Upcoming Plant Experiments on the International Space Station

How does a kitchen gardener choose what to grow? It’s about balancing quite a complex set of variables, which include the space and time available, the local climate and soil, the gardener’s skill level and what they like to eat. That last one is, itself, quite a complicated topic as culture plays a significant role. There are many thousands of edible plants on the planet; most people only eat a small number and grow fewer still.

Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA

Right now, 200 miles above your head, chilli peppers are growing on the International Space Station (ISS).

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.

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.

Header image: NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio uses a video camera to photograph the Ant Forage Habitat. Image credit: NASA

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.

Just over a year ago, when we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I talked about the lack of diversity in space and mentioned Mary Jackson. In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures shared the stories of Mary Jackson and two other Black female mathematicians – Katherine Johnson and, Dorothy Vaughan. They worked at NASA when a ‘computer’ still meant a person carrying out mathematical calculations. The film is based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, which I am reading at the moment. The book offers a more detailed and accurate account of the prejudice these women (and others) had to overcome.

Can we grow food on the Moon or Mars? That was the question that started Dr Wieger Wamelink, ecologist and exobiologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, on a research quest in 2013.

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.

Gardeners of the Galaxy has completed its first solar orbit! Join Emma the Space Gardener for a birthday celebration and learn how GotG got started, hear the story of a space plants experiment you’ll never forget, and find out which plant Emma would choose to take into space.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! Emma’s guest on this week’s show is Dr Gioia Massa, a Project Scientist at the NASA Kennedy Space Center, working on the Veggie growing system on the International Space Station. Gioia talks about the challenges of growing plants in space, those blooming space zinnias, and when we might see astronauts eating their first space tomato!