Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
21.08.2023 - 12:00 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty / Tim Peake
While we’re waiting for Tim Peake to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin his Principia mission, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the first Briton in space – Helen Sharman, who was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991.
Tim Peake will be the first Briton to visit the ISS, and will be encouraging school children across the UK to become astrobiologists, having teamed up with the RHS for a Rocket Science project looking at what happens to seeds (rocket [US: argulua]) exposed to space conditons.
Tim Peake is an official British astronaut, trained by ESA and sponsored by the British government. Helen Sharman took part in a commercial partnership with the Russian space agency, which unfortunately wasn’t very successful – she was the only Briton to fly up under the scheme.
The mission was called Juno, and since it hadn’t been properly funded by British commercial interests, Sharman got a bit short-changed in the science experiment department and mostly helped with Soviet experiments rather than having her own set (unlike Tim Peake, who has a range of activities tailored to him, including running a space marathon!). Of course, astronauts and cosmonauts are pretty much lab rats themselves, as one of the most important areas of research is how space affects the human body.
The Soviet space programme is nowhere near as well-documented as NASA’s, but according to David M. Harland, in The Mir Space Station: A Precursor to Space Colonization:
As the first woman to visit Mir, she was presented with a tiny bonsai tree on arrival.
Which is nice
Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps the latest space plant news and then talks about some of the seeds with space stories.
Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.
This is what the wild, self-seeded comfrey plant outside my front door looked like last week. It doesn’t look like that now, though, because I have cut it back and put the leaves to rot in one of my comfrey buckets (they have lids and taps). First, though, I had to empty out the last lot of comfrey liquid. I can’t remember when I made it – I don’t think it was last year, I think it must have been before that – and I harvested 3 litres of comfrey liquid from my pair of bucket. That’s certainly enough to keep my tomatoes and peppers happy this year!
One of the nerdy things I enjoy doing in my spare time is researching the first seeds to have made it into space. This is what I have found so far:
It has been a month since we set up the AeroGarden and started our journey into space gardening. It came with three herbs – basil, dill and parsley. The basil was the first to burst into life and has been the fastest growing. I trimmed the top of one of the young plants at the end of July, and it’s probably ready for another trim now. The parsley was the slowest to germinate and isn’t remotely close to catching up, but it is growing well now.
From the moment humans started to reach for the skies, we have used other species from Earth to test what’s safe and what happens to life away from its natural habitat on the planet’s surface.
Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps important spacecraft Arrivals and Departures and learns about growing nutrients and medicines in space. There’s a new plant experiment running on the International Space Station, and exciting news from ESA.
I imagine the Apollo 11 astronauts had plenty to do while they were hurtling towards the Moon, but from a bystander’s perspective it was probably pretty dull stuff. Still, it’s Day 3 of the mission, so let’s have a look at what they’ve got stashed away in their space age picnic basket.
In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.
In December 2015, as we were waiting for Tim Peake to launch to the ISS and start his Principia mission, I talked about Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. In that blog post, I quoted David M. Harland, from his book The Mir Space Station: A Precursor to Space Colonization:
Back in 2014, I bought some seeds that had been into space. They are cinnamon basil (Ocimum basilicum Cinnamon), still sealed into their space packet.