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 - 12:03 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Fresh from the success that allowed astronauts to eat lettuce grown in space in August, NASA’s Veggie plant-growing hardware on the International Space Station (ISS) has been reloaded with new plant pillows – this time sown with Zinnia ‘Profusion’.
These Zinnias will take twice as long as the lettuce to grow – 60 days in total – and are expected to be in bloom in the New Year. They will have a special regimen of 10 hours of LED light followed by 14 hours of darkness.
It may seem slightly frivolous to grow flowers in space, but it makes perfect sense. Not only will there be a noticeable effect on crew morale (and this is one of the facets of the experiment that NASA is tracking), but getting plants to flower in space is one of the things we need to crack if we want to be able to feed ourselves in off-world environments. Whilst we’re obviously well on the way to being able to grow salad in space, it’s only a small part of our diet. Fruiting plants, such as tomatoes, have to flower (and those flowers have to be pollinated) before they will fruit. There’s also a question of whether pollen will be problematic in an entirely enclosed environment.
And, of course, if we want to be able to continually farm in space, we need to be able to take plants through their whole lifecycle, from seeds to flowers and back to seeds.
The first extraterrestrial seeds were grown on the Russian Mir space station in the 1980s. These were Thale Cress, Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant often used in scientific experiments because a) it has a very short lifecycle and b) it was the first plant to have its genome sequenced. Here on Earth, it’s better known as a weed, and technically it’s edible – it’s a Brassica.
You probably wouldn’t want to eat too much of
Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
Word by Matt de Neef, The Conversation
Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA
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.
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.
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.
Over our heads, on the International Space Station, chilli peppers are blooming and being hand-pollinated by astronauts.
Back at the beginning of December, I mentioned that astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) were hoping to have flowers in bloom for the new year. After successfully growing a second crop of lettuce in the Veggie growing system on board, they were trying their hand at something more complicated. Coaxing a plant into flowering in space has been done before, but it’s trickier than just growing leaves – but it’s something we’re going to have to crack if we want to be space farmers. We need flowers before we can grow fruits and grains, and we also need to be able to produce seeds in space if living away from the Earth is to be sustainable.
Sixty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin launched us into the era of human spaceflight. The Russian cosmonaut achieved a major milestone in the Space Race when he orbited the Earth in the Vostok 1 capsule. This amazing achievement came less than four years after the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik 1.
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.
Join Emma the Space Gardener in the Gardeners of the Galaxy time machine to learn about the time that NASA encouraged schoolchildren all over the world to grow killer mutant space tomatoes. That can’t be right, can it?