Whether from continent to continent or coast to coast, people have always made their big moves together with plants. Traveling away from Earth would be no different. Our success on other worlds will rest, in part, on the supple stems of plants.
“Plants are things that we take with us as explorers,” says Anna-Lisa Paul, the co-director of the University of Florida Space Plants Lab. “They’re part of our core heritage whether we think of it or not.”
On all the brief forays into space so far, astronauts have sustained themselves almost entirely on packaged food. But if humans ever hope to set up long-term habitats on the moon or Mars, their physical and mental health would benefit from the ability to grow plants.
Space agencies from various countries have spent decades developing the technologies necessary to bring farming indoors, and now the German space agency and NASA are pushing the state-of-the-art of soil-free gardening to its limits with a greenhouse in Antarctica and laying the groundwork for their next act: farming systems where the farmers are optional.
NASA, Soviets and history of indoor farming experiments
NASA has worked to advance space agriculture, in part because a robust plant collection could serve as the ultimate multipurpose life-support system, producing calories and nutrients to eat, making oxygen to breathe and taking carbon dioxide from the air.
Building on Soviet research, NASA funded a variety of agricultural programs in the 1980s and 1990s. In a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, researchers discovered that they could replace hot and cumbersome incandescent grow lights with a particular blend of LED lights. Red LEDs, which were more energy efficient, let plants photosynthesize. But plants also needed blue light, or they would grow too tall and spindly. The work led to a patent, and today’s indoor farms often feed plants on a similar diet of red and blue photons — which is why indoor farms often appear bathed in purple light.
“NASA was genuinely in front of the curve on this, promoting their use for these applications,” says Raymond Wheeler, a horticultural scientist who has studied space agriculture at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for decades.
In the late 1980s, Wheeler worked on a KSC team that grew wheat, potatoes, soybeans and other crops with their roots immersed in a nutrient solution, stacked on four rows of shelves inside a large cylindrical chamber — likely the first execution of a vertical farming system that has now developed into a multi-billion-dollar industry.
