Daniella McCahey, assistant professor of history, Texas Tech University writes that figuring out how to feed people in space is a major part of a larger effort to demonstrate the viability of long-term human habitation of extra-terrestrial environments. This is Part 2 of a two-part article.
…continued from Part 1.
Antarctica as an analogue for space
As permanent human occupation of Antarctica grew through the middle of the 20th century, humanity also began its push into space – and specifically, to the Moon. Starting in the 1960s, scientists working for organisations like NASA began thinking of the hostile, extreme and alien Antarctic as a convenient analog for space exploration, where nations could test space technologies and protocols, including plant production. That interest continued through the end of the 20th century, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that space became a primary goal of some Antarctic agricultural research.
In 2004, the National Science Foundation and the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center collaborated to build the South Pole Food Growth Chamber. The project was designed to test the idea of controlled-environment agriculture – a means of maximising plant growth while minimising resource use. According to its architects, the facility closely mimicked the conditions of a Moon base and provided “an analogue on Earth for some of the issues that will arise when food production is moved to space habitations.” This facility continues to provide the South Pole Station with supplementary food.
Since building the South Pole Food Growth Chamber, the University of Arizona has collaborated with NASA to build a similar Prototype Lunar Greenhouse.
Growing plants in space
As people began spending longer times in space toward the end of the 20th century, astronauts began putting to use the lessons from a century of growing plants in Antarctica.
In 2014, NASA astronauts installed the Vegetable Production System aboard the International Space Station to study plant growth in microgravity. The next year, they harvested a small crop of lettuce, some of which they then ate with balsamic vinegar. Just as Antarctic scientists had argued for many years, NASA asserted that the nutritional and psychological value of fresh produce is “a solution to the challenge of long-duration missions into deep space.”
Antarctic research plays an important role for space to this day. In 2018, Germany launched a project in Antarctica called EDEN ISS that focused on plant cultivation technologies and their applications in space in a semi-closed system. The plants grow in air, as misters spray chemically enhanced water on their roots. In the first year, EDEN ISS was able to produce enough fresh vegetables to comprise one-third of the diet for a six-person crew.
Just as in Antarctic history, the question of how to grow plants is central to any discussion of possible human settlements on the Moon or Mars. People eventually abandoned efforts to cultivate the harsh Antarctic landscape for food production and turned to artificial technologies and environments to do so. But after over a century of practice and using the most modern techniques, the food grown in Antarctica has never been able to support many people for very long. Before sending people to the Moon or Mars, it might be wise to first prove that a settlement can survive on its own amid the frozen southern plains of Earth!
Republished under creative commons licence from The Conversation Africa.
Want to read more on this topic? See this Cold Link Africa news post on space agriculture from 2022.