constant pressure to prioritize and deliver with very little bandwidth.
• Legacy tools that couldn’t support future scaling

The company needed collaborative, industry-standard tools that would support investor engagement, team growth, and professional engineering workflows.

Space-grade engineering requirements from the outset

Building equipment for low-Earth-orbit systems demands compliance, traceability, and rigorous systems engineering long before prototypes exist.

“I’m not approaching this with a pen-and-paper concept. We need to think about materials compliance and system integration from day one, that prevents months of delay later. Solid requirements at the beginning are a must to speed everything up.”

Stuart Preston, Founder & CEO | Ochil Astronautics

A true engineering partnership

The collaboration with TECHNIA began at Space-Comm London, where Stuart focused not on visual CAD features but on requirements management and MBSE (model-based systems engineering) workflows. That mindset shaped a partnership built on shared engineering discipline, providing Ochil Astronautics’ team with:

• Engineering support through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
• MBSE workflows with full requirements traceability.
• Professional CAD models, concept designs, and investor-ready visuals.
• A scalable digital environment to onboard future engineers.

TECHNIA’s involvement ensures that every design decision remains connected to requirements, compliance considerations, and future system integration, essential for equipment intended for future commercial space stations.

Supplier-ready designs for the next generation of space stations

Thanks to the collaborative digital environment, Ochil Astronautics now has:

• Professional, space-ready concept designs.
• A clear digital thread across requirements, changes, and design decisions.
• Investor-ready engineering assets.
• A scalable platform for growing the engineering team.
• A credible supplier proposition for orbital-habitat manufacturers.

The team will present these designs at Space Comm Florida, positioning Ochil Astronautics not as a concept-stage startup, but as a credible future supplier of food-production systems for commercial space stations.

“Being able to show that we’re on top of the engineering is essential for generating capital. With TECHNIA’s support, we can demonstrate real maturity.”

Stuart Preston, Founder & CEO | Ochil Astronautics

Ochil Astronautics is now progressing toward preliminary design review, preparing to expand the engineering team. With rugged terrestrial applications generating revenue and the space program built on a solid engineering foundation, the company is rapidly advancing toward its long-term goal: sustaining human life by enabling fresh food production anywhere, on Earth or in orbit.

For TECHNIA, supporting innovators like Stuart reinforces a core commitment, empowering ambitious ideas with world-class engineering discipline, digital infrastructure, and genuine partnership.