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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?
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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.
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"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.
Machines don't need bodies at all. In fact, machines don't want or need anything. Humans are curious though, and like to do essentially pointless things just because we can. So we're going to have our biosphere in space.
Besides, the Singularity is just about AI. It doesn't follow that humans are immediately going to go extinct. We may have decent cyborg bodies before then anyway, and so could reduce our food/air/water requirements too.
which is totally what she said
Will this bring a significant improvement in oxygen recycling?
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don't hit the alt space bar
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It's not like they're further from the sun. So why not grow it using sunlight?
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I drink at the space bar alot. But sometimes I step away from the keyboard and drink somewheres else.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
I was told back in 2000 that the Singularity would solve the problem of cheap access to space in twenty years. So we have about seven years to go.
Second, we are already machines. But machines that happen to need food, air, and water. There's no particular reason to wait for the Singularity to do things which we can do now.
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.
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!
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