Inside NASA’s Space Farming Labs
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Particulates, like soil, are actually considered a hazardous material in space because it can float into and clog up the ventilation.
Capillary action is a dominant force in microgravity and water will coat everything.
Roots are respiratory and will absorb the oxygen in the water around them, but the bubbles of CO2 they create won't naturally rise to the surface. This can cause the roots to suffocate.
Hydroponics are the logical route because regular soil will deplete its nutrient supply, but you still need a root growth substrate. The current "Veggie" system uses vermiculite clay chips contained in a pouch. They had to use the right gauge of particle diameter though: too small and it will saturate with water and suffocate the roots, too big and there won't be enough pressure gradient from the capillary action and the roots will dry out. Also, if you don't have your hydroponic nutrient solution just right, salts will build up in your substrate, so the pouches are typically single use.
Our team developed a method for 3D printing a growth substrate. This eliminates the problem with particulates and it also allows you control the gauge of the holes in the material to get the right air/water ratio. You can even vary the hole sizes so the water is pulled by the capillary action more at the dry end and fills the medium more evenly with water. It's not a perfect solution. The hydrophilic nylon filament we used liked to warp when it was printed. It also doesn't work for root vegetables like potatoes and stuff. However, it is reusable, cleanable, recyclable, scalable, largely passive, and safe. Plus, everyone loves 3D printers.
TL;DR Microgravity creates a lot of problems for growing plants in space, many of which aren't immediately obvious. 3D printed growth mediums might be a solution.
A capsule tethered to a second stage, or a pair of capsules is the low-cost* way to do it. The technique was demonstrated during the Gemini missions (at very low g).
*Compared to rotating space station
As to why... I suspect non-ISS life science research in orbit just has no where to get funding or support.
With NASA's current budget, they probably figure it's easier to just deal with microgravity for a spaceflight with a limited duration (like to Mars). Generating gravity only really makes sense for spaceflights of longer/unlimited duration (interstellar travel).
For the most part, your garden variety of plants wouldn't be affected too much by the force gradient. There actually has been quite a bit of research put into this. I'm trying to find a source for this, but a few years back the Japanese burned a bunch money on this kind of research and didn't end up with anything substantial. If you do it on a smaller scale, just for the plants, it also creates the issue of extra angular momentum added to your spacecraft. This is manageable, but definitely something to take into account.
But, you're right. If you created gravity on a scale large enough for humans, it would definitely get rid of most of the problems for the plants.
In the context of this thread, I'm mostly interested because it seems like a happy middle ground to solve your capillary action issues. However it would also be super interesting to see how a small acceleration like that could help with e.g. retinal problems from microgravity.
Growing crops in space has no real scientific benefits for the nearterm future. It's a "nice to have" not a "visionary" thing.
The science resulting from our robot exploration is astounding. Nearly all photos of outer space objects beyond the earth and moon are robot driven, and the high quality photos of Jupiter, etc are entirely robot driven. Compare that to a Mars rock.
BTW, we can't send a human to Mars right now. It's technically impossible- well, I mean, we could deliver their dead body to the surface, but that's not super useful.
A single geologist on Mars would constantly have to check back in on their plans.
Mars is not. It's a minimum of a 1-hour round-trip. So every tiny little rover movement has to be planned in advance, unless you can figure out how to automate it, which only goes so far: you're not going to put an AI with a geologist's education in a rover.
This is not likely to ever change, unless you can 1) figure out how to make FTL communications work (subspace?), or 2) figure out how to make AIs with human-level intelligence (at which point we humans would be completely obsolete and likely slated for extermination). Good luck with either of those. Until then, sending actual humans is the only way to get a lot done in a reasonable amount of time.
The nice photos you talk about from robotic exploration is the result of completely pre-planned missions, with very little possibility of needing to make fast decisions on-site. When you're just flying around the Jupiter system or flying through the Pluto system, that's really not that hard; the planet and moons' locations can be predicted with a very high degree of accuracy, and the data they're gathering is all planned far in advance. It's not like walking around a planet's surface and deciding which rock to investigate, or which rock to ignore, or what a good place to dig would be. You can do all that by remote control, but it's a whole lot slower because you need to have humans verify everything, so what would take you an hour with a human on-site now takes you days.
The beauty of large-scale robotic exploration is that you can use all the analysts on earth to analyze the results. Compared to a single human.
Yes, NASA has made mission changes post-launch, but these are usually simple changes, consisting basically of single orders to redirect the craft along a new trajectory. A human walking around looking at rocks makes those decisions on a second-by-second basis.
The best way to farm in space is to convert human waste into manure and compost, and you need to have other organisms to do that. I don't see red worms either.
NASA won't be able to engineer plants in space, it will have to adopt a microbiome that exists on earth already that can be modularized into a spacecraft. Growing lettuce is a joke, you need to figure out how to make pigs and chickens into astronauts.
I'm not joking.
The future is probably artificially produced food, like the porridge / sludge shown in the Matrix. Something out of a chemical process instead of a biological one.
I'm not sure we're ready for all that soil to be floating around in the ISS, literally mucking things up. Not saying it isn't possible, but why not use lettuces to solve all the 'simple' problems about growing things in space first.
Also, don't discount the quality of life improvement of eating some fresh lettuce.
I imagine we can synthesize relatively simple molecules such as glucose to supplement calories when needed by astronauts.
Step one, discover whether pouches can support plant life in space, with ideal conditions set up beforehand on earth.
Step two, discover whether you can manufacture said conditions in space using in situ materials.
Lettuce is a great way to explore step one. Consider that we're not confident that root systems will behave correctly when water doesn't flow through the strata like it normally does with gravity. There are still fundamental research elements to be done.
Good question! The answer is that we know so little about surviving there for any appreciable length of time (compared to a human lifespan), that most don't understand the challenges. Meanwhile they're relative experts with the problems faced by a terrestrial existence.
TL;DR The hydrogen is always redder in the other man's H-Alpha band.
That's a big difference from sending a box of lettuce up into space so that astronauts don't have to eat paste.