Astronaust Has Successfully Grown Lettuces On The International Space Station

Meals in space are always pre-packaged and frozen. Of course, they are nutrient-rich meals with different kinds of food and drink, even chocolate and cocktails, but they are never fresh. Researchers have found out ways to grow lettuce in space and now astronauts can enjoy fresh, delicious and safe salad in a very special place, their space station.

Christina Khodadad, a researcher from Kennedy Space Centre, says that despite the diversity of meals, the quality and nutrients in food go down day by day in space so astronauts cannot get enough nutrients and energy they need to work. Therefore, scientists from NASA have been working to grow fresh food in space to provide good meals for astronauts.

Besides providing fresh food, growing plants in space is also a way to help astronauts with recycling the air as plants take carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Fresh salads help improve their psychological health.

The most difficult thing when planting in space, however, is watering. Roots need both water and oxygen but in the microgravity environment, there isn’t natural convection while water and air cannot mix very well so plants may often get too much or not enough water.

Another challenge for planting in space is high radiation. This is really a problem significantly affects food safety. Being out of Earth’s protective magnetic field for a long time may cause an imbalance in the microbial ecosystem of humans and plants.

According to Frontiers in Plant Science, a journal about science, Khodadad and a team of scientists in different majors led by Gioia Massa are try growing red romaine lettuce on the ground in production systems called Veggie on the ISS.

Veggie is a system that provides a suitable environment with lighting and watering system for planting in space. Scientists monitor conditions including temperature, CO2 and humidity that resemble those on Earth.

Scientists test growing vegetables in periods of one to two months. When the test products are confirmed to be safe enough to eat, half of them were eaten by astronauts and the others were frozen and sent to the Earth lab for other tests and analysis.

In general, nutrient content of lettuces grown in space is as high as those grown on Earth and in some trials, space-grown lettuces seem to be richer in some elements.

Lettuces grown in space have as many kinds of microbes as lettuces grown on Earth. They may be even safer because scientists didn’t find human pathogens like Salmonella sp. or coliform E.coli in them and the amounts of fungal and mold spores were safe for humans.

After the success of lettuce growing, the team plans to continue growing kinds of leafy vegetables and some small fruit trees like peppers and tomatoes. They are also learning and study more about planting and watering in space to be able to build a crop production system in space in the future.

This will be very useful and important when NASA is preparing for many plans in the future.

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