Have you spotted the Veggie Memorial Plaque?
21.08.2023 - 11:48
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
I was scrolling through Twitter recently when I spotted something in a picture of the Veggie growth chamber on the ISS that I hadn’t noticed before – there’s a triangular plaque at the back.
I wanted to know more, so I did a quick search and came across a NASA update from December 2016. It was mainly about the Veg-03 experiment, which was the first to trial the ‘cut-and-come-again’ harvest technique on the Outredgeous space lettuce.
The update also includes an explanation of the plaque, which it says was mounted that summer in memory of two pioneering space biologists. The plaque reads:
“Dedicated to the memory of space biology pioneers Thora Halstead and Ken Souza, for all they did to plant and nurture the seeds of biological research in space.”
According to NASA Watch, Thora Halstead “practically invented space biology”. During her career she focused on the study of how the cells of living organisms (often plants) respond to a low-gravity environment, publishing more than 40 research articles.
NASA tells us that Ken Souza conducted one of the earliest life science spaceflight experiments on Gemini 11. “In 1992, his frog egg experiment on SpaceLab-J provided the first evidence that a vertebrate species can reproduce in the absence of gravity.”
“Both Halstead’s and Souza’s early stewardship of a new science that became the discipline of space biology will continue to benefit future explorers on the journey to Mars.”
According to SpaceRef, copies of the plaque were flown in space and then returned to Earth and presented to the families of Ken Souza and Thora Halstead.
Having also spotted identical plaques on the Veggie growth chamber in the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, I do wonder