Mycelium’s adventures in space go beyond material innovation. As she researched the commission, Ciokajlo came across a feminist novel from 1893 that imagined Mars as a planet where gender roles reversed – which is why their creation is a boot for women. The novel propelled her to imagine a new society where biomaterials provide a new way to interact with our surroundings. Even the boot’s name, Caskia, comes from the novel: it is the planet’s only region with equal standing between men and women.

The design is still hypothetical, because the real boot submitted for Moma – and currently in display at the London Design Museum – did use mycelium but not human sweat, as their deadline was too tight, but the science checks out.

Mycelium materials can take shape in several ways. If you have solid waste (like sawdust), you want to sterilise it and add the fungus so its spread can start. By incubating it in controlled conditions for temperature and humidity, the white veiny hyphae would compact to create a fibrous solid material. This is how Nasa and Esa hope to use mycelium for their Mars bases.

For Caskia, a special type of fungus (there are more than five million species) would feed off the nutrients diluted in human sweat after it is filtered for impurities. The ‘wet material’, as Montalti calls it, would be shaped with a mould directly around the astronaut’s feet and kept fed by sweat production.

In both methods, the fungus growth can be stopped by heating to up to 70 or 80C (F), which means either using an oven on Earth or exposing the culture to high temperatures on Mars or outer space.

The substrate would possibly need an additional nutritional supplement to promote its growth, acknowledges Moltalti, but it is rooted in current mycelium science. The boot they created for MoMA used a special diluted formula.

“For each of our cultural inspirations you could find scientists that back this up,” says Ciokajlo.