NASA evaluates space farming development

U.S. President Donald Trump recently signed a $19.5-billion bill to fund the programs of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), including NASA’s long-term goal to send humans to Mars by the 2030s.

According to The Washington Post, this is “the first such authorization bill for the space agency in seven years.”

In light of the recent authorization bill, one of the first questions many might ask is: How can people be kept alive and healthy in those extreme environments?

One promising method is growing plants. Plants are a valuable resource for oxygen, water recycling and food, and that makes them the ideal candidates for humans’ food source on an alien planet.

In a recent review article, “Agriculture for Space: People and Places Paving the Way,” Ray Wheeler of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center identifies some international research groups and their contributions to the development of space agriculture.

According to the article, he believes that research in space agriculture “has provided an intellectual and collegial bridge between the aerospace and agricultural communities.”

One of the earliest investigations into space agriculture began in the 1950s and 1960s. Biologist Jack Myers and his colleagues conducted research on algae, particularly a single-celled green algae called Chlorella, for oxygen production and carbon dioxide removal.

Yet, turning algae into food proved to be a major challenge, because they were too rich in protein and nucleic acids for a balanced diet.

At around the same time, Russian researchers Iosif (Joseph) Gitelson and Genrich (Henry) Lisovsky in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia created a closed environment where three men were able to live for up to four to six months with plants providing “70% of the food, 100% of O2, 100% of [carbon dioxide] scrubbing, and 100% of the water regeneration,” according to Wheeler’s review. They became the founding fathers of bioregenerative research.

Later, during the 1980s, NASA started the Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems (CELSS) program to conduct bioregenerative research focused on growing crops including wheat, soybeans and potatoes in a closed environment.

This program led to the testing of LEDs on agriculture in 1990. Since then, the LED lighting technique has become popular, particularly during the past decade. This provides an example of transmitting advances in space agriculture to terrestrial agriculture.

In the early 2000s, the Japanese Closed Ecological Experimental Facility (CEEF) in Aomori Prefecture also designed an environment where two crew members called EcoNauts and two small goats lived for four weeks with the crops providing all the oxygen and water and almost all the food.

Most recently in the space agriculture community, Professor Hong Liu and her team from the University of Beijing constructed a more complex closed system, the Lunar Palace 1, that converts waste into soil-like substrates for growing plants. This system supported three humans for 105 days.

Wheeler provided a short and informative history on the development of space agriculture, which also includes the results of each decade’s effort to create novel technology in our society, including vertical farming and new ways of controlling water delivery.

“Dr. Ray Wheeler has written a compelling and complete history of the people that have committed their careers to enabling the colonization of space,” Gary W. Stutte, NASA’s principal investigator, said according to Science Daily.  “The review underscores that the answers will be achieved not through proclamation but through collaboration between nations, cooperation between people and sustained commitment by institutions.”