Space Farming: The Final Frontier
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
These space germs are often fairly benign, akin to the natural bacteria that build up in any moist root bank. Russian crews are allowed to consume vegetables grow on their side of the space station, but microbe standards are strict and unwavering on U.S. space missions.
That is the strangest part of the whole article. It's amazing how much science the USSR did on long term space habitation (including growing plants) that just gets ignored by NASA. Unfortunately I can't recall the title, but I read a book on the Soviet space program maybe 10 years ago that detailed all of the progress the USSR made prior to the US SkyLab program, and honestly they were 10-15 years ahead on that stuff compared to NASA.
I thought that line was the funniest in the article. I can imagine an image of Vladimir munching his veggies as poor Joe looks on.
The diary of cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev includes a story about a batch of onion bulbs taken on board Salyut as part of an investigation of plant growth in zero gravity. “As we were unloading the resupply ship, we found some rye-bread and a knife. So we ate some bread. Then we saw the onion bulbs we were supposed to plant. We ate them right then and there, with bread and salt. They were delicious. Time went by and the biologists asked us, ‘How are the onions?’ “‘They are growing,’ we answered…. “‘Do they have shoots?’ Without any hesitation we replied that they even had shoots. There was great excitement at the communication station. Onions have never bloomed in space before! We asked to speak to the head biologist in private. ‘For god’s sake,’ we told him, ‘don’t get upset, we ate your onions.’”
"I don't know about the onions, but the weed grows great up here! We grew enough up here to last for the next few missions!"
It's interesting to think how long these veggies could last within human civilization beyond Earth. How would our veggies evolve (only from genetic modification?) Would they be largely immune from disease in this environment? What would be the possibility of them hitting some sort of genetic dead end and us losing our entire supply? Could we create new types of veggies?
This video gave me the idea and instructions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjWLyA-w4Bo
Well, these "outlandish" cereal crops currently provide the bulk of calories for almost everyone on the planet. If you're serious about feeding astronauts in space, they are exactly the plants that you need to start with. And don't tell me equipment to grind wheat or hull rice would be complicated, compared with other stuff that's in orbit already.
Grains have loads of stalk and root that you don't eat, tend to need a lot of water and need extra equipment in preparation and are often used as powders, which easily form combustible suspensions in low gravity.
Maybe if you don't care about total area. Stalks and all, grains and tubers are the most efficient at transforming square footage of sunlight into edible calories; water would get completely recycled in any case.
yes, or one can consider potatoes. 2-3 times higher calorie/water efficiency than grains.
In my grandmother's day, all food post-harvest was either dried (grains and meats), canned, or pickled.
Some things that we refrigerate now, but historically didn't have to, are eggs and milk. Do you know how those were treated in your grandmother's day? The image I have from history is that milk was produced and consumed in large quantities, and "refrigerated" (iceboxed) then as now. But clearly (?), what was good enough for milk was too good for... lettuce? ;)
Just as a fun side observation, there are some other obvious concerns, if you're starting from a hunter-gatherer state: jerky keeps significantly better than grain does, and is packed full of calories, and is ultra-low-tech, but grain production can be scaled up in a way that would be extremely difficult for jerky. So we built granaries and tolerated massive losses to rats essentially because even after the losses we could produce more grain than "other food".
Some of the earliest practical refrigeration on the farm (eg. the Icy Ball [1]) is from the early-late 1920s. That was during my grandmother's lifetime. If you think about it, the change in lifestyles she's witnessed in ~100 years is pretty bloody impressive: refrigeration, electricity, telephones, computers, etc.
Historically, milk was "preserved" by turning it into cheese.
The current efforts are more of a because-it's-there thing than a what-would-we-like-to-grow thing, and at some point "the calculus for what plants make sense in space" will have to take into account which plants we actually want to consume.
EDIT:
> Potatoes, rice, olives, a wide range of beans, even aq[u]atic plants etc are all w[or]th considering. After all the fact grains need little water is one of the[ir] main ap[p]eals
Rice is a grain. A grain that grows in swamps. It could best be described as "water-intensive".
Colonization or really long term missions is where your arguments really take off.
By volume, potatoes (the 2nd option beyond leafy greens according to NASA) have 30x the calories as lettuce. I don't see how the math could ever work out.
In fact, potatoes might be a good optionally nutritionally. Chris Voigt went on an all potato diet for 60 days and seemingly suffered no ill effects: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/12/interview-with... I wouldn't want to see someone try the same thing with lettuce.
1. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2828/could-i-surviv...
Now, cooking them down might be an option more suited, either that or most food prep is going to be done clean room style, isolated from the rest of the area. If we go along the route of wet, cannot some sea products be used as substitutes?
Also, the idea of using various combinations of plants to replicate existing animal products is coming along well, there are artificial egg products coming to market. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2416808/Artif...
At the moment we are at a point in time where we cant see the end of space but there might be another "ocean" at the end, who knows!
Actually this is a common misconception. Educated people have known the earth was spherical since the birth of astronomy.