“Crew tastes red romaine lettuce with oil & vinegar for #NASAVeggie study and #JourneyToMars”, tweeted the worldwide Space Station’s Twitter account.
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Astronaut Kjell Lindgren said he appreciated the psychological benefit of growing plants while surrounded by the sterility of the lifeless space station.
In 2014, an astronaut on NASA Expedition 39 grew and harvested the first plants from Veg-01 and then sent the plants back to earth for food safety analysis.
They will eat half of the bounty, and the rest will be returned to Earth for testing.
Veggie is collapsible and expandable, and it features a flat panel light bank that includes red, blue and green LEDs for plant growth and crew observation. But NASA needs to figure out how to grow food on spacecraft – and on other planets – for future deep space missions such as the one planned to Mars.
The red romaine lettuce was grown in a special plant-growing box called a Veggie unit that was built by Orbital Technologies Corporation in Madison, Wisconsin, and was flown to space aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship.
In addition to its romaine seeds, the crew also had one pack of zinnia seeds.
Astronauts yesterday took the first bites of food grown in entirely in space and harvested from their own space garden on board the global Space Station.
So what was the reaction on Earth? It’s unclear how the lettuce will be prepared, whether it’ll be part of some sort of space salad or just as garnish for regular dehydrated space food.
It’s not like the astronauts are guinea pigs for the Veggie system: experiments were conducted in Arizona before the first pillows were activated on the station in May 2014.
“There is evidence that supports fresh foods, such as tomatoes, blueberries and red lettuce are a good source of antioxidants”, Dr. Ray Wheeler, a scientist at the Kennedy Space Center, said in a statement. A second plant pillow was activated on the ISS this July.
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We all remember learning about space food back in elementary school, whether it was the tasteless paste squeezed out of a tube or the tightly packaged meals designed to stay contained in a microgravity state.
