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Space Food From Space Farms
Modern Farmer magazine has an article about NASA's efforts into growing food in space, a slow, difficult process that's nonetheless necessary if humanity is to have any significant presence away from Earth's surface. Quoting:
"This December, NASA plans to launch a set of Kevlar pillow-packs, filled with a material akin to kitty litter, functioning as planters for six romaine lettuce plants. The burgundy-hued lettuce (NASA favors the 'Outredgeous' strain) will be grown under bright-pink LED lights, ready to harvest after just 28 days. NASA has a long history of testing plant growth in space, but the goals have been largely academic. Experiments have included figuring out the effects of zero-gravity on plant growth, testing quick-grow sprouts on shuttle missions and assessing the viability of different kinds of artificial light. But [the Vegetable Production System] is NASA's first attempt to grow produce that could actually sustain space travelers. Naturally, the dream is to create a regenerative growth system, so food could be continually grown on the space station — or, potentially, on moon colonies or Mars. ... Plant size is a vital calculation in determining what to grow on the space station, where every square foot is carefully allotted. Harvest time is also of extreme importance; the program wants to maximize growth cycles within each crew’s (on average) six-month stay."
What will they use as fertilizer?
No sig today...
I would be more interested in terrestrial applications. Removing pressure on habitats or even letting current farmland revert back to natural habitats would have a large impact on the plasticity of many ecosystems. In short making them more robust to changes in climate for example.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I think it's a waste of time trying to solve issues of maintaining a biosphere in space, when a push into space will be much easier after we've reached the Singularity: machine bodies don't need food, air or water.
"Plant size is a vital calculation in determining what to grow on the space station, where every square foot is carefully allotted. "
Square ft on the US part of ISS, square meters (or square decimeters) on the Russian/European parts
every square foot is carefully allotted
Shouldn't that be CUBIC foot (or, more likely, meter, as the AC above pointed out)? Square footage is only a good measure when you're tethered to the floor.
Will this bring a significant improvement in oxygen recycling?
I wonder if they have tried "Chia Pets"?
Surely of all the vegetables, lettuce is one we could do without?
Have there seriously been no attempts to grow produce in orbit yet? I would have thought it would have been an insanely easy & cheap experiment. Just slap some tomato seeds in a small fabric bag filled with dirt, let them grow a bit and send them up into orbit in a small net enclosure to see how well they grow by one of the stations/shuttles windows.
Gonna drink space beer at the space bar
It's not like they're further from the sun. So why not grow it using sunlight?
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Capsule will have to be large as you will lose artificial gravity as you approach the center.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
sounds like a hydroponic media that is not good for root production. They'd be better off using rock wool to promote root growth and give the plants something to bind to. Rock wool is pretty easy to create, especially in space where the energy is readily available using a sinmple solar concentrator and feed the matterial through the focal point.
Another advantage of rock wool is the ability to retain a nutrient solution near the root ball to promote plant growth
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
To have to space soup, and not the space special.
Maybe Im lookin at this wrong, but it seems that you are dealing with a closed system with a leak in that there is only X amount of organic material and Y amount of energy being continually expended by at minimum the people existing (breathing, radiating heat, expending energey..etc) so it seems to be a matter of scale problem at that point..like.. how long you want this thing to go would eventually be determined by how big X is.
I don't see why we have to use land plants. Why not something like fungi or algae genetically modified to supply the essentials? Or a combination of such things.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
The same thing we use for fertilizer here on earth. The good shit. Animal agriculture is a vital part of the equation. Plants and animals co-evolved to use each others wastes.
Largely coz they don't exist. The closest is mycoprotein for synethic meat products, and its still a labor intensive process. Plants, if they grow, pretty much handle it themselves.
" The burgundy-hued lettuce (NASA favors the 'Outredgeous' strain) will be grown under bright-pink LED lights, ready to harvest after just 28 days."
Ignoring the higher quantum yields of green light is going to be a bad mistake. Catch up with the research done not even 4 years ago, NASA. No wonder you can't get a budget when you can't even keep up with the pace of research.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The soil replacement substrate they are testing (arcillite) is highly absorbent and probably is pretreated with the fertilizers. I know that similar experiments (SVET, russian ) were done on the Russion Mir station (my father was leading the team that developed the soil substrate). They used naturally occurring mineral (zeolite) which is extremely good absorbent. You can pretreat it with a fertilizer mix and it will leach small amounts of nutrients and support plant growth for years. All you need to do is add water. The zeolite is also very light - the dry stones will actually float when placed in water, until they absorb enough of it to sink. The zeolites and I assume the arcillite substrate that NASA is testing can also serve as base for soil formation. On long missions you can mix them with waste and let it rot. Because of their absorbent properties the zeolites will actually reduce the smell that comes out of the mix. I would guess that in a confined box with no external supply of fresh air, this would be quite an advantage.
Here are some references for the substrate description and the experiment results.
OT: Are they growing them in microgravity or some sort of spin-induced inertial "gravity" close to Earth's? Just wonder what plants growing in zero-G conditions would look like...
I better start saving up my space cash i stole from baby fark mcgee zax
What I'm curious about is how much they're going to have to play with the atmosphere scrubbers to provide a consistent level of CO2 for the plants to metabolize. Too little CO2 and the plants grow slowly or stunted, too much CO2 and the astronauts suffer. Finding that happy medium is going to be critical for any long-term orbital farming.
Trying to recycle human waste into fertilizer would be extremely energy intensive and potentially hazardous contamination-wise.
