A man growing lettuce for space station salads
bbc.com
bbc.com
Does anyone know of serious companies working on in-orbit manufacturing machines or agricultural equipment? Just a proper CNC lathe or milling machine seems like it would be a giant first step for orbital construction. Perhaps combined with an orbital smelter for making metals out of asteroids.
I was also just thinking about "boring things" like coffee machines, laundry machines and space beds for the space station hotels that the Bigelow people are designing. Surely you'd want to design those well up front so you can iterate the design a few times before the first guests arrive?
Funding development of orbital smelters would be an incredibly risky proposition given that pay-off would be contingent on someone else figuring out asteroid mining or something.
And as for "boring things". Same type of deal. It's risky throwing money at a problem that only has a payoff if someone else succeeds their own high risk activity. Like Bigelow currently has no staff, and has totally missed all of its planned milestones. Especially for the boring stuff, you're also going to be cramped up against someone selling solutions that just apes whatever the ISS does. Does only have instant coffee, and not having real laundry, and having to sleep strapped into a sleeping bag kind of suck? Ya. But YOU'RE IN SPACE (and that's roughly just the same thing as camping). The novelty alone should be enough to tide you through your entire first generation of customers.
Otherwise the atmosphere helps you somewhat, but you've still got to fit a heatshield and some way to decelerate. The mass limit for parachutes is pretty low, so we're probably talking about a lifting body and some proper engines - maybe air-breathing engines, which are going to be significantly cheaper (especially fuel-wise) than rocket engines but by no means free. Maybe thousands per kilogram is an overstatement, but the cost is significant and there's only so much you can do about it (short of building a space elevator).
https://spacenews.com/bigelow-aerospace-lays-off-entire-work...
"A company spokesperson confirmed March 23 that the company laid off all its employees because of the governor’s order, and that it faced “fines, penalties and threats of having our business license revoked” if it remained open. The spokesperson added that the company planned to hire workers back once the emergency directive was lifted, although other sources interpreted the layoffs as a permanent measure."
There is necessarily some churn in these businesses because things like SpaceX’s Starship are completely changing a lot of old assumptions.
I wonder if that poses any problems for growing something like lettuce, with it's very high surface area, for food?
Edit: clearly I should have read the whole article before commenting...
"Betalains have been demonstrated to have antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal and antiprotozoal activity...."[1]
Lettuce, especially a hardy cultivar, is delicate but fast growing and parasite resistant. And not picky about the growth media usually. Potatoes are slow and I suspect they might start to rot on the space station before they got to full size. Hydroponic potatoes is possible but tricky. But I'm only making a guess from having grown these plants here on Earth.
In regard to calories I've heard good things said about oats and switchgrass. Not many people's favourite staples but they grow like weeds under wide climatic conditions with minimal water.