Gardening – Plants in space

If December’s weather proved a challenge for growing vegetables, spare a thought for space farming. The University of Melbourne, in collaboration with NASA, is researching ways to grow plants in space. The work focuses on how plants can recycle vital resources such as air, water and nutrients in closed-loop systems for extraterrestrial habitats.

The Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) is a space station growth chamber that uses LED lighting and a porous clay substrate with controlled-release fertiliser to deliver water, nutrients and oxygen to plant roots. The system is designed to recycle waste, grow edible crops and help maintain a stable life-support ecosystem.

Extreme conditions create a range of challenges that affect plant survival, including exposure to cosmic radiation, the absence of gravity, limited temperature gradients that affect air circulation and heat transfer, and the lack of a stable environment. Space agriculture is promoted as a way to develop self-sustaining, biologically regenerative food production systems that can function in extraterrestrial settings.

Producing food in space highlights the sustainability challenges we already face here on Earth. While controlled-environment farming allows researchers to test agricultural technologies under extreme conditions, many solutions to challenges such as drought, heat, flooding, saline soils and extreme winds already exist closer to home. Coastal gardeners are tackling real-world problems using practical knowledge, biology and science to create balanced ecosystems, reduce carbon footprints and grow food in increasingly difficult conditions.

Plants are not only central to survival on Earth, they will also be vital for space missions. Recent research shows that microgravity affects plants as well as people. Space-grown crops lose nutrients. Lettuce grown on the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong II, for example, contained 29 to 31 percent less calcium and about 25 percent less magnesium than lettuce grown on Earth.

With increasingly extreme gardening conditions on the peninsula, it is hard not to think that a few visits to local coastal vegetable growers could provide NASA with a practical roadmap. Many of those solutions could be directly transferable to the challenges of space farming.