Once settled on another planet, colonists would likely start with hydroponic farming, using small-stature or dwarf cultivars that can be tightly packed together. It would make the most sense to plant fast-cycle salad crops first, says Jean Hunter, a professor at Cornell who studies food-processing and waste-management systems for long-term living away from Earth. That means lettuce, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, and other veggies. Later on, the colonists would move to carbohydrate-heavy crops like sweet potatoes, rice, and wheat, and after that they might plant protein and oil-rich crops, such as soybeans and peanuts.
Flowers from the Ganjoji "space tree" also look a bit different, containing five petals, as opposed to about 30 like their parent trees.
This latest design for growing vegetables in space is a bit prettier than its predecessors. This is a collapsible growth chamber made by Orbital Technologies Corporation in Wisconsin. The lettuces inside live in individual "plant pillows." NASA plans to send the chamber and the plant pillows to the International Space Station on April 14, aboard a SpaceX launch.
Today, Bonhams auctions more than 300 pieces of space memorabilia. We have our eyes on these items:
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, probably the most famous and beloved astronaut since Apollo 11 and certainly the best-known Canadian astronaut ever, announced his retirement from the Canadian Space Agency today. "I've decided to retire from government service after 35 years of serving our country," said Hadfield, concisely.
Space Odyssey 2.0, a collaborative art installation opening this month in Belgium at art house Z33, asks some big questions about art and outer space: What is the role of science in art? How has the DIY movement changed our view of space travel? What if somebody went to the moon with a bunch of geese?
The problems surrounding sending the first humans into space were mainly technical - how to build a rocket that could shoot through the atmosphere while protecting its passengers. But now that we’ve got people up there, and for increasingly longer amounts of time, a whole new host of issues present themselves - including the effect living in space has on the bodies of our astronauts.
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