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Comment by Ninjalicious | Hacker News Reader

I see more metal than dirt in all of their experiments. No biohazard markers anywhere so probably not using waste.

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.

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Indeed; even if they can make lettuce grow, it's very low in nutritional value so they'd need to sacrifice a lot of space and energy into creating something edible. Potatoes would work better. Space pigs, too, but they'd require a lot of nutrients to keep alive and grow. iirc they need ten times as much food than what their meat is worth in nutritional value.

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.

Algae and fungi have been popular in some recent "near-future" sci-fi.

This makes much more sense, then you can make soylent with it.

Well, there is the recent innovation in vat-grown meat that supposedly has the same texture as 'real' meat.

Potatoes are an interesting case, but they require rooting around through soil to harvest. (Having grown potatoes in my garden last year, it was a much messier endeavor than my greens.)

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.

Aeroponics or hydroponics would help eliminate the mess issue.

>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 imagine we can synthesize relatively simple molecules such as glucose to supplement calories when needed by astronauts.

I agree. Artificial food can be 3-D printed for various textures and flavours can be added to make it seem familiar for those need the nostalgia.

Keep in mind that floating soil is problematic. There may be soil in the pouches there.

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.

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