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Design solutions for robust and optimal supply of water, nutrients, and gases within plant root media in micro-and reduced-gravity are essential for successful integration of plants as an important bioregenerative component of advanced life support systems. Many of the confounding and ‘unknown’ microgravity effects associated with previous plant research on Mir and on the International Space Station (ISS), may be attributed to inadequate media selection, and lack of monitoring and modeling capability. Our objectives are to: (i) develop a modeling approach for optimizing liquid and gas fluxes to plant roots under extreme volume constraints and reduced gravity conditions, (ii) extend this approach to design engineered porous media that satisfy plant root metabolic requirements in reduced gravity.