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Eat Like a Martian
21.08.2023 - 12:02 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Two researchers from the University of Central Florida – Kevin Cannon and Daniel Britt – have been looking at how a Martian colony might feed itself. Although NASA has been growing some food on the International Space Station, its goal is to supplement the vitamins and minerals in a standard astronaut diet and to improve crew morale – it’s not about making a space station, or a colony, self-sufficient.
But SpaceX has a different goal, which is being the transport infrastructure for a Martian colony that grows to a million people or more. Feeding that many people, so far from Earth, becomes a different challenge. To avoid shipping in vast quantities of food – at enormous expense – the only solution is to make agriculture possible on Mars.
Cannon and Britt have made several assumptions of the kinds of agriculture that might thrive on Mars, assuming a commercial, market-led system similar to Earth. They believe that a Martian colony could achieve self-sufficiency within 100 years. The timescale over which that happens would be primarily determined by how quickly pressurised infrastructure could be put in place, probably in underground tunnels.
Self-sufficiency would require the colony to make as much use of local resources as possible. The settlement will need water, energy, oxygen, construction materials and food. The first four of those are relatively easy with current technology. Solar panels and nuclear reactors will provide energy, we believe there’s extractable water on Mars below the planet’s surface, and the Martian regolith (the rocky surface) can be transformed into building materials.
Food is trickier, as there’s no native plants or animals on Mars, and the conditions on the surface are incredibly hazardous. So
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