Space — the farm’s final frontier
To see the next frontier for food, you may want to look to the stars.
With humans now hoping to establish colonies on the moon, on Mars and in the stars beyond, researchers are focusing on ways to produce fresh food in space that will look, smell and taste like the edibles we have on the home planet.
A NASA crew on the International Space Station cleared an important milestone in 2015 by becoming the first to grow, harvest and eat a spacegrown crop of Outredgeous red romaine lettuce. The project is one way scientists are experimenting with creating sustainable sources of fresh food, a linchpin for surviving long interplanetary trips and establishing permanent extraterrestrial colonies.
Humans, after all, have thousands of years of experience adapting farming techniques to the world’s harshest places.
“We’ve shown, at least here on Earth, if we can set up environments where plants can thrive, we can pretty much grow whatever we need,” said John Holst, senior research analyst with the Space Foundation, a Colorado nonprofit space advocacy organization.
On the earliest manned space flights, food was an afterthought for U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts because they weren’t in orbit that long.
And their space capsules were barely big enough for themselves and their equipment. Moreover, mission planners worried that floating water, bread crumbs or other food matter would damage that expensive equipment. So astronauts had to settle for pureed food they could squeeze out of aluminum tubes or small, bitesize food cubes coated with gelatin.
As spacecraft became larger, and missions went from hours to days to months, space food became more normal, although perishables needed to be vacuum packed, dehydrated or otherwise preserved to survive long periods.
According to NASA, about 200 meal items are available on the International Space Station. There, NASA is testing the Vegetable Production System, dubbed Veggie, a chamber with controlled lighting and water that can grow crops like lettuces from seeds that have been planted in special “pillows” of soil and fertilizer. The system is designed to see how various crops grow in a weightless environment.
NASA, which plans to land humans on Mars in the 2030s, wants to use these systems in greenhouses on the red planet to grow potatoes, wheat, soybeans and other crops.
Billionaire Elon Musk, best known for electric Tesla cars, has also been thinking about food on Mars.
Musk and his private firm SpaceX have ambitious plans to shuttle humans to a selfsustaining, million-person city on Mars in the next 100 years. (“History suggests” an eventual doomsday event on this planet, Musk said — so our species’ future may hinge on the venture.)
Although Mars is “a little cold,” Musk said in an outline of his plans, “it has a very helpful atmosphere, which, being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.”
Meanwhile, Holst said the European Space Agency has been investigating using a radiation-resistant bacteria called spirulina, which not only is a protein-rich food supplement, but can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. The agency has created a muesli bar, made of spirulina and goji berries, for its space-station astronauts. Similarly, NASA is developing its own high-calorie breakfast food bars for crews on its planned deep-space Orion spacecraft to help reduce the weight of food supplies that are brought aboard.
But humans still face a long journey before learning what it takes to grow edible food on another planet, especially one with an inhospitable atmosphere and toxins in the soil. Indeed, it’s been almost 45 years since an astronaut even took a step on the moon.
For now, “we’re just seeing what we have here and if it’s easily eatable up there,” Holst said.