Exposing human waste to hard vacuum and direct sunlight for a while wouldn't be sufficient to sterilize it? I'm actually curious about that.
That would make space toilet design a lot easier. You just need to avoid what happened to U-1206
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
How the heck are you to make any kind of food other than raw in space? Your microwave oven is going to take 1kW, and you'll get mushy carrots at best. How do you dice in 0g? What about stir-fry? That seems very messy!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
To go where no farmer has gone before...
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/2009/04/01/pig-farmers-in-space/
Eating salad in space; sounds like the next viral video sensation... Could get pretty messy!
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
Guinea pigs are probably a better choice. Reproduce faster, less fat, need less space, and the pellet-type manure is easier to deal with. They thrive on kitchen waste and weeds, and are dumber than pigs so less likely to cause trouble. They're also MUCH less aggressive than a sow in heat (or a boar any time), and the males don't need to be castrated to make the meat eatable. The only disadvantage is that they won't eat meat or fish offal like a pig would, but there are plenty of fish that will do that.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I bet it works on pot too. Shazam.
Wow, so much mythunderstanding and so little real knowledge in your reply:
1) Fat is a necessary dietary component. If you don't get it you won't be healthy. Even in space you'll need fat.
2) Pigs don't actually have much fat unless you breed and feed them for it. "Fat Pigs" are made that way primarily through miss-management since few people have lard type pigs now. Even lard type pigs aren't fat if kept on a proper feed.
3) Pigs thrive on kitchen wastes, weeds, pasture and just about anything making them a perfect animal for space. We raise our pigs on pasture. In fact, they can eat a more varied diet than guinea pigs. They'll even eat you when you die so we can avoid wasting resources by spacing you. Hey, in space nothing can go to waste...
4) Pigs make food for us much faster than guinea pigs. Real farm pigs grow from birth (3 lbs) to finisher size (250 lbs) in about six months on pasture. Farm pigs have eight to 20 piglets per litter and two to three litters a year. That's around 7,000 lbs of continuous production per year. You'll never find guinea pigs doing that efficient production of food.
5) Aggressive pigs should be eaten, not bred. If you're breeding aggressive boars and sows then you're making a big mistake. But based on what you're saying I have the distinct impression you know little to nothing about pigs so I don't think you're doing any pig raising or breeding. I actually breed and raise them so I'm very familiar with them. I have hundreds out on pasture. Our pigs aren't aggressive. Like with any large animal you need to handle them with care - they can step on you or bite.
6) Male pigs don't need to be castrated. There is plenty of research on that. The meat of non-castrated male (boar) pigs is very good. We sell the meat from thousands of boars to tens of thousands of people.
7) Most of all I have one word for you: Bacon.
Next time pick a topic you understand rather than spreading false information and myths.
Walter Jeffries
SugarMtnFarm.com
Pastured Pigs
Most of my knowledge of pigs comes from those raised by my dad in the '40s/'50s and my wife's relatives in Peru, so probably none of them would have been the breeds you use. Perfectly willing to be educated, that's what I come to SlashDot for.
A dozen guinea pigs (which do have some fat on them, but not the lard belly that I associate with pork) can be raised on the potato peelings, banana skins, etc. of a family, with a few greens on occasion to round out the diet. In a very large habitat you might have enough fodder for a herd of pigs, but in a smaller habitat you'd be limited to just a few. Guinea pigs are better than rabbits and near chickens for pound of animal grown per pound of feed, aren't pigs close to the middle between chickens and cattle?
Can you inbreed your porkers, or would you need to have sperm for insemination brought in? Guinea pigs don't have much problem with that, at least in Peru an inbred line can go at least 10 or 12 generations without outbreeding and probably longer. We generally end up wiping them out for someone's birthday or anniversary and starting over every couple of years, so I'm not sure how long they can go. My brother-in-law would know for sure, he's raised them for sale.
I've had meat from uncastrated boars, it's eatable but not good. Again, they probably weren't the breeds that you work with, but just cooking it made the whole house reek like spoiled urine. Is there something you need to do at slaughter time to prevent that, or is it the breed you use? I know with buck deer you remove the scent glands as soon as you kill it or the venison doesn't taste as good.
7) You win. :-)
I think we're probably both right. In a small pioneer situation where meat is an occasional luxury and there isn't a lot of fodder guinea pigs win, in a large environment with surplus greens or pasture pigs could probably provide a more steady supply of meat.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"Can you inbreed your porkers, or would you need to have sperm for insemination brought in?"
You can inbreed. It is just like any animal, or plant. Breed the best of the best and eat the rest. Inbreeding problems don't appear by magic but are from recessive genes that become visible. Cull them. That is the problem with inbreeding where people aren't willing to cull the offspring. This is why inbreeding humans is generally frowned on. :)
"I've had meat from uncastrated boars, it's eatable but not good."
Then you had either the unfortunate result of the few breeds that have a problem with boar taint or it was miss-management. See this for more on taint. I've done a lot of research on it, we don't castrate and there is a growing movement in the industry to end castration. Basically have good genetics (most pigs don't have taint), feed correctly and manage correctly and there won't be taint.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:sugarmtnfarm.com+taint
"7) You win. :-)" :) Bacon is the gateway meat. :)
I'm thinking that when we go into space, space, as in room, isn't going to be a big deal. We're going to make huge habitats. Lots of sunlight. Lots of solar energy. Pastures! Pig farmers in space! I would take some chickens too for a complete breakfast. :